CUNY Academic Commons

Queer reading of Bollywood.

Indian short story writer.

Meena Kandasamy is a young Dalit writer (poet, novelist and essayist) who weaves nuanced critiques, iterating her multiple personalities, of hegemonic structures in India.

This is part 1 of Jason Moore’s theorization around the anthropocene that tries to post the centering of the human.

This is a piece Roy wrote about meeting with Edward Snowden and John Cusack in a hotel room in Moscow.

I chose this 2015 article which thinks through the possibilities of queer studies in South Asian studies. I will also be referring to the earlier 2005 essay by the same scholar that I uploaded last week.

The attached document is just a link.

Stuart Hall has written on issues of race as well as on the television, so I thought I would share this great clip of Hall on a TV show. While we might find a lot of it rather banal, it was a major intervention at the time.

This article deals with the need to think through the archival turn in sexuality studies, positing a need for the field to contend with the colonial archive.

Ato Quayson’s article is a very brief and helpful introduction to the questions that contemporary Africanist scholars are contending with. While this early article is not very detailed, it is a great primer which can help people find their footing as they get used to the unstable landscape of the field.

As at Wardha,
December 24, 1940
DEAR FRIEND,
That I ADDRESS you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespective of race, colour or creed.
I hope you will have the time and desire to know how a good portion of…[Read more]

The suicide of Vemula has rocked the casteist status quo of India and forced it to reckon with the lived realities of Dalit-ness. This letter calls on me to acknowledge my own brahminical privilege that provided me the opportunities that allow me to study issues of the global South while sitting pretty in New York. It reminds me that the congealed…[Read more]

I chose this article so that we could potentially consider the politics of academia and the global political economy within which we produce. Also, the style of Puar’s lecture makes this a very accessible introduction to the discussions of homonationalism and pinkwashing.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2014/02/13/in-full-arundati-roys-letter-to-penguin/
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/why-i-am-returning-my-award/

These are links to two statements made by Arundhati Roy in the wake of what many consider a surge in extreme right wing activity in India. Roy often faces the accusation of not…[Read more]