The queer demands of postcoloniality

Abstract

To my graduate students, You are going to enjoy reading this book, for its clarity and linguistic flare, but also because of the challenges it will offer as you grapple with colonial history and with the possibilities afforded you by the concept of queerness. You will find it an invaluable part of your library. Read it slowly and mark the margins liberally. Rahul Rao offers three major disruptions you should study, for content and approach. First, the book parses through conventional postures for understanding the potted histories of colonialism and, by extension, contemporary politics of struggle. Second, the book offers a particularly sharp innovation in its conception of the temporal, disrupting linearity in order to make room for the full potential of historicity and futurity. Finally, the book offers an expansive possibility for how queer, conceived as a form of becoming, might reconfigure our sensibilities of time, history, critique, and struggle.