“Archival Interregnum: Caste, Sexuality, Indenture,” A Lecture by Anjali Arondekar
Presented by the Comparative Approaches to the Literatures of Africa, the Middle East, and the Global South (CALAMEGS) 2025-26 Lecture Series. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at NYU.
While Mauritius remains the place from which my questions emerge, it is also an area impossible, a geo-epistemology that confounds histories of sexuality and caste in/and South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. Indenture is the archival interregnum—especially in Mauritius—where our attachments to counter-archives, origin-stories, run amuck. If archives of indenture are flooded with markers of identification that suture presence to labor, what happens to the labor of caste and sexuality that lives unaccounted within economies of such enumeration? How do we think histories of indenture outside settled archival forms, outside technologies of historical recuperation, where we historicize not to materialize absence, but to speak to the weight of our historical anchors? How do we couple the abundance of historical reading with the oceanic voyages of indenture, caste and sexuality? Caste and sexuality here are not tracked through acts/practices that might return us to identitarian forms; rather I read archival records of caste and sexuality against the settlement and lure of reproductive futurities.
Anjali Arondekar is Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the founding director, Center for South Asian Studies, 2020-24. Her research engages the comparative poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. She is the author of two award-winning monographs: For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010); and Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023, Orient Blackswan, 2023). Arondekar’s third book-in progress, entitled, Oceanic Sex: Archives of Caste and Indenture, couples the archival forms of indenture with the oceanic voyages of caste and sexuality.
Accessibility note: This event is free and open to the public with RSVP. The venue is located on the ground level and is accessible with two sets of automatic doors. For any accommodation requests, please email amb10317@nyu.edu.