Kanika Batra
Biographic Data
| ID | 203290 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kanika Batra |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kanika |
| FAMILY NAME | Batra |
| SIGNATURE | BATRA K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Texas Tech University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0355-7966 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Auto/ethno/biography, anti-Jim Crow, and (de)coloniality in Richard Rive’s Writing Black
South African writer Richard Rive wrote and spoke about educational apartheid widely, famously in the US in his 1979 keynote address for African Literature Association conference titled “The Ethics of an anti-Jim Crow,” included it in his autobiography Writing Black. This article reads Rive’s work alongside a scrutiny of historic and contemporary educational disparities before, during, and following #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) and #FeesMustFall (#FMF)…
Of communitas and community: Remembering Monica Popescu
A Seed of a Dream: Morris Isaacson High School and the Struggle for Education in Soweto, 1956–2012
Black Consciousness affiliations in Soweto women’s life writing
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Feminist criticism engaging with South African women's life writing including early essays by Carole Boyce Davies and Desiree Lewis, and more recent work by Gabeba Baderoon and Pumla Gqola set the terms for future work in the area. Barbara Harlow's assessment of women's prison narratives remains a benchmark for the field.2 Elleke Boehmer et al. explain in a re…
Atrangik narivad: New directions for queer feminist studies in India
This essay places Srila Roy's recently published Changing the Subject in dialogue with my book Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities, studying Southern feminist and queer activism to reveal solidarities and dissensions contributing to new world-making forms. My focus is on the first section of Changing the Subject, where Roy describes her research with Sappho for Equality (SFE) to map a queer feminism-one I describe as atrangik narivad in Hindi-chara…
Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights
Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities demonstrates how late twentieth century postcolonial print cultures initiated a public discourse on sexual activism and contends that postcolonial feminist and queer archives offer alternative histories of sexual precarity, vulnerability, and resistance. The book’s comparative focus on India, Jamaica, and South Africa extends the valences of postcolonial feminist and queer studies towards a historical examination…
Transporting metropolitanism: Road-mapping feminist solutions to sexual violence in Delhi
This article reads literary texts on sexual violence in Delhi in relation to social texts such as the successive plans for the development of Delhi, notably documents produced by the “Safe Delhi” campaigns to assess the culture of sexual violence in Delhi today in the wake of the horrendous gang rape of 2012, and a 2013 report evaluating public safety and legislation. It focuses on Manjula Padmanabhan’s [1996] 2013 short story “Teaser” which desc…
Polygamous Postcolonialism and Transnational Critique in Tess Onwueme’s The Reign of Wazobia
Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) in contrast to the exploration of polygamy in Nigerian-American dramatist Tess Onwueme’s early pl…
Worlding Sexualities under Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to a Queer Afropolitanism
Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies towards a historical examination of North-South interactions in theorizing sexual activism. Gay liberati…
Creating a Locational Counterpublic: Manushi and the Articulation of Human Rights and Sexuality from Delhi, India
This essay examines the Indian women’s journal Manushi’s coverage of sexual violence and a concomitant articulation of women’s rights to bodily autonomy, albeit one that did not advocate sexual autonomy and choice. However, given the almost exclusive focus on (hetero)sexual violence, the human rights framework used to talk about Indian women in Manushi was not applied to sexual minorities. I begin by situating the publication in Delhi-based women…
Guest Editor's Column
Quest of a Discipline: New Academic Directions for Comparative Literature
From the days of René Wellek s Crisis of Comparative Literature (1959) through the beginning of the twenty-first century that saw Gayatri Spivak s provocative Death of a Discipline (2003), Comparative Literature as an academic discipline has endured like no other. This pioneering volume, Quest of a Discipline, offers challenging new directions to this field urging the readers to see the practice of Comparative Literature as a quest. It showcases …
Our own gayful rest: A Postcolonial Archive
My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism
The Home, the Veil and the World: Reading Ismat Chughtai towards a 'Progressive' History of the Indian Women's Movement
This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the 'waves', 'stages' or 'phases' of …
Kipps, Belsey, and Jegede: Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in Zadie Smith's On Beauty
Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith's first novel White Teeth. The status of Smith's fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of On Beauty, encourages an analysis of disciplinarity and institutionalization. I offer a reading of Smith's re…
Pulling the coat: Postcolonial performativity in Black British women's drama
This paper analyzes black British women's drama produced during the 1980s and 1990s to understand the transformations in black lesbian politics through these decades. It explores the intersections between queer cultures and postcolonialism as a political theory and ideology that thinks of colonialism as an encounter with specific material, linguistic and cultural effects on the colonizing and colonized populations. Using Audre Lorde's idea of the…
Guest Editors' Column: Gender and Sexuality in South Asian Literature and Culture
Emergent Sexual Identities in Indian Women's Writing
(2008). Emergent Sexual Identities in Indian Women's Writing. South Asian Review: Vol. 29, Perspectives on South Asian Women's Writing, pp. 251-268
Daughters Who Know the Languages of Power: Community, Sexuality, and Postcolonial Development in Tess Onwueme's Tell It to Women
This paper discusses how the work of the Nigerian diasporic playwright Tess Onwueme can be placed on the continuum of Nigerian cultural activism marked, on the one hand, by a critique of postcolonial governmentality and, on the other, by active support of the programmes initiated by the state. I examine Onwueme's focus on women's resistance to the developmental programmes imposed by leaders and bureaucrats in Nigeria by reading her play Tell it t…
Worlding Sexualities under Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to a Queer Afropolitanism
Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies towards a historical examination of North-South interactions in theorizing sexual activism. Gay liberati…
Our own gayful rest: A Postcolonial Archive
My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism
The Home, the Veil and the World: Reading Ismat Chughtai towards a 'Progressive' History of the Indian Women's Movement
This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the 'waves', 'stages' or 'phases' of …
Creating a Locational Counterpublic: Manushi and the Articulation of Human Rights and Sexuality from Delhi, India
This essay examines the Indian women’s journal Manushi’s coverage of sexual violence and a concomitant articulation of women’s rights to bodily autonomy, albeit one that did not advocate sexual autonomy and choice. However, given the almost exclusive focus on (hetero)sexual violence, the human rights framework used to talk about Indian women in Manushi was not applied to sexual minorities. I begin by situating the publication in Delhi-based women…
Kipps, Belsey, and Jegede: Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in Zadie Smith's On Beauty
Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith's first novel White Teeth. The status of Smith's fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of On Beauty, encourages an analysis of disciplinarity and institutionalization. I offer a reading of Smith's re…
Daughters Who Know the Languages of Power: Community, Sexuality, and Postcolonial Development in Tess Onwueme's Tell It to Women
This paper discusses how the work of the Nigerian diasporic playwright Tess Onwueme can be placed on the continuum of Nigerian cultural activism marked, on the one hand, by a critique of postcolonial governmentality and, on the other, by active support of the programmes initiated by the state. I examine Onwueme's focus on women's resistance to the developmental programmes imposed by leaders and bureaucrats in Nigeria by reading her play Tell it t…
Pulling the coat: Postcolonial performativity in Black British women's drama
This paper analyzes black British women's drama produced during the 1980s and 1990s to understand the transformations in black lesbian politics through these decades. It explores the intersections between queer cultures and postcolonialism as a political theory and ideology that thinks of colonialism as an encounter with specific material, linguistic and cultural effects on the colonizing and colonized populations. Using Audre Lorde's idea of the…
Guest Editors' Column: Gender and Sexuality in South Asian Literature and Culture
Emergent Sexual Identities in Indian Women's Writing
(2008). Emergent Sexual Identities in Indian Women's Writing. South Asian Review: Vol. 29, Perspectives on South Asian Women's Writing, pp. 251-268
Our own gayful rest: A Postcolonial Archive
My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism
The Home, the Veil and the World: Reading Ismat Chughtai towards a 'Progressive' History of the Indian Women's Movement
This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the 'waves', 'stages' or 'phases' of …
Kipps, Belsey, and Jegede: Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in Zadie Smith's On Beauty
Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith's first novel White Teeth. The status of Smith's fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of On Beauty, encourages an analysis of disciplinarity and institutionalization. I offer a reading of Smith's re…
Quest of a Discipline: New Academic Directions for Comparative Literature
From the days of René Wellek s Crisis of Comparative Literature (1959) through the beginning of the twenty-first century that saw Gayatri Spivak s provocative Death of a Discipline (2003), Comparative Literature as an academic discipline has endured like no other. This pioneering volume, Quest of a Discipline, offers challenging new directions to this field urging the readers to see the practice of Comparative Literature as a quest. It showcases …
Guest Editor's Column
Worlding Sexualities under Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to a Queer Afropolitanism
Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies towards a historical examination of North-South interactions in theorizing sexual activism. Gay liberati…
Creating a Locational Counterpublic: Manushi and the Articulation of Human Rights and Sexuality from Delhi, India
This essay examines the Indian women’s journal Manushi’s coverage of sexual violence and a concomitant articulation of women’s rights to bodily autonomy, albeit one that did not advocate sexual autonomy and choice. However, given the almost exclusive focus on (hetero)sexual violence, the human rights framework used to talk about Indian women in Manushi was not applied to sexual minorities. I begin by situating the publication in Delhi-based women…
Polygamous Postcolonialism and Transnational Critique in Tess Onwueme’s The Reign of Wazobia
Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) in contrast to the exploration of polygamy in Nigerian-American dramatist Tess Onwueme’s early pl…
Transporting metropolitanism: Road-mapping feminist solutions to sexual violence in Delhi
This article reads literary texts on sexual violence in Delhi in relation to social texts such as the successive plans for the development of Delhi, notably documents produced by the “Safe Delhi” campaigns to assess the culture of sexual violence in Delhi today in the wake of the horrendous gang rape of 2012, and a 2013 report evaluating public safety and legislation. It focuses on Manjula Padmanabhan’s [1996] 2013 short story “Teaser” which desc…
Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights
Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities demonstrates how late twentieth century postcolonial print cultures initiated a public discourse on sexual activism and contends that postcolonial feminist and queer archives offer alternative histories of sexual precarity, vulnerability, and resistance. The book’s comparative focus on India, Jamaica, and South Africa extends the valences of postcolonial feminist and queer studies towards a historical examination…
Black Consciousness affiliations in Soweto women’s life writing
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Feminist criticism engaging with South African women's life writing including early essays by Carole Boyce Davies and Desiree Lewis, and more recent work by Gabeba Baderoon and Pumla Gqola set the terms for future work in the area. Barbara Harlow's assessment of women's prison narratives remains a benchmark for the field.2 Elleke Boehmer et al. explain in a re…
Atrangik narivad: New directions for queer feminist studies in India
This essay places Srila Roy's recently published Changing the Subject in dialogue with my book Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities, studying Southern feminist and queer activism to reveal solidarities and dissensions contributing to new world-making forms. My focus is on the first section of Changing the Subject, where Roy describes her research with Sappho for Equality (SFE) to map a queer feminism-one I describe as atrangik narivad in Hindi-chara…
A Seed of a Dream: Morris Isaacson High School and the Struggle for Education in Soweto, 1956–2012
Of communitas and community: Remembering Monica Popescu
Auto/ethno/biography, anti-Jim Crow, and (de)coloniality in Richard Rive’s Writing Black
South African writer Richard Rive wrote and spoke about educational apartheid widely, famously in the US in his 1979 keynote address for African Literature Association conference titled “The Ethics of an anti-Jim Crow,” included it in his autobiography Writing Black. This article reads Rive’s work alongside a scrutiny of historic and contemporary educational disparities before, during, and following #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) and #FeesMustFall (#FMF)…
Sociology (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · History (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (7 works) · History (7 works) · Human sexuality (7 works) · Politics (7 works)