Pink Revolutions describes how queer politics in India occupies an uneasy position between the forces of neoliberal globalization, on the one hand, and the nationalist Hindu fundamentalism that has emerged since the 1990s, on the other. While neoliberal forces use queerness to highlight India’s democratic credentials and stature within a globalized world, nationalist voices claim that queer movements in the country pose a threat to Indian national identity. Nishant Shahani argues that this tension implicates queer politics within messy entanglements and knotted ideological triangulations, geometries of power in which local understandings of “authentic” nationalism brush up against global agendas of multinational capital.
 
Eschewing structures of absolute complicity or abject alterity, Pink Revolutions pays attention to the logics of triangulation in various contexts: gay tourism, university campus politics, diasporic cultural productions, and AIDS activism. The book articulates a framework through which queer politics can challenge rather than participate in neoliberal imperatives, an approach that will interest scholars engaged with queer studies and postcolonial scholarship, as well as activists and academics wrestling with global capitalism and right-wing regimes around the world.

 

NISHANT SHAHANI is an associate professor in the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of English at Washington State University. He is the author of Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return and a coeditor of AIDS and the Distribution of Crises.

“Shahani situates himself in a variety of literatures, including South Asian studies, globalization and development studies, political economy, queer studies, neoliberalism, Dalit studies, global health, and diaspora studies. This book is impressive in the number of themes it analyzes, including the co-optation of revolution, queer safety, queer privacy, mobility, Hindu nationalism, neoliberalism reform, modernity, and more. I found Shahani’s deployment of triangulation theory intriguing and appreciate its theoretical potential to make visible entangled dynamics.” —GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

“In this extremely insightful book, Nishant Shahani takes us on a journey through the rapidly changing terrains of queer politics and modernity in the era of fraying democratic rights in India. Placing the production of local hetero-authenticity in relation to the global marketability of queer rights, Shahani offers a clear and timely analysis of Hindutva’s global capitalist ambitions as necrocapitalist logics. This book is absolutely essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the intertwined fortunes of queer rights and antidemocratic governance.” —Svati P. Shah, author of Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai— -

“Pink Revolutions is a well-theorized and provocative addition to current scholarship in queer and postcolonial studies. Shahani’s turn to genealogies and afterlives of ‘pink revolutions’ is certainly timely in its call for a renewed attention to the affective and economic logics underwriting the politics of queer movements in postcolonial India.” —Anjali Arondekar, author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India— -