From Elsewhere

Abstract

This is a conversation that began elsewhere. Although primed and conditioned in typical spaces where scholarly discourse emerges—conferences, classrooms, coffee shops, living rooms—and in typical temporalities—20-minute Q&As following panels, early-morning or late-night wrangling of ideas onto a page, in the duration of a lecture—the affect of a less conventional hermeneutic seemed to permeate neatly drawn lines around carefully complicated scholarship on queer South Asia. Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel (2016) articulate this discursive move in ‘Area impossible: notes toward an introduction’, pushing queer studies past the ‘homing devices’ of geopolitical and identitarian boundaries that regulate areas studies, especially of the Global South. To move away from the necessity of location, of grounding or of cohesive intersectional identity sets global queer studies into a different orbit—one that prefers to decentre geography from the locus of queer relationality. For South Asia, this could mean a variety of things, but what we hope to do in this themed issue is to inhabit a speculative realm of possibility where the subcontinent ceases to declare itself. Rather, the elsewheres we seek reframe queerness as the organising logic of area (impossible) studies.