Lecture
Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (LUCIR book talk)
- Date
- Wednesday 3 November 2021
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.03
LUCIR, in collaboration with The MAIR Programme and the International Studies Students Association presents:
Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality, a talk by and with the author Rahul Rao
Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who were said to have lobbied for its passage.
Focusing on the Ugandan case, in Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality Rahul Rao seeks to understand the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. It investigates the impact and memory of the colonial encounter on the politics of sexuality, the politics of religiosity of different Christian denominations, and the political economy of contemporary homophobic moral panics. In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain—three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives.
Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself.
About LUCIR
The Leiden University Centre for International Relations (LUCIR) is a multi-disciplinary platform promoting research and education on international relations at Leiden University.
Website: www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/lucir.
Would you like us to keep you posted? Signup for the LUCIR mailing list!