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How do recuperative historiographies of sexuality mobilize salutary forms of loss in the service of collectivities tallying up what they do not as yet have in relation to other constituencies? Far from repudiating such salvific historical forms (instantiated as they routinely are in the language of lost rights and representation), the introduction asks (1) how minoritized conclaves wrestle with the evidentiary genres that such models of devaluation demand, and (2) how they assemble historical archives that self-consciously activate the compensatory mechanisms that such losses should or will produce. The challenge here is to engage a historiography of sexuality that paradoxically adds value to a sedimented historical form (lost archives must be resurrected, found, produced for future gains) precisely by staging interest in its modes of reproduction (found archives must be disseminated, digitalized, and memorialized). To speak of a history of sexuality from the Ansatzpunkt of abundance is to emphasize both the efflorescence of the past, and to attend to its strategic and active mobilization within the politics of the present.
How do recuperative historiographies of sexuality mobilize salutary forms of loss in the service of collectivities tallying up what they do not as yet have in relation to other constituencies? Far from repudiating such salvific historical forms (instantiated as they routinely are in the language of lost rights and representation), the introduction asks (1) how minoritized conclaves wrestle with the evidentiary genres that such models of devaluation demand, and (2) how they assemble historical archives that self-consciously activate the compensatory mechanisms that such losses should or will produce. The challenge here is to engage a historiography of sexuality that paradoxically adds value to a sedimented historical form (lost archives must be resurrected, found, produced for future gains) precisely by staging interest in its modes of reproduction (found archives must be disseminated, digitalized, and memorialized). To speak of a history of sexuality from the Ansatzpunkt of abundance is to emphasize both the efflorescence of the past, and to attend to its strategic and active mobilization within the politics of the present.
For anyone who works within historical archives, it will come as no surprise that any hegemonic text making confident claims to historical truth will be destabilized and exceeded by the operations of counter-archives, counter-stories that disrupt any and all ideological projects being advanced. Such a critical understanding, however, does not as easily extend to minoritized archives, where the aura and/or seduction of resistance stubbornly lingers, suturing subaltern archives to an oppositional imperative. Even the most rigorous intentions to the contrary have not prevented the demand for a veracity archive that promises such desired radicality for histories of minoritized collectivities. What happens, chapter 1 asks, if we are confronted instead with an archive of sexuality that trades the consolations of veracity genres (such as memoirs, testimonials, and biographies) for the promise of more imaginative genres of representation? The revelatory veracity of the archive gives way to a revelatory labor that eschews transparency and celebrates its own continuous (non)production.
One narrative ritual continues to inaugurate most historiographical projects of sexuality: the problem-event, the detail, the legal case—in other words, an archival trace that compresses or even obfuscates historical content, legible only through reconstructive hermeneutics. For scholars working at the interstices of sexuality and subalternity, the problem event could offer glimpses of a lost history, the scarcity of historical evidence countered by the hermeneutical performance of plenitude as you mine the archival trace for the promise of historical precedence and futurity. Instead, chapter 2 summons a paradoxical labor for histories of sexuality in South Asia: to read the archival exemplar precisely for what it cannot hold. There is no stabilizing recuperation of historical detail on offer here; rather, there is an exhortation to think the exemplar of sexuality as an absorbing and abundant discursive presence, reassembled through our every act of reading. Bypassing the seductive heroics of recuperative historiography, the chapter offers a different pathway to historical presence.
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