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
