Revisiting Sexuality in Colonial India

Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She completed her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, and is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, (Duke University Press, 2009). She has also recently published a number of articles in GLQ, Journal of Asian Studies, Interventions, Victorian Studies, Feminist Studies, and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. Her second book-project, provisionally entitled, Margins of Excess: Ethics, Sexuality, South Asia grows out of her interest in ethics, sexuality and figurations of collectivity in South Asia.

In her talk, Arondekar focuses on the presence, or conversely the absence of sexuality in the colonial archive. The talk stems from Arondekar�s research, which engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, colonialism and historiography in South Asia. Her presentation considers the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive by posing the following questions: Why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and temporal logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what kind of �archive� does such a recuperative hermeneutics produce? Rather than render sexuality�s relationship to the colonial archive through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would presume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and needs to �come out�), Arondekar engages sexuality�s recursive traces within the colonial archive against and through our very desire for access.

The logic and the interpretive resources of this talk arise out of two entangled and minoritized historiographies: one in South Asian studies and the other in queer/sexuality studies. Focusing on late colonial India, Arondekar examines the spectacularization of sexuality in anthropology, law, literature, and pornography from 1843-1920. Indeed the overarching impetus behind Arondekar�s work is an effort to place sexuality at the center of the colonial archive rather than at the margins. Her work draws on sources that are familiar to many scholars of queer and subaltern studies in the Indian subcontinent, from Richard Burton�s missing report in the male brothels in Karachi (1845) to a failed sodomy prosecution in Northern India, Queen Empress v. Khairati (1884). Yet the manner in which she engages with these sources is what makes her work so unique. Arondekar tackles the issue of archival loss head on, and turns to the paucity (and yet ever present lure) of legal sodomy adjudications to amplify the narratives of loss and invisibility that are the very conditions of our archival labors.

The talk will be held on Wednesday, 29th September at 4:30 PM in room 105 of the Yale Anthropology Department, located on 10 Sachem Street. The venue is wheelchair accessible.