by Disha Karnad Jani
In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Anjali Arondekar, Professor of Feminist Studies and founding co-director of the Center for South Asian Studies at UC Santa Cruz, about her new book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History, out in 2023 from Duke University Press and Orient Blackswan.
Arondekar’s book takes up questions of geopolitics, caste, and sexuality through her reading of the archive of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, a caste-oppressed devadasi collective that originated in and in between Portuguese and British India, and whose archives today are in Maharashtra and Goa. Through her reading of the many forms, languages, and genres of this material, Arondekar proposes a method that foregrounds continuities between the colony and postcolony, exemplary events and ordinary violence, and the “lost” past and abundant archive.
Disha Karnad Jani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group “World Politics” at Universität Bielefeld. Her current book project is an intellectual history of the League Against Imperialism, 1927-1937. She is the co-host of In Theory, the podcast of the JHI Blog.
Featured image: Book cover, Abundance: Sexuality’s History, Duke University Press, 2023.
