Archives of Dissent: Sexuality. Caste. History.

Synopsis: Suturing histories of caste and sexuality to archives of dissent in South Asia, this talk rearranges the grammar of our ethical engagements with the past and present. At stake here are the historical vernaculars  that found the evidentiary regimes of rights and representation for minoritized subjects. What I offer here are intimations of andolan/protest, meditations that move between the heady inspirations of dissent and the stultifying violence of archival practices. Andolan is after all a movement in Hindustani music, an alankar (combination/ornamentation of notes) that oscillates between one fixed note and its counterpart, touching, suffusing, all that lies in between. Let us imagine such a history together.

Anjali Arondekar is a 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.