Unhomely Histories
Unhomely Histories is my book in progress, in which I ask how we might rethink the history of domestic modernity in late colonial India from missionary schools and women’s colleges. The project draws outward from a history of Women’s Christian College in Madras (now Chennai), to trace a historical geography of Christian womanhood in the 1910s to the 1960s that unsettles the concatenation of woman-home-nation that is typically taken as the centrepiece of gender in early 20th century India. Instead, I show, unmarried women and women who centred their lives around scholarship and friendships rethought ‘home’ as figured through intimate relationships of care wrought in the encounters across caste and ethnicity that occurred in missionary educational institutions.
Abolitionist Domesticities
Collaboration with Laura Antona, LSE
Central to the project of abolition is the question of how to make home - to build, and dwell in worlds that operate outside the systemic violence of carcerality and premature death. Our project traces geographies of home - historical and contemporary - as integral to the critique of racial capitalist carceral logics. We ask how, in proliferating geographies of enclosure and containment that range from militarised zones to concentration camps to prisons to the hyper-surveillance and liberal humanitarian scrutiny of caste-marginalised and racialised communities, people make home, build everyday life, and envision abolitionist futures.
We root our work in our critical engagement with Britain’s past and contemporary imperial presence. In doing so, our goal is to shore up the ways in which a debate on racial capitalism that typically centres on the US might shore up the ways in which racism is seeded within the mainstream rather than the “far right” alone of British establishment politics.
Publications
Carceral Domesticities - Special Issue of Society and Space
School Magazines
Collaboration with Catherine Sloan, Oxford.
In an edited collection, Catherine Sloan and I focus the scholarship on colonial print cultures on educational institutions as sites of subject-making, where ideas about childhood and youth, as well as about civilisation, empire, nation, and gender, came to crystallise in richly varied ways. In thinking with the relationship between British colonial cultures and the school magazine, this volume draws attention to young people’s positioning within, and dialogue with, cultures of institutional power. As the contributors to this volume show, such networks reached far beyond children’s and youth’s proximate worlds, drawing them into formations of nation, empire, and religious community. School magazines are a particularly potent archive because they not only show that young people actively grappled with their socio-political circumstances, but also that they were involved in documenting them. The varied materials that young people produced for these publications show that they observed, analysed, and narrativized their position within a world where questions of race, age, gender, family, nation, community, and citizenship were all widely debated. They did so in works that show serious reflection, playful and subversive creativity, and artistic flair.