For the Record English 2011

For the Record 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 sexualitys 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 sexualitys recursive traces within the colonial archive against and through our very desire for access. The logic and the interpretive resources of this book arise out of two entangled and minoritized historiographies: one in South Asian studies and the other in queer or sexuality studies. Focusing on late colonial India, Arondekar examines the spectacularization of sexuality in anthropology, law, literature and pornography from 1843–1920. By turning to materials and or locations that are familiar to most scholars of queer and subaltern studies, Arondekar considers sexuality at the centre of the colonial archive, rather than at its margins.