BiblioVault - Books about South

Queer Activism in India

A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics

Naisargi Dave

Duke University Press, 2012

In Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dave examines the formation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with activist organizations in Delhi, a body of letters written by lesbian women, and research with lesbian communities and queer activist groups across the country, Dave studies the everyday practices that constitute queer activism in India.

Dave argues that activism is an ethical practice comprised of critique, invention, and relational practice. Her analysis investigates the relationship between the ethics of activism and the existing social norms and conditions from which activism emerges. Through her study of different networks and institutions, Dave documents how activism oscillates between the potential for new social arrangements and the questions that arise once the activists' goals have been accomplished. Dave's book addresses a relevant and timely phenomenon and makes an important contribution to the anthropology of queer communities, social movements, affect, and ethics.

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Queer Companions

Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan

Omar Kasmani

Duke University Press, 2022

In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.

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Queering Colonial Natal

Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa

T. J. Tallie

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

How were indigenous social practices deemed queer and aberrant by colonial forces?

In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natalestablished by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal provinceto show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools.

Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims.

Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority.

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