Rahul Rao
Biographic Data
| ID | 203139 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rahul Rao |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rahul |
| FAMILY NAME | Rao |
| SIGNATURE | RAO R |
| AFFILIATIONS | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3289-7460 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 63 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Knowledge with power
This commentary responds to Andrew Smith's ‘What post-colonial sociology forgets: Recovering the materialist tradition of anti-colonial critique’. It argues that, rather than being forgotten, the key figures that populate this tradition have become hegemonic in ways that have made them vulnerable to capture by antagonistic ideological tendencies. The argument is illustrated with reference to contemporary invocations of the work of Ngũgı ̃ wa Thio…
The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire
Is the Homo in Homocapitalism the Caste in Caste Capitalism and the Racial in Racial Capitalism
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 artic…
Gandhi falling … and rising
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 Gandh…
Forum on Rahul Rao’s Out of Time, Part IV: A Luta Continua
In this piece, Rahul Rao replies to the reflections on his book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality by the six scholars who contributed to the Forum
On vernacular capitalist‐iconic‐democratic‐neoliberal‐concrete‐territorial‐automotive assemblages: Gods in the Time of Democracy by Kajri Jain
Between 1995 and 1997, anyone driving from the centre of Bangalore to its old airport would have passed a giant white statue of the Hindu god Shiva in his traditional seated pose, rudraksha mala (bead garland) and serpent around his neck and a trishul (trident) and damaru (drum) in two of his four hands. In 1997, the statue abruptly disappeared from drive-by view on HAL Airport Road, obscured by a white castle called Kemp Fort, complete with cren…
Explicit Exclusions; or, The Ethnicization of Democracy
Peer reviewed
Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality
Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament attracted global attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US anti-gay evangelical Christians who were reported to have lobbied for its passage. This book makes three contributions to our understanding of these developments. First, it offers an account of the international relations that anticipated and followed the Anti Ho…
One Time, Many Times
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 tw…
The State of “Queer IR
Book Review| January 01 2018 The State of “Queer IR” Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization over Gay Rights, Altman, Dennis; Symons, Jonathan, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. viii + 178 pp.Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations, Picq, Manuela Lavinas; Thiel, Markus (editors), Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. xvi + 178 pp.Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression, Weiss, Meredith L.; Bosi…
Sexual states: Governance and the struggle over the antisodomy law in India, by Jyoti Puri
Sexual states: governance and the struggle over the antisodomy law in India, by Jyoti Puri." International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19(2), pp. 278–279
Recovering Reparative Readings of Postcolonialism and Marxism
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) r…
The Diplomat and the Domestic: Or, Homage to Faking It
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 masculinized Occident penetrates a subservient and feminized Orient. 1 Yet till the publication of Cynthia Weber's Faking It, most IR scholars thought, wrote, and spoke as if sex, gender, and sexuality were ir…
Re-membering Mwanga: Same-sex intimacy, memory and belonging in postcolonial Uganda
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…
The locations of homophobia
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 re…
Queer Questions
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 long-running 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 …
Listening to the avant-garde
In her book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, Lea Ypi revisits the debate over the scope of justice between cosmopolitans and statists, which has been constitutive of the field of international normative theory. Against statists, Ypi defends the global scope of egalitarian principles of justice, deriving them from a causally fundamental relationship between relative and absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she demonstrates …
Third World Protest: Between Home and the World
Journeying through the writings of James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, 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.
The Empire Writes Back (to Michael Ignatieff)
This article critiques the re-legitimisation of empire evident in recent writing by Michael Ignatieff. It begins by locating his work within the larger debate on empire emerging today. Focusing first on Ignatieff's more general comments on empire, it suggests that his defensive case for empire is misleading: it ignores the extent to which the circumstances allegedly necessitating `new' empire are themselves a consequence of older empire, and inde…
The UN and Nato in the New World Order: Legal Issues
Analog CMOS integrated circuit design: Research and undergraduate teaching
The authors describe the use of software that was developed as part of a research program in analog CMOS integrated circuit design for an undergraduate course on analog VLSI design. The software includes some unusual uses of readily available, inexpensive, and easy-to-use programs available for microcomputers such as Macintosh or IBM-PC clones. Although initially intended to help with the design of CMOS operational amplifiers, the IC design metho…
Re-membering Mwanga: Same-sex intimacy, memory and belonging in postcolonial Uganda
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…
Queer Questions
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 long-running 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 …
The State of “Queer IR
Book Review| January 01 2018 The State of “Queer IR” Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization over Gay Rights, Altman, Dennis; Symons, Jonathan, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. viii + 178 pp.Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations, Picq, Manuela Lavinas; Thiel, Markus (editors), Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. xvi + 178 pp.Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression, Weiss, Meredith L.; Bosi…
Recovering Reparative Readings of Postcolonialism and Marxism
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) r…
Is the Homo in Homocapitalism the Caste in Caste Capitalism and the Racial in Racial Capitalism
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 artic…
The Empire Writes Back (to Michael Ignatieff)
This article critiques the re-legitimisation of empire evident in recent writing by Michael Ignatieff. It begins by locating his work within the larger debate on empire emerging today. Focusing first on Ignatieff's more general comments on empire, it suggests that his defensive case for empire is misleading: it ignores the extent to which the circumstances allegedly necessitating `new' empire are themselves a consequence of older empire, and inde…
The Diplomat and the Domestic: Or, Homage to Faking It
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 masculinized Occident penetrates a subservient and feminized Orient. 1 Yet till the publication of Cynthia Weber's Faking It, most IR scholars thought, wrote, and spoke as if sex, gender, and sexuality were ir…
Listening to the avant-garde
In her book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, Lea Ypi revisits the debate over the scope of justice between cosmopolitans and statists, which has been constitutive of the field of international normative theory. Against statists, Ypi defends the global scope of egalitarian principles of justice, deriving them from a causally fundamental relationship between relative and absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she demonstrates …
Analog CMOS integrated circuit design: Research and undergraduate teaching
The authors describe the use of software that was developed as part of a research program in analog CMOS integrated circuit design for an undergraduate course on analog VLSI design. The software includes some unusual uses of readily available, inexpensive, and easy-to-use programs available for microcomputers such as Macintosh or IBM-PC clones. Although initially intended to help with the design of CMOS operational amplifiers, the IC design metho…
The UN and Nato in the New World Order: Legal Issues
The Empire Writes Back (to Michael Ignatieff)
This article critiques the re-legitimisation of empire evident in recent writing by Michael Ignatieff. It begins by locating his work within the larger debate on empire emerging today. Focusing first on Ignatieff's more general comments on empire, it suggests that his defensive case for empire is misleading: it ignores the extent to which the circumstances allegedly necessitating `new' empire are themselves a consequence of older empire, and inde…
Third World Protest: Between Home and the World
Journeying through the writings of James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, 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.
Listening to the avant-garde
In her book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, Lea Ypi revisits the debate over the scope of justice between cosmopolitans and statists, which has been constitutive of the field of international normative theory. Against statists, Ypi defends the global scope of egalitarian principles of justice, deriving them from a causally fundamental relationship between relative and absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she demonstrates …
The locations of homophobia
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 re…
Queer Questions
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 long-running 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 …
Re-membering Mwanga: Same-sex intimacy, memory and belonging in postcolonial Uganda
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…
The Diplomat and the Domestic: Or, Homage to Faking It
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 masculinized Occident penetrates a subservient and feminized Orient. 1 Yet till the publication of Cynthia Weber's Faking It, most IR scholars thought, wrote, and spoke as if sex, gender, and sexuality were ir…
Sexual states: Governance and the struggle over the antisodomy law in India, by Jyoti Puri
Sexual states: governance and the struggle over the antisodomy law in India, by Jyoti Puri." International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19(2), pp. 278–279
Recovering Reparative Readings of Postcolonialism and Marxism
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) r…
The State of “Queer IR
Book Review| January 01 2018 The State of “Queer IR” Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization over Gay Rights, Altman, Dennis; Symons, Jonathan, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. viii + 178 pp.Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations, Picq, Manuela Lavinas; Thiel, Markus (editors), Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. xvi + 178 pp.Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression, Weiss, Meredith L.; Bosi…
One Time, Many Times
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 tw…
Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality
Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament attracted global attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US anti-gay evangelical Christians who were reported to have lobbied for its passage. This book makes three contributions to our understanding of these developments. First, it offers an account of the international relations that anticipated and followed the Anti Ho…
Explicit Exclusions; or, The Ethnicization of Democracy
Peer reviewed
On vernacular capitalist‐iconic‐democratic‐neoliberal‐concrete‐territorial‐automotive assemblages: Gods in the Time of Democracy by Kajri Jain
Between 1995 and 1997, anyone driving from the centre of Bangalore to its old airport would have passed a giant white statue of the Hindu god Shiva in his traditional seated pose, rudraksha mala (bead garland) and serpent around his neck and a trishul (trident) and damaru (drum) in two of his four hands. In 1997, the statue abruptly disappeared from drive-by view on HAL Airport Road, obscured by a white castle called Kemp Fort, complete with cren…
Gandhi falling … and rising
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 Gandh…
Forum on Rahul Rao’s Out of Time, Part IV: A Luta Continua
In this piece, Rahul Rao replies to the reflections on his book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality by the six scholars who contributed to the Forum
Is the Homo in Homocapitalism the Caste in Caste Capitalism and the Racial in Racial Capitalism
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 artic…
The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire
Knowledge with power
This commentary responds to Andrew Smith's ‘What post-colonial sociology forgets: Recovering the materialist tradition of anti-colonial critique’. It argues that, rather than being forgotten, the key figures that populate this tradition have become hegemonic in ways that have made them vulnerable to capture by antagonistic ideological tendencies. The argument is illustrated with reference to contemporary invocations of the work of Ngũgı ̃ wa Thio…
Political science (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Art (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works)