Dr Sandeep Bakshi - orcid.org/0000-0002-4095-0209
IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, May - July 2022
Home Institution: Université Paris Cité / LARCA (CNRS UMR 8225)
Twitter: @sandeepbak
Sandeep Bakshi researches on transnational queer and decolonial enunciation of knowledges. He received his PhD from the School of English, University of Leicester, UK, and is currently employed as an Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Queer Literatures and Literary Translation at the University of Paris. He coordinates two research seminars, “Peripheral Knowledges” and “Empires, Souths, Sexualities,” and heads the “Gender and Sexuality Studies” research group. Co-editor of Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (Oxford: Counterpress, 2016) and Decolonial Trajectories, special issue of Interventions (2020), he has published on queer and race problematics in postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the founder and serves on the board of the Decolonizing Sexualities Network (https://decolonizingsexualities.org).
Project Title: Race, Queer Politics and Decoloniality
Race, queer politics and decoloniality draws upon the work of the well-established network of academics and activists (US, UK, India, France) to spearhead a collaborative project with the RACE.ED Network at the University of Edinburgh under the aegis of the Institute Project on Decoloniality. The key aim of the collaboration constitutes a reflection on decolonial knowledges production in the field of genders and sexualities in Brazil and India through an interdisciplinary perspective. The significance of the project lies not only in posing a challenge to homonormative discourses of the global north whereby it appears as central to the discourse of (colonial) modernity, but simultaneously, in underscoring the impossibility of an unproblematic redemptive reading of South Asian/Brazilian queer sexualities since they are ambivalently inter-implicated in the hegemonic construction of racial, national, linguistic, class, caste and gendered privilege. The overarching question that impels the project iterates the immediacy of engagement between theory and disciplines: Can a decolonising turn in queer articulations successfully dismantle hegemonic structures of power that remain intact despite the pressure exerted by former and ongoing postcolonial movements?