For the Record

Arondekar Anjali Arondekar

Description

Anjali Arondekar considers the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive by posing the following questions: Why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and temporal logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what kind of "archive" does such a recuperative hermeneutics produce? Rather than render sexuality's relationship to the colonial archive through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would presume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and needs to "come out"), Arondekar engages sexuality's recursive traces within the colonial archive against and through our very desire for access.The logic and the interpretive resources of For the Record arise out of two entangled and minoritized historiographies: one in South Asian studies and the other in queer/sexuality studies. Focusing on late colonial India, Arondekar examines the spectacularization of sexuality in anthropology, law, literature, and pornography from 1843 until 1920. By turning to materials and/or locations that are familiar to most scholars of queer and subaltern studies, Arondekar considers sexuality at the center of the colonial archive rather than at its margins. Each chapter addresses a form of archival loss, troped either in a language of disappearance or paucity, simulacrum or detritus: from Richard Burton's missing report on male brothels in Karachi (1845) to a failed sodomy prosecution in Northern India, Queen Empress v. Khairati (1884), and from the ubiquitous India-rubber dildos found in colonial pornography of the mid-to-late nineteenth century to the archival detritus of Kipling's stories about the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Sujets

• Anglais
• India
• English
• History of Asia
• Idioma inglés
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822391029
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

F O R T H E R E C O R D

N E X T W A V E A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman

N E W D I R E C T I O N S I N W O M E N ’ S S T U D I E S

F O R T H E R E C O R D On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India

A N J A L I A R O N D E K A R

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

D U R H A M A N D L O N D O N 2 0 0 9

∫2009 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by Heather Hensley

Typeset in Whitman by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

An earlier version of the introduction was first published as the article ‘‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,’’ by Anjali Arondekar, from thetheofrnalJou HistoryofSexuality14:1/2, pp. 10–27. Copyright∫2005 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

I N M E M O R I A M

LyndaHart and LeelaDurgaramShirodkar

C O N T E N T S

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Preface

Introduction Without A Trace

One A Secret Report: Richard Burton’s Colonial Anthropology

Two Subject to Sodomy: The Case of Colonial India

Three Archival Attachments: The Story of an India-Rubber Dildo

Four In the Wake of 1857: Rudyard Kipling’s Mutiny Papers

Coda Passing Returns

Bibliography

Index

P R E F A C E

Let me begin with a vulgar question: ‘‘Tumhi kai shodhta, madam?’’ (What are you looking for, madam?) This was the question the head of the Maharashtra State Archives in Mumbai impatiently asked me as I arrived for my annual research visit. His impatience was occasioned by what he perceived as my inability to answer a series of simple queries on the nature of my research: Which colonial records did I want to see, and for what purpose? My inarticulateness around his seemingly pedestrian question was not organized (as one would predictably assume) around my reluctance to reveal my interests in the figurations of sexual perver- sions in nineteenth-century India—the state-sponsored intellectual cen- sorship and vandalisms of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute ∞ notwithstanding. Rather, my hesitations stemmed more from a sense of archival aporia, from what I had realized through my own research was an unrepresentable search for an impossible object. In many ways, the present work is an attempt to trace and push against the force of that archival aporia. The writing of this book was sustained by a network of friends and colleagues in multiple places. Geeta Patel has been instrumental in the conception and fruition of the project. Through innumerable phone conversations and readings, Geeta nursed me through the di≈culties of archival and historical thinking. Central to this work was also the ex- traordinary support of the South Asian Studies feminist posse, a.k.a., Sisters under the Sari: Indrani Chatterjee, Raka Ray, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Parama Roy, Mrinalini Sinha, Kavita Philip, and Kamala Visweswaran. Since the book’s first incarnation, they have all served as unfailingly encouraging and critical commentators. I owe a special debt to Gina