Books by Rahul Rao
Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be... more Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who were said to have lobbied for its passage. Focusing on the Ugandan case, this book seeks to understand the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. It investigates the impact and memory of the colonial encounter on the politics of sexuality, the politics of religiosity of different Christian denominations, and the political economy of contemporary homophobic moral panics.
In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain—three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself.
If boundaries protect us from threats, how should we think about the boundaries of states in a wo... more If boundaries protect us from threats, how should we think about the boundaries of states in a world where threats to human rights emanate from both outside the state and the state itself? Arguing that attitudes towards boundaries are premised on assumptions about the locus of threats to vital interests, Rahul Rao probes beneath two major normative orientations towards boundaries-cosmopolitanism and nationalism-which structure thinking on questions of public policy and identity. Insofar as the Third World is concerned, hegemonic versions of both orientations are underpinned by simplistic imageries of threat. In the cosmopolitan gaze, political and economic crises in the Third World are attributed mainly to factors internal to the Third World state with the international playing the role of heroic saviour. In Third World nationalist imagery, the international is portrayed as a realm of neo-imperialist predation from which the domestic has to be secured. Both images capture widely held intuitions about the sources of threats to human rights, but each by itself provides a resolutely partial inventory of these threats. By juxtaposing critical accounts of both discourses, Rao argues that protest sensibilities in the current conjuncture must be critical of hegemonic variants of both cosmopolitanism and nationalism. The second half of the book illustrates what such a critique might look like. Journeying through the writings of James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, the activism of 'anti-globalisation' protesters, and the dilemmas of queer rights activists, Rao demonstrates that important currents of Third World protest have long battled against both the international and the domestic, in a manner that combines nationalist and cosmopolitan sensibilities.
Journal articles by Rahul Rao
Radical Philosophy, 2024
In her book The Colonizing Self, Israeli political theorist Hagar Kotef recalls overhearing a con... more In her book The Colonizing Self, Israeli political theorist Hagar Kotef recalls overhearing a conversation at a café in a bourgeois left-leaning neighbourhood of northern Tel Aviv in 2012. The Israeli army had been engaged in a war on Gaza at the time that killed over 150 Palestinians and displaced hundreds of families. She describes two people sitting at separate tables who end up sharing a newspaper and a conversation. At some point they conclude, in her paraphrase, that 'if the world blames us for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza we might as well commit genocide and get it all over with' (182). Kotef notes that they did not seem to know one another until their chance encounter in the café, as if to underscore the banality of Israeli genocidal intent vis-à-vis Palestinians such that it could furnish the shared ground for imagined community between strangers. The anecdote is almost emblematic of a book that is devoted to demonstrating how the settler-colonising self, and speci昀椀cally the Israeli self, is forged through an attachment to violence and structures of injury. Kotef distances herself from theoretical approaches that seek to account for mass violence in the reproduction of political community through recourse to notions of coercion, cruelty and disassociation. Instead she places her bets on desire, arguing that the settler is attached to violence in the way that Lauren Berlant accounts for attachment to 'bad objects': 'as part of an almost tragic effort to stabilize identity-the meaning of who we are' (48). Much of the book is devoted to substantiating this argument with reference to the quest for home and homeland, and practices of homemaking, on two registers. Within liberal political theory, Kotef demonstrates how the household constitutes the basic analytical unit of Lockean possessive individualism, functioning as the tip of the spear in the ideological justi昀椀cation of settler colonial expansion. And in the context of Israel/Palestine, she illuminates how both liberal and rightwing Israelis make themselves at home in landscapes of ruination, and speci昀椀cally in the ruins of Palestinian homes, demonstrating how homes become tools of destruction and expulsion. This is a book about how settler colonialism is sustained rather than how it ends. Yet I want to take the scattered remarks that Kotef makes on this latter subject as the point of departure for this review of recent works that address settler colonialism across different geographies and genres. About halfway through her book, Kotef startles the reader with a parenthetical caveat: 'I do not call here for killing all settlers or so many others whose social positions, security, and prosperity generate a world of insecurity for others', she says (131). The comment seems to speak to the café conversation in some way, even if only to preempt its obvious antithesis. If the settler wants to eliminate the native, as Patrick Wolfe tells us, it seems logical and even defensible for the native to want to eliminate the settler for reasons of sheer self-preservation. Yet Kotef does not want us to go there, or at least cautions against interpreting elimination in its most corporeal sense. In doing so, she enters into conversation with a number of texts including Lorraine Hansberry's celebrated play Les Blancs and the 昀椀eld of settler colonial studies more generally. Set amidst the throes of decolonisation in an un-62 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.16 / Summer 2024 Press, 2018). Yuval Evri and Hagar Kotef, 'When does a native become a settler? (With apologies to Zreik and Mamdani)', Constellations 29 (2022), 3-18.
Contexto Internacional, 2023
This is my reply to a symposium on 'Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality' in Contex... more This is my reply to a symposium on 'Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality' in Contexto Internacional. The full symposium is accessible here: https://www.scielo.br/j/cint/i/2023.v45n3/
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2024
This article attempts to think through the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism... more This article attempts to think through the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism, and caste capitalism. It conceptualizes homocapitalism as immanent within the assemblage of homonationalism but also as becoming partially disembedded from it as a result of the shift in conjuncture from the “war on terror” to the “global financial crisis.” Having made a case for the partial autonomy of homocapitalism from homonationalism, the article explores the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism, and the emergent theoretical conceptualization of caste capitalism. The author demonstrates how the central analytical insight of racial and caste capitalism—namely, that capitalism mobilizes precapitalist social hierarchies as a means of furthering accumulation—throws open the field for a range of ideological approaches that seek emancipation from racial and caste oppression through varying relationships with capitalism. This allows the author to make a crucial distinction between analytics and ideologies, a distinction that has been unhelpfully blurred in discussions of homocapitalism. As ideology, homocapitalism intensifies and derives some of its purchase from its affinities with discourses of liberatory capitalism such as Black capitalism and Dalit capitalism. As analytic, homocapitalism illuminates the fractioning of queerness in terms of its potential (ability, willingness) to contribute to production and social reproduction. Central to the comparison around which this article is structured is the illumination of racialization as a technology for the extraction and attribution of value that operates across racial capitalism, caste capitalism, and homocapitalism.
Journal of Historical Geography, 2023
In recent years, statues of Gandhi have been attacked by a variety of radically incommensurable m... more In recent years, statues of Gandhi have been attacked by a variety of radically incommensurable movements. Subaltern social movements struggling to dismantle the legacies of colonialism, slavery and apartheid have attacked Gandhi on the grounds of his alleged racism, casteism, misogyny and because he functions as a cipher for the imperialism of the contemporary Indian state and the racism of Indian society. Yet little about the case against Gandhi is new. This article explores why these arguments are being voiced now by identifying three discursive vehicles that have given them salience – decolonisation in the African academy, US-originated Afropessimism and a resurgent global Dalit movement. The article juxtaposes this global picture with the range of contradictory attitudes expressed towards Gandhi in India, where a state dominated by the neoliberal Hindu Right promotes Gandhi abroad at the same time as it sidelines him at home. Simultaneously, Gandhi is attacked by its domestic electoral base while remaining a talisman for its opponents as a symbol of an elusive communal harmony and environmentalism. In revealing how Gandhi is toppled by radically incommensurable social movements and how attitudes towards Gandhi do not map neatly onto power, the article complicates ongoing debates about decolonisation, memorialisation and heritage.
Radical Philosophy, 2020
The combination of entrenched racism, the structural legacies of slavery and colonialism, and neo... more The combination of entrenched racism, the structural legacies of slavery and colonialism, and neoliberal austerity, together with far-reaching changes in the way students and teachers are encouraged to understand the purpose, provision and 'consumption' of higher education, has exacerbated the crisis of the public university in the UK and beyond. Needless to say, its consequences are being magnified and intensified with unprecedented speed by the impact of Covid-19 and the government's responses to it. The short articles that follow, along with further articles that will be collected in a dossier in a forthcoming issue, aim to engage with some of the many aspects of this complex and highly charged situation.
This review article surveys recent work on time and temporality in international relations. It be... more This review article surveys recent work on time and temporality in international relations. It begins with an overview of Kimberly Hutchings's influential history of ideas exploring the relationship between chronos (quantitative experience of time) and kairos (qualitative conceptualisation of time). Building on the architecture of Hutchings's argument, it surveys more recent scholarship that supplements, extends and complicates her insights in two ways. First, while Hutchings focuses on the way in which theorisations of kairos shift over time, the development of a unified global chronotic imaginary was itself a contested process, frequently interrupted by kairotic considerations. Second, while Hutchings is interested in western conceptualisations of kairos, recent work has shifted the analytical focus to those subject positions marginalised by such kairotic imaginaries.
That states have sex should not have come as a surprise to IR scholars. The colonial archive is s... more That states have sex should not have come as a surprise to IR scholars. The colonial archive is saturated with gender talk conceptualising the colonial encounter around a homology between sexual and political dominance, in which a virile and masculinised Occident penetrates a subservient and feminised Orient. 1 Yet until the publication of Cynthia Weber's Faking It, most IR scholars thought, wrote, and spoke as if sex, gender, and sexuality were irrelevant or marginal to understanding relations between states. Or perhaps more accurately, IR scholarship was suffused with an implicit heteronormativity that barely acknowledged itself, let alone the possibility that states could be queer.
This article offers critical readings of two works that are symptomatic of a troubling repudiatio... more This article offers critical readings of two works that are symptomatic of a troubling repudiation of postcolonialism and Marxism by each other. Locating itself within the subfield of postcolonial international relations, John Hobson's 'The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics' (2012) dismisses Marx as imperialist and Lenin (and various forms of neo-Marxism) as Eurocentric. Vivek Chibber's 'Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital' (2013) renews the Marxist attack on postcolonialism, ironically casting subaltern studies as a form of orientalism. I argue that the relative lack of attention in these polemics to reparative possibilities immanent within the theoretical formations being criticized is disabling, forcing us to choose positions that insist on the priority of some axes of marginality over others. In the tradition of feminist intersectionality, my critiques of these texts insist on reading their respective theoretical antagonists in ways that bridge the supposed gulf between postcolonalism and Marxism.
In this article I ask why leading institutions of global capitalism have begun to take activist s... more In this article I ask why leading institutions of global capitalism have begun to take activist stances against homophobia, and why they have done so now. Central to these initiatives is a common-sense understanding of homophobia as a cultural disposition that might be disincentivized through the deployment of economic carrots (the promise of growth) and sticks (the withdrawal of capital). Revisiting debates over recognition and redistribution politics, I argue that viewing homophobia as ‘merely cultural’ enables international financial institutions (IFIs) to obscure the material conditions that incubate homophobic moral panics, and their own culpability in co-producing those conditions. Positioning themselves as external to the problem they seek to alleviate, IFIs are able to cast themselves as progressive forces in a greater moral struggle at precisely the historical moment in which austerity and capitalist crisis threaten to bring them into ever greater disrepute. Through a critical survey of recent IFI initiatives on homophobia, I attempt to delineate the emerging contours of what I call ‘global homocapitalism’.
Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2014
Proponents of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014 have denounced homosexuality as an import from... more Proponents of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014 have denounced homosexuality as an import from the West. Yet every June, hundreds of thousands of Christian pilgrims in Uganda commemorate a set of events, the hegemonic textual accounts of which pivot around the practice of native ‘sodomy’. According to these accounts, the last pre-colonial Kabaka (king) Mwanga of Buganda ordered the execution of a number of his male Christian pages in 1886 when, under the influence of their new religion, they refused his desire for physical intimacy. These events have assumed the place of a founding myth for Christianity in Uganda as a result of the Catholic Church’s canonization of its martyred pioneers. This article explores how public commemoration of these events can coexist with the claim that same-sex intimacy is alien to Uganda. Unlike previous scholarship on the martyrdoms, which has focused primarily on colonial discourse, the article pays attention to contemporary Ugandan remembering of the martyrdoms. And against the grain of queer African historical scholarship, which seeks to recover the forgotten past, it explores the critical possibilities immanent within something that is intensively memorialized. The article maps Ugandan public memory of the martyrdoms, unravelling genealogies of homophobia as well as possibilities for sexual dissidence that lurk within public culture.
London Review of International Law, 2014
This article explores what is at stake in contemporary practices of locating homophobia, as expre... more This article explores what is at stake in contemporary practices of locating homophobia, as expressed in debates surrounding the Ugandan Anti Homosexuality Act. Problematising both neo-Orientalist representations of homophobia in Uganda and critical responses thereto, it draws on materialist, postcolonial and queer approaches to offer an account of the transnational production of homophobia that nonetheless accounts for its local resonance and resilience.
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2014
As rights claims on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity occupy an increasingly pr... more As rights claims on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity occupy an increasingly prominent place in international politics, it seems clear that the longrunning Woman Question has been supplemented by a set of variously articulated "queer questions." Drawing on postcolonial, feminist and queer theory, and readings of queer literary and cinematic texts from India and Iran, this article explores moments of resonance, intersection and tension between the Woman Question and queer questions. It argues, first, that contemporary queer questions echo the preoccupations of the Woman Question even as they are uncannily prefigured by it; second, that these questions have been mutually disruptive of one another, so that queer questions are not simply a rerun of the Woman Question; and third, that differences between these questions are problematically flattened out in projections of shared futurity articulated in the abstract universality of "human rights." Navigating the shared pasts, fraught presents and imagined futures of Woman and queer questions, the article brings queer critiques of temporality to bear on the concerns of postcolonial queer activism. It elucidates opportunities and challenges for alliance between the subjectivities interpellated by these various questions. In addition, it asks how the proliferation of new subjectivities under the sign of "queer" troubles notions of universal human rights.
Using recent writing on cosmopolitanism as a springboard, this essay explores the disciplinary gr... more Using recent writing on cosmopolitanism as a springboard, this essay explores the disciplinary grounding of, as well as substantive themes in, the thinking and praxis of contemporary cosmopolitanism. Beginning with David Harvey’s view of geography and anthropology as propaedeutic to philosophical enquiry, it is argued that Rawlsian-style contractarian efforts to devise principles of global justice cannot legitimately claim to be universalistic unless they operate not only beneath a veil of ignorance of contracting parties’ interests but also with the benefit of substantial empirical knowledge of the lives of subaltern others. The essay then explores the liberatory potentials of the more sophisticated deployments of geographical concepts such as space, place and environment suggested by Harvey, in the context of contemporary struggles for human rights. Taking the view that geography and anthropology can assist with the articulation of cosmopolitan conceptions of justice that could more legitimately claim to be universalistic, the essay argues that the implementation of such claims within the world as it is currently constituted necessitates an engagement with the international state system and the discipline of international relations. In considering the relationship between international relations and cosmopolitanism, it intervenes in a long-running discussion on moral and institutional cosmopolitanism. Gillian Brock’s work is discussed as a valuable effort to remedy the relative neglect of institutional cosmopolitanism, but also as unwittingly demonstrating its pitfalls. Notably, despite its attempt to accommodate nationalism, Brock’s approach fails to recognise the role that nationalism might play in disciplining institutional cosmopolitanism. It is suggested in conclusion that progressive global politics will be constituted by the dialectical relationship between institutional cosmopolitanism and nationalist contestations thereof.
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Books by Rahul Rao
In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain—three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself.
Journal articles by Rahul Rao
In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain—three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself.
Keywords: orientalism, hybridity, subaltern, imperialism, capitalism, nativism, essentialism, humanism, deconstruction, marxism, poststructuralism