Rate My Professor Anjali Arondekar

Arondekar authored For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009; Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), which interrogates sexuality's pursuit of truth in colonial archives, spatial and racial logics of such returns, and the resulting recuperative hermeneutics; it won the 2010 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies from the Modern Language Association's GL/Q Caucus. Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023; Orient Blackswan, 2023), posits sexuality's radical abundance against archival loss narratives, drawing on plentiful archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, a caste-oppressed devadasi collective, to challenge subaltern histories of vulnerability and precarity while centering sexuality in post/colonial and anti/caste contexts. She co-edited Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies in GLQ (2016, with Geeta Patel) and Pandemic Histories in History of the Present (2022, with Sherene Seikaly). Arondekar teaches courses including Feminist Theories, Topics in Queer/Race Studies, Topics in Postcolonial Studies, Empire and Sexuality, and History of Sexuality. Her ongoing project, Oceanic Sex: Archives of Caste and Indenture, examines indenture archives from Mauritius as an area impossible epistemology.