"Archival Interregnum: Caste, Sexuality, and Indenture," A Lecture by Anjali Arondeka

Presented by the Comparative Approaches to the Literatures of Africa, the Middle East, and the Global South (CALAMEGS) 2025-26 Lecture Series. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at NYU.

While Mauritius remains the place from which my questions emerge, it is also an area impossible, a geo-epistemology that confounds histories of sexuality and caste in/and South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. Indenture is the archival interregnum—especially in Mauritius—where our attachments to counter-archives, origin-stories, run amuck. If archives of indenture are flooded with markers of identification that suture presence to labor, what happens to the labor of caste and sexuality that lives unaccounted within economies of such enumeration? How do we think histories of indenture outside settled archival forms, outside technologies of historical recuperation, where we historicize not to materialize absence, but to speak to the weight of our historical anchors? How do we couple the abundance of historical reading with the oceanic voyages of indenture, caste and sexuality? Caste and sexuality here are not tracked through acts/practices that might return us to identitarian forms; rather Arondeka reads archival records of caste and sexuality against the settlement and lure of reproductive futurities.