Time’s Corpus

Abstract

At stake here is a dialogue between two minoritized historiographies—one in South Asian studies and the other in queer-sexuality studies—and their shared preoccupation with the responsibility of historical emergence and recognition. To attempt such a dialogue, this chapter moves away from the conventional (and often reactionary) segregation of the two field formations as oppositional or discrete. Central to the argument is an understanding of area studies as constitutive of the histories of sexuality and vice versa.1 My goal is not merely to narrate the analytical convergences between the two field formations; rather I am interested more in what I will call the ``comparative imaginaries'' that animate such a conversation. By ``comparative imaginaries,'' I mean to gesture to the incursions of temporality, to the ``politics of time'' that emerge in our desire for knowledge and in our ethical stances toward otherness.2