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.

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.

Introduction: Make.Believe.Sexuality's Subjects  1
1. In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Archives  33
2. A History I Am Not Writing: Sexuality's Exemplarity  63
3. Itinerant Sex: Geopolitics as Critique  90
Coda. I Am Not Your Data. Caste, Sexuality, Protest  112
Acknowledgments  129
Primary Sources  135
Secondary Sources  139
Index  163