Nishant Upadhyay
Biographic Data
| ID | 640540 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nishant Upadhyay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nishant |
| FAMILY NAME | Upadhyay |
| SIGNATURE | UPADHYAY N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tsinghua University |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-5121-6374 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Desire, Ruin, and Ecological Resistance: Reading Sanduk Through Eco-socialism and Eco-feminism
This study examines Siddhartha Chanakya’s SandukFootnote1 (2025), an independent Indian film that transforms the imagery of war into a radical ecological allegory of life at the limits of the Anthropocene. Set in a post-nuclear wasteland stripped of history and national identity, the film depicts conflict not between states but between forms of life – human, alien, and material – that persist after civilisation's collapse. Rejecting the hyper-nat…
Negotiating Existence: The Ontological Dilemma and the Problem of Categories of Animals and Humans in the Context of Rights
Entangled Ethics: Indic Religious Dietary Traditions and the Moral Limits of Modern Consumption
Military Marxism and Africa’s ‘community-to-come’: Decolonization, sovereignty, and the case of Burkina Faso
Africana Marxist movements, central to Mayer’s Military Marxism (2025), reveal both theoretical and practical potentials in confronting renewed forms of neo-colonial domination in the Sahel, particularly Burkina Faso. This article argues that these developments invite a rethinking of Africana Marxism as a material strategy of sovereignty, rather than solely an ideological or discursive project. It conceptualizes military Marxism as a configuratio…
The beef and the bare life – Ambedkar’s Broken Man, Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and the biopolitics of beef and dietary consumption
This article examines the intersection of caste, xenophobia, and biopolitics in India through Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Bhimrao Ambedkar’s conception of the Broken Man. It argues that the cow’s sacralisation operates as a biopolitical instrument through which the state codifies Brahmanical hierarchy, criminalizes and targets Dalit and Muslim dietary practices, and legitimizes violence under the guise of ‘scientific’ governance in modern co…
Broad chest and red eyes: Idioms and symbolics of populism in Modi’s foreign policy discourse toward China
The epistemology and ontology of a bhakta: An Analysis of Pejorative and Secularised Meanings of Bhakta
The Sound of Silence: Neoliberal Capitalism and Subversion of Class and Religious Minority Issues in the Indo-Gulf Relations
Notes on Brahminical Coloniality and the Occupation of Kashmir
Fraught Solidarities: Diasporic Hindutva and Claims to Indigeneity
The Power to ‘Break: Biopower, ‘Manufactured demographic crisis’, and defining new categories of identity in India
The Wanderer as Becoming: A Satirical Critique of Indian Philosophy and Religions and a Wanderer's Religion
Rahul Sankrityayan, a twentieth-century Indian polymath, is known for his contributions to Buddhism, Marxism, and Hindi literature. While his writing has been analyzed for its engagement with Buddhism and Tibet, he is also credited with inaugurating Hindi travel-writing. Though his contributions to this genre are well-recognized, one crucial work-ghummakaṛa śāstra (1945; lit. The Treatise of a Wanderer)-has received insufficient scholarly attenti…
The Middle Republic: India, Multipolarity, and the Post-Ukraine War Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia
Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity
Indians on Indian Lands studies dominant caste Indian diasporic formation within the Canadian settler state. Specifically, it theorizes Indian immigrant labor in resource extraction industries, logging, and canneries in unceded lands of British Columbia in the 1960s-1990s and the tar sands in Treaty 6 lands of Alberta currently. The book examines these sites as simultaneous spaces of Indigenous dispossession and spaces of racialized-classed-gende…
Decolonial Futures
This roundtable showcases how different Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities in Colorado are fighting for sovereignty of their homelands. It reorients the question of “homelands” to highlight the experiences of communities whose homelands remain occupied by settler-colonial and imperial nation-states, like the United States, India, Israel, and China. Participants speak to the struggles of sovereignty of their communities and commun…
Trans Lies Elsewhere: Trans of Color Lives, Critiques, and Futures
Trans Lies Elsewhere":Trans of Color Lives, Critiques, and Futures Nishant Upadhyay (bio) Black Trans Feminism. By Marquis Bey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 290 pages. $104.94 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies. By Francisco J. Galarte. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 182 pages. $90.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art…
The Eighteenth-Century Gardens of Bundelkhand, India, compared to the Mughal, Rajput and Colonial Gardens
Bundelkhand is a region in central India demarcated on the basis of uniform socio-cultural practices. During the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a peculiar garden-style developed under the patronisation of the princely states in Bundelkhand. The gardens of Bundelkhand have a characteristic typology and identical gardens can be seen all across Bundelkhand. These walled gardens consist of an outhouse (kothi), a temple, well, stepwell…
Coloniality of White Feminism and Its Transphobia: A Comment on Burt
In this comment, I challenge Burt’s colonial epistemological framework in her theorizations of sex, gender, and transness. Drawing upon anti-racist, decolonial, and trans of color feminisms, I argue that transphobia is inherent to white feminisms due to its roots in colonialism. Heteropatriarchy and cisnormativity are products of colonialism, and feminists who espouse transphobic discourses invariably reproduce colonial and white supremacist fram…
Translating queer
Are homophobia and transphobia legacies of colonialism or “native” practices in India ? What are appropriate words for homophobia and transphobia, and are there homophobic and transphobic words in Indian languages? Are words like queer and trans applicable in the Indian context or are they impositions of the global north? What are the appropriate “native” words for queer and trans peoples in Indian languages? If English functions as the imperial …
Hindu Nation and its Queers: Caste, Islamophobia, and De/coloniality in India
The 2018 Indian Supreme Court judgement decriminalizing homosexuality has been marked as a “decolonial act.” Section 377, which criminalized homosexuality, was a colonial law introduced by the British in India, which the postcolonial state maintained till 2018. The judgement may be “decolonial” in intent, but there are other simultaneous processes at play which are not so decolonial in praxis; this essay argues these processes are colonialism, br…
‘Can you get more American than Native American?’: Drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul’s Drag Race
Many scholars argue for an epistemological shift from romanticizing marginalized politics and praxis to understanding them within a spectrum of resisting and reproducing normative and dominant power structures. Scholarship on drag demonstrates that drag as a performative practice that seeks to challenge gender and sexual normativities is often not beyond the logics of hegemony and normativity. Drawing on these critiques, this paper contends that …
Establishing architectural typology of eighteenth-century Bundeli gardens — characteristics and extent, with reference to the gardens of Rajnagar/Khajuraho
Bundelkhand is a region in central India, its identification based on its peculiar socio-cultural values. During the sixteenth to nineteenth century Bundelkhand was under the reign of Bundela kings. The architectural edifices of Bundela rulers lie in all parts of Bundelkhand including popular places like Orchha, Datia and Khajuraho. Other than the palaces, forts and temples, Bundelkhand has a number of gardens created by the Bundela rulers. These…
Geographies of Occupation in South Asia
Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, Ather Zia, Geographies of Occupation in South Asia, Feminist Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2-3, Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts (2019), pp. 574-580
Theorizing the State and Sexuality
Book Review| June 01 2018 Theorizing the State and Sexuality Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India, Puri, Jyoti, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. x + 222. Nishant Upadhyay Nishant Upadhyay Nishant Upadhyay is assistant professor in women’s and gender studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2018) 24 (2-3): 384–387. https://do…
Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation
This conversation with Richa Nagar about feminist friendships and co-authorships emerged from a collaborative interview as a way to resist individualism, career-centric-orientations and academic-stardom; themes that are prominent in the interview itself. The conversation explores the process of collaborative writing, how it challenges hegemonic modes of knowledge production, and what types of relationships sustain such an engagement, based on Ric…
Coloniality of White Feminism and Its Transphobia: A Comment on Burt
In this comment, I challenge Burt’s colonial epistemological framework in her theorizations of sex, gender, and transness. Drawing upon anti-racist, decolonial, and trans of color feminisms, I argue that transphobia is inherent to white feminisms due to its roots in colonialism. Heteropatriarchy and cisnormativity are products of colonialism, and feminists who espouse transphobic discourses invariably reproduce colonial and white supremacist fram…
Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada: Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada
Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada:Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada Michael Connors Jackman (bio) and Nishant Upadhyay (bio) Queer organizing against Israel's deployment of gay rights discourses to mask the occupation of Palestine—referred to as "pinkwashing" within academic and activist circles—has raised pertinent questions about the relations between settler colonialism, sexuality, gender, race, and (gay) im…
Theorizing the State and Sexuality
Book Review| June 01 2018 Theorizing the State and Sexuality Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India, Puri, Jyoti, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. x + 222. Nishant Upadhyay Nishant Upadhyay Nishant Upadhyay is assistant professor in women’s and gender studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2018) 24 (2-3): 384–387. https://do…
Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation
This conversation with Richa Nagar about feminist friendships and co-authorships emerged from a collaborative interview as a way to resist individualism, career-centric-orientations and academic-stardom; themes that are prominent in the interview itself. The conversation explores the process of collaborative writing, how it challenges hegemonic modes of knowledge production, and what types of relationships sustain such an engagement, based on Ric…
Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity
Indians on Indian Lands studies dominant caste Indian diasporic formation within the Canadian settler state. Specifically, it theorizes Indian immigrant labor in resource extraction industries, logging, and canneries in unceded lands of British Columbia in the 1960s-1990s and the tar sands in Treaty 6 lands of Alberta currently. The book examines these sites as simultaneous spaces of Indigenous dispossession and spaces of racialized-classed-gende…
The Power to ‘Break: Biopower, ‘Manufactured demographic crisis’, and defining new categories of identity in India
The Middle Republic: India, Multipolarity, and the Post-Ukraine War Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia
Geographies of Occupation in South Asia
Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, Ather Zia, Geographies of Occupation in South Asia, Feminist Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2-3, Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts (2019), pp. 574-580
Pernicious Continuities: Un/settling violence, race and colonialism
This paper argues that Milwaukee Gurdwara shootings and racism against Sikh communities, and other racialized communities, need to be situated within the broader context of past and ongoing dispossession and colonization of indigenous peoples across North America. The analysis of racial violence is incomplete and inaccurate without the analysis of settler colonialism on stolen lands. This paper asks: What happens if histories of indigenous genoci…
Pernicious Continuities: Un/settling violence, race and colonialism
This paper argues that Milwaukee Gurdwara shootings and racism against Sikh communities, and other racialized communities, need to be situated within the broader context of past and ongoing dispossession and colonization of indigenous peoples across North America. The analysis of racial violence is incomplete and inaccurate without the analysis of settler colonialism on stolen lands. This paper asks: What happens if histories of indigenous genoci…
Ghadar Movement: A Living Legacy
Established in early 1913 in Oregon and formalized on 1 November 1913 in San Francisco, Ghadar Party (also Ghadr, ‘mutiny’, ‘revolt’ or ‘rebellion’), a group of South Asian, predominantly Punjabi (
Writing Ghadar's History: Interview With Sohan Singh Pooni
Sohan Singh Pooni is the author of Canada de Gadri Yodhe (Canada's Ghadari Warriors) (published in 2009 by Singh Brothers, Punjab). Written in Punjabi, the book traces life histories of 41 Ghadaris
Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada: Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada
Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada:Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada Michael Connors Jackman (bio) and Nishant Upadhyay (bio) Queer organizing against Israel's deployment of gay rights discourses to mask the occupation of Palestine—referred to as "pinkwashing" within academic and activist circles—has raised pertinent questions about the relations between settler colonialism, sexuality, gender, race, and (gay) im…
Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation
This conversation with Richa Nagar about feminist friendships and co-authorships emerged from a collaborative interview as a way to resist individualism, career-centric-orientations and academic-stardom; themes that are prominent in the interview itself. The conversation explores the process of collaborative writing, how it challenges hegemonic modes of knowledge production, and what types of relationships sustain such an engagement, based on Ric…
Theorizing the State and Sexuality
Book Review| June 01 2018 Theorizing the State and Sexuality Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India, Puri, Jyoti, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. x + 222. Nishant Upadhyay Nishant Upadhyay Nishant Upadhyay is assistant professor in women’s and gender studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2018) 24 (2-3): 384–387. https://do…
‘Can you get more American than Native American?’: Drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul’s Drag Race
Many scholars argue for an epistemological shift from romanticizing marginalized politics and praxis to understanding them within a spectrum of resisting and reproducing normative and dominant power structures. Scholarship on drag demonstrates that drag as a performative practice that seeks to challenge gender and sexual normativities is often not beyond the logics of hegemony and normativity. Drawing on these critiques, this paper contends that …
Establishing architectural typology of eighteenth-century Bundeli gardens — characteristics and extent, with reference to the gardens of Rajnagar/Khajuraho
Bundelkhand is a region in central India, its identification based on its peculiar socio-cultural values. During the sixteenth to nineteenth century Bundelkhand was under the reign of Bundela kings. The architectural edifices of Bundela rulers lie in all parts of Bundelkhand including popular places like Orchha, Datia and Khajuraho. Other than the palaces, forts and temples, Bundelkhand has a number of gardens created by the Bundela rulers. These…
Geographies of Occupation in South Asia
Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, Ather Zia, Geographies of Occupation in South Asia, Feminist Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2-3, Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts (2019), pp. 574-580
Translating queer
Are homophobia and transphobia legacies of colonialism or “native” practices in India ? What are appropriate words for homophobia and transphobia, and are there homophobic and transphobic words in Indian languages? Are words like queer and trans applicable in the Indian context or are they impositions of the global north? What are the appropriate “native” words for queer and trans peoples in Indian languages? If English functions as the imperial …
Hindu Nation and its Queers: Caste, Islamophobia, and De/coloniality in India
The 2018 Indian Supreme Court judgement decriminalizing homosexuality has been marked as a “decolonial act.” Section 377, which criminalized homosexuality, was a colonial law introduced by the British in India, which the postcolonial state maintained till 2018. The judgement may be “decolonial” in intent, but there are other simultaneous processes at play which are not so decolonial in praxis; this essay argues these processes are colonialism, br…
The Eighteenth-Century Gardens of Bundelkhand, India, compared to the Mughal, Rajput and Colonial Gardens
Bundelkhand is a region in central India demarcated on the basis of uniform socio-cultural practices. During the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a peculiar garden-style developed under the patronisation of the princely states in Bundelkhand. The gardens of Bundelkhand have a characteristic typology and identical gardens can be seen all across Bundelkhand. These walled gardens consist of an outhouse (kothi), a temple, well, stepwell…
Coloniality of White Feminism and Its Transphobia: A Comment on Burt
In this comment, I challenge Burt’s colonial epistemological framework in her theorizations of sex, gender, and transness. Drawing upon anti-racist, decolonial, and trans of color feminisms, I argue that transphobia is inherent to white feminisms due to its roots in colonialism. Heteropatriarchy and cisnormativity are products of colonialism, and feminists who espouse transphobic discourses invariably reproduce colonial and white supremacist fram…
Trans Lies Elsewhere: Trans of Color Lives, Critiques, and Futures
Trans Lies Elsewhere":Trans of Color Lives, Critiques, and Futures Nishant Upadhyay (bio) Black Trans Feminism. By Marquis Bey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 290 pages. $104.94 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies. By Francisco J. Galarte. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 182 pages. $90.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art…
Decolonial Futures
This roundtable showcases how different Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities in Colorado are fighting for sovereignty of their homelands. It reorients the question of “homelands” to highlight the experiences of communities whose homelands remain occupied by settler-colonial and imperial nation-states, like the United States, India, Israel, and China. Participants speak to the struggles of sovereignty of their communities and commun…
The Middle Republic: India, Multipolarity, and the Post-Ukraine War Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia
Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity
Indians on Indian Lands studies dominant caste Indian diasporic formation within the Canadian settler state. Specifically, it theorizes Indian immigrant labor in resource extraction industries, logging, and canneries in unceded lands of British Columbia in the 1960s-1990s and the tar sands in Treaty 6 lands of Alberta currently. The book examines these sites as simultaneous spaces of Indigenous dispossession and spaces of racialized-classed-gende…
The Sound of Silence: Neoliberal Capitalism and Subversion of Class and Religious Minority Issues in the Indo-Gulf Relations
Notes on Brahminical Coloniality and the Occupation of Kashmir
Fraught Solidarities: Diasporic Hindutva and Claims to Indigeneity
The Power to ‘Break: Biopower, ‘Manufactured demographic crisis’, and defining new categories of identity in India
The Wanderer as Becoming: A Satirical Critique of Indian Philosophy and Religions and a Wanderer's Religion
Rahul Sankrityayan, a twentieth-century Indian polymath, is known for his contributions to Buddhism, Marxism, and Hindi literature. While his writing has been analyzed for its engagement with Buddhism and Tibet, he is also credited with inaugurating Hindi travel-writing. Though his contributions to this genre are well-recognized, one crucial work-ghummakaṛa śāstra (1945; lit. The Treatise of a Wanderer)-has received insufficient scholarly attenti…
Desire, Ruin, and Ecological Resistance: Reading Sanduk Through Eco-socialism and Eco-feminism
This study examines Siddhartha Chanakya’s SandukFootnote1 (2025), an independent Indian film that transforms the imagery of war into a radical ecological allegory of life at the limits of the Anthropocene. Set in a post-nuclear wasteland stripped of history and national identity, the film depicts conflict not between states but between forms of life – human, alien, and material – that persist after civilisation's collapse. Rejecting the hyper-nat…
Negotiating Existence: The Ontological Dilemma and the Problem of Categories of Animals and Humans in the Context of Rights
Entangled Ethics: Indic Religious Dietary Traditions and the Moral Limits of Modern Consumption
Political science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · History (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Colonialism (8 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)