Overview

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 minoritized 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. 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.

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9781478017240

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Reviews

“By shifting our attention from the recuperation of sexuality as loss to understanding it as a site of abundance, Anjali Arondekar forces a reckoning with the knowledges of subaltern groups in the global South. Abundance will blow a wide hole in South Asian historiography as well as sexuality studies in the United States.” - Indrani Chatterjee, author of (Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India) ""With her brilliantly conceived Abundance: Sexuality’s History, Professor Anjali Arondekar . . . has reset the bar very high, with one of the best, richest and most important books of Indian historiography ever written. It’s a huge achievement, with even huger implications for how we assess and think about our collective past."" - Vivek Menezes (O Heraldo) ""It is one of the most challenging and gratifying books to have emerged from queer theory in recent years. Perhaps the title says it all: Abundance: Sexuality’s History hides the place of the West because it has been everywhere and nowhere in the social lives of sexual dissent."" - Howard Chiang (Journal of the History of Sexuality)

By shifting our attention from the recuperation of sexuality as loss to understanding it as a site of abundance, Anjali Arondekar forces a reckoning with the knowledges of subaltern groups in the global South. Abundance will blow a wide hole in South Asian historiography as well as sexuality studies in the United States. -- Indrani Chatterjee, author of * Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India *

Author Information

Anjali Arondekar is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, also published by Duke University Press.

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