Ahonaa Roy

Vasu Reddy

This book explores gender, sexualities, labour, migration and coloniality in Africa and India in an attempt towards transnational understanding and ways of rethinking gender. It scrutinises the nuances, textures, taxonomies and architectures of gender and sexuality in the mediated encounters between the two regions. Amidst the current climate of great global fragmentation and geopolitical conflict, this volume brings new readings from Africa and India to surface points of contact and departure. As a counter to ruptures and alienation that often characterise geopolitical borders, this book advances new epistemologies from both the internal and external borders of the modern (and colonial) world-system. In fresh and incisive essays, the volume offers ideas to build solidarity and collaboration through the lens of ‘contact zones’ that open up prospects for transcultural dialogues across continents, contexts, regions, nations, identities and disciplines. The volume contributes to transnational understanding, highlights complex diversity and resists the idea of a single, unified set of experiences of gender and sexuality in non-Western contexts. Rather than representing mainstream trends, it advances the idea of interracial solidarity that is linked to the revolutionary momentum of confronting imperialism as a consciousness that reifies oppressive domains of thinking. The book will be of interest to scholars of gender and sexuality, anthropology, cultural theory, sociology, human geography, development studies, cultural and media studies, film studies, linguistics, curriculum studies, political science, land and migration studies. It will also be of interest to activists working in these domains.

Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Africa and India

Transnational Contact Zones

This book presents a new approach to the understanding of non-normative sexuality and gender transgressive modes in South Asia and South Asian diaspora. It reconceives sexual representation from the point of view of the theoretical, political and empirical trajectories of decolonization, provincialization and neoliberalism to look at the role of historical contingency, postcolonial sexual politics and gender and sexual diversity. The volume brings together anthropological, historical, material and political analyses around South Asian sexual politics by exploring a range of themes, including culture, class, ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, migration, borders, diaspora, modernity and cosmopolitanism across various local, regional and global contexts. By using southern/non-Western and subaltern theorizations of gender and sexuality, the book discusses South Asian sexualities through issues such as the sexual politics of indeterminacy; sexual subculture, iconography and political decision-making; religious identity; queer South Asian diaspora; decolonizing the postcolonial body; sexual politics, gender and feminist debates; discrimination, and socio-political violence; the political economy of empowerment; and critical appropriation of the 377 Indian Penal Code. It also builds forms of dialogues to bridge the gap between academic and development practitioners. With diverse case studies and a fresh theoretical framework, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, sociology and social anthropology, political studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial and global south studies.

Ahonaa Roy

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