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. While Mauritius remains the place from which the project’s questions emerge, it is also an “area impossible,” an epistemology of geopolitics that deliberately strays from a literal understanding of sexuality and caste in/and South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. Even as the turn to Oceanic Sex enables myriad geographies of affiliation, how can such affiliations summon genealogies of the past and the future that read routes of indenture and archives anew? Indenture is the archival interregnum– especially in Mauritius where our attachments to counter-archives, origin-stories, run amuck. If archives of indenture are marked, indeed flooded with markers of identification that suture presence to labor, what happens to the labor of caste and sexuality that lives unaccounted within economies of such enumeration?
