In this talk, prof. Arondekar considers the question: if archives of indenture are flooded with records of identificationthat suture presence to labour, what happens to the labour of gender and sexuality that lives unaccounted within economies of such enumeration? How do we think histories of indenture outside settled archival forms, outside technologies of historical recuperation, where we historicize not to materialize absence, but to speak to the weight of our historical anchors?

Gender and sexuality here are not tracked through acts/practices that might return us to identitarian forms; rather, prof. Arondekar reads archival records of gender and sexuality against the settlement and lure of reproductive futurities (be they of capital, race, caste) offered or mediated through indenture. 

About the speaker

Anjali Arondekar is Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the founding Director, Center for South Asian Studies, 2020-24. Her research engages the comparative poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. 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. 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, Oceanic Sex: Archives of Caste and Indenture.