In Abundance, Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality, and that the deficit of our minoritised pasts can be redeemed through acquisitions of lost pasts. Instead, Arondekar theorizes the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary.
Author:Anjali Arondekar Format: Paperback Publisher:Duke University Press Publication date:August 4, 2023 Pages: 176 Language: English ISBN:978-1478019909
For Arondekar, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge narratives of their constant devaluation. Summoning abundance over loss upends settled genealogies of historical recuperation and representation and works against the imperative to fix sexuality within wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and precarity. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within area, post/colonial, and anti/caste histories.
About the Author
Dr. Anjali Arondekar's work engages the politics and poetics of sexuality, caste and historiography with a strong focus on comparative empires within south Asian and Indian Ocean studies. Currently she holds the Peggy and Baskin Foundation presidential chair in Feminist studies. She was the Founding Director, Center for South Asia Studies (CSAS) 2020-2024. CSAS is the first area studies to be focused explicity on economic and social justice in south asia and its border diaspora.
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