The colonial remnants of destruction in postcolonial South Asia are evident in various 21^st century ethnic, religious, and communal conflicts across the subcontinent. Regions like India’s northeast and Kashmir, and states such as Myanmar, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have been under constant postcolonial violence, state oppression, and military presence since independence. The systemic marginalization of minorities has been used by the powerful to silence and erase history. As stories of queerness exist in the periphery of heteronormative imagination of a nation, conflicts and violence add layers of further investigation into the nation and belonging of queer bodies within the nation. This panel investigates the intricacies of conflict zones and borderlands which shape as well subvert identity. The aim of this panel is to investigate nuances of queering the state, borderlands, and heteronormative practices to question the not just the normative but also the colonial and neocolonial praxes in South Asia. Thus, the rationale of this panel is to focus on literary intervention that challenge hegemony by rejecting homogenous definitions of being and existing. The framework of queering the postcolony, provides for a broader investigation of the nation and the tools of nation-building.

This topic of this panel has fundamental roots in Gayatri Gopinath in Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005), Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” (2003), Nira Yuval-Davis’s Gender & Nation (1997), Ronak K. Kapadia’s Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (2019), Cynthia Cockburn’s The Space Between Us (1998) and José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2019), to name a few. These scholarships explore the dynamics of queering nationhood and its relationship to the individual, in the global south postcolonial state or in the diaspora.

The session will begin with a brief introduction to the panel and the panelists. The session has three presenters, each allocated with 18-20 minutes of presentation time. Followed by question-answers and discussion on the given topic.

Anu Sugathan’s paper, “Queering Autobiography: Memory, Borderlands, and Identity in Spellbound”, examines Bishakh Som’s Spellbound (2020) as a queer diasporic graphic memoir that finds selfhood in the borderlands of gender, memory, and diasporic belonging. While autobiographical narratives rely on memory rather than historical accuracy, Spellbound stretches this instability into the domain of queer and trans identity. The narrative portrays queer self-recognition as a process of mediation, displacement, and emergence as Anjali gradually gains autonomy after initially posing as a substitute self. The memoir directly addresses issues of both overt and covert queer life.

While, Nathan Omprasadham’s paper, “Queering the Archive of War: Literary Prizes, Diaspora, and Impossible Desires in Sri Lankan Anglophone Fiction”, investigates the paradoxical prominence of queer narratives within the prizewinning canon of Sri Lankan Anglophone (SLA) literature, arguing that literary awards function as a key mechanism for both tracking and articulating an ambivalent nationalism in queer wartime writing. This paper studies Punyakante Wijenaike’s Giraya (1971), Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994) and SJ Sindu’s Marriage of a Thousand Lies (2017). This tension between the lack of queer rights in Sri Lanka and its literary representation, is only highlighted by the growing canon of Sri Lankan authors to win international prizes for queer writing, presenting a representational disconnect between the national narratives privileged domestically by the state, and internationally by prize-giving institutions.

Finally, Natasa Thoudam in the paper, “The Politics of Dress and Representation of Nupa Maibis/Amaibis in Meitei Lai Haraoba of Manipur in India’s Northeast”, investigates the heterosexist shift in the Maibis/Amaibis, priestesses of the Sanamahi religion of the Meitei community of Manipur, one of the eight northeastern states of India. This paper examines exclusion of trans representation in the festival and the imposition of the heteronormative dress code in Santa Khurai's memoir The Yellow Sparrow: Memoir of a Transgender Woman (2023) and Siddharth Haobijam’s documentary The Unheard Voice (2014). This paper focuses on Nupa Maibis or the male Maibis, and the shift in the traditional attire and relationship with gender within the community.

The topics for this panel encompass varied voices of underrepresented literary valor. The queering of regions of unrest, such as Manipur in northeast India or Sri Lanka, and the remnant of postcolonial violence in the South Asian diaspora, brings forth a diverse array of perspectives. Thus, the selection of panelists for this session was intentional to understand the intersectionality of queering beyond identity and sexual orientation.