Can an anti-caste movement politics found trans/queer histories? Using the framework of caste abolition and queer/trans legal struggles in South Asia, our workshop will offer some potential pathways for radical trans/queer/caste futurites.
Two (rather ambitious!) questions will animate our gathering:
- How has the escalation of authoritarianism and religious violence in South Asia impacted queer/trans/caste projects of dissent?
- What do trans/queer/caste movements teach us about navigating crisis amidst a climate of constant conflict?
Anjali Arondekar is Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Professor of Feminist Studies. She was the founding Director, Center for South Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2020-24. Her research engages the comparative poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on Indian Ocean Studies and South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. She is co-editor (with Geeta Patel) of “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2016), and (with Sherene Seikaly) of “Pandemic Histories,” History of the Present (2022). Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023, Orient Blackswan, 2023), grows out of her interest in the archival figurations of sexuality, caste and historiography in British and Portuguese colonial India.
Arondekar is currently working on a third project, tentatively entitled, Oceanic Sex: Archives of Caste and Indenture, that couples the archival forms of indenture with the oceanic voyages of caste and sexuality.
Light refreshments will be available.
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This event is presented by the Queer and Trans Anti-Fascisms Research Cluster, funded by the Public Humanities Hub.
Co-sponsors: Department of Asian Studies, Centre for Migration Studies, Centre for Climate Justice, Department of Geography, Department of English Language & Literatures, and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice.
