Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights By Kanika Batra

Abstract

Reviewed by: Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights by Kanika Batra Carli Coetzee Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights KANIKA BATRA Routledge, 2022. ISBN 9780367772109 paper. Kanika Batra's ambitious monograph Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics Counterpublics, Human Rights makes an intervention in a number of fields, complicating and nuancing existing conversations. It has been awarded the Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures prize, a collaboration with the National Women's Studies Association. The argument of the book is that postcolonial studies as a field of inquiry will be richer if it pays attention to feminist and LGBTQ print media for what they reveal about the located histories of gender and sexuality. The archive on which Batra draws is mainly pre-digital, and it is a salutary reminder that despite the optimistic belief that the internet contains all knowledge, there are important and vital archives that remain outside of these networked knowledge systems. Batra locates her archive in three distinct but linked Global South contexts, which allows her to think comparatively across spaces, but also to map common ground. This is an important methodological component of the work, and one that is hugely inspirational for those scholars and activists exploring the kind of Global South solidarities that are possible. The book is invested in the formation of feminist and queer organizational and print networks, and Batra shows how these networks have played a vital role in the direction taken by feminist-queer activism in more recent years. The archive of magazines and newsletters shows, she argues, the modes through which postcolonial feminist and queer activists created regional, national, and transnational alliances. The materiality of the archives, and the state in which she is able to encounter and access them, adds an additional layer to her smart and engaged analysis. Through the reflections on and analyses of these archives, Batra builds for the reader a lens through which to examine and question hegemonic discourses such as the heterosexual bias in transnational feminist thinking. Her reading of the archive is intent on the activists' search for common ground, but her keen eye is able to detect the nuanced disagreements, responses, and debates through which this commonality is found, made, and remade. The argument of the book loops forwards and backwards, asking probing questions about the forms of activism that have flourished or withered and about [End Page 150] how the print archives that form her primary source materials can be used to help us understand the formation of publics and counter-publics. She uses the evocative and useful phrase of "semi-remembered counter-publics," an injunction to activists and scholars to reenter these archives in order to generate questions that will in turn reconvene counter-publics who resist hegemonic models. The book has a three-part structure, each of the three sections geographically centered, and collectively mapping transnational feminist and queer "worldmaking and world-shifting" practices and activities. Part 1 is titled "Abeng, Challenging Depravation," and its focus is on Jamaica. The two linked chapters develop an argument that illustrates that while there are continuities between women's gay and lesbian activism, these continuities do not always guarantee harmonious solidarity. Part 2, "Azadi, Emerging Freedoms," moves the focus to India, and this section includes as one of its highlights: a nuanced and extremely useful discussion of the over-used (and often misused) concept "subaltern." In this section Batra challenges the charge, which has often been made, that Indian gay and lesbian identities are imitations of Western lifestyles. In the contextual attention to a term such as subaltern, and in the mapping of Indian LGBTQ+ and feminist histories in India, the scholarship shows an immersion into the located histories of these forms of activism and an ability to see both continuities and change across time. In section 3, called "Amandla, Embodying Power," Batra focuses on South Africa and develops one of her main arguments, namely that these networks do not mimic but instead pose a challenge to Euro-American definitions of terms such as "queer" and that the networks call for specificity in the development of such terminologies. This is an important point as it helps us to formulate responses to universalizing assumptions about...