Organizer: Anjali Arondekar, University of California - Santa Cruz

Chair: Lucy MSP Burns, University of California - Los Angles

Discussant: Mrinalini Sinha, Pennsylvania State University

Narratives of loss and recovery, presence and absence continue to haunt our relationship to historical production. To script history is to still write within a logic of reproduction that privileges modes of recovery and subjectivity. This panel troubles the centrality of such tropes through an attentiveness to local histories of finance, science, and sexuality that exceed such a recuperative critical turn. By linking terrains of risk, piracy and pleasure in colonial and post-colonial South Asia, the panelists explore alternate genealogies for the project of historiography, and raise some of the following questions: What happens when the establishment of post-colonial anti-piracy laws is read in conversation with the colonial codification of profit and pleasure? What transformations and contradictions emerge when we link the philosophical project of historiography with that of sexual taxonomies, and the debates around value and intellectual property? What forms of globalized citizenship and subjectivity are being historicized within discourses of technology, even as we reinvent archives and expand access to new forms of information? The panel, thus, not only foregrounds new approaches to theorizing historiography, but also offers models of interdisciplinary scholarship that make such approaches possible.

Anjali Arondekar, University of California-Santa Cruz

This paper attempts to bridge the gap between studies of South Asia and more recent work in queer studies that bring into question received notions of proof, evidence and argumentation in the field of sexuality. The past few decades of scholarship have benefited from the expansion of the imperial archive, leading to a proliferation of studies on the constitutive role of sexuality in matters of colonial governance and rule. These studies have decisively intervened in projects of colonial historiography, decentering not just the idea of a coherent and desirable imperial archive, but also forcing us to rethink colonial methodologies and the relations between theories, methods and the historical conditions that produce them. Uninterrogated, however, is the implicit assumption that the archive, in all its multiple avatars, is still the source of knowledge about the colonial past. The inclusion of oral histories, ethnographic data, popular culture, performances, may all disrupt conventional understandings of the archive (and that too, for the better) but they still produce a telos of knowledge production that is propelled forward by what one will find, if only one thinks of more capacious ways to look. Archives are still organized around a positivist order of things. This paper is an exploration of such theoretical quandaries within the history of sexuality in colonial India.

Geeta Patel, Wellesley College

Colonial pensions were the financial forms through which claims to intimacy were adjudicated, and consolidated in law. This paper examines political, military and civil pensions given to "faithful" soldiers, mutineers and political pensioners who were both inside and outside the battles of 1857. In the aftermath of 1857, I argue that differentiated notions of self and family, producing genealogies of origin and reproduction, are carefully constructed and carried over from pre-1857 discussions of fraud and pensions. Some of the questions I raise are: How does the embodiment of sexuality transform these concepts of self-hood, and kinship ties? How can renumeration of a (native) body inform us about its failure and its worth?

Kavita Philip, University of California-Irvine

Intellectual property "robbers" in South Asia who traffic in images, music, and software have become a growing concern for the managers of twenty-first-century economic globalization. Although business analysts regard this as a novel problem, supposedly precipitated by the unprecedented importance of "knowledge" as a force of economic production, historians of science and law tell stories of intellectual property theft that predate the current IPR discourse by two centuries. Anti-piracy discourses now frequently intersect with anti-terrorist security discourses, where both pirates and terrorists unction as threats to free markets and civilized nations. Clearly, even while it participates in a longer history, the current discourse of piracy is specific to our present historical and economic moment, and illuminates particular characteristics of the emerging forms of global informational capitalism. What forms of globalized citizenship and personhood are being shaped via the emerging legal discourses of intellectual property, on both sides of the struggle for access to new forms of information? In this paper I read the emerging spaces of technological illegality as new historical configurations of global techno cultural identities, in much the same way as madhouses, brothels, and prisons help us (after Foucault) track the conditions of enunciation of discourses of civilization, legality, sexuality, and science.