Keva X. Bui is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies at Northwestern University. They are a scholar of science, technology, war, and empire and hold a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Their research examines cultures of war in everyday life in the heart of U.S. empire, and how anti-war social movements offer visions of life beyond the stranglehold of the military-industrial complex. As a child of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, their life has been touched by war on multiple registers. These intimate encounters with the US war machine guide both their scholarly research and political commitments to the work of demilitarization.
What about Asian American literature and culture inspires you?
When it comes to Asian American literature and culture, I’m inspired by its capacity for forging new worlds from conditions of violence and catastrophe and to reflect back onto the world that we live. As a scholar and researcher, I'm constantly stuck researching horrific violences—how war and empire have devastated communities, environments, and ultimately, people's lives. There's no singular Asian American literature or culture; it's not a monolithic category, but rather something that imagines and creates worlds—that is world-making and world-breaking. The central question that I think about is: How can we imagine better futures for ourselves and our communities?
I'm constantly inspired by how central art and culture was to the imagination of the Asian American anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of poetry, a lot of political cartoons were circulated in radical newsletters during that moment that developed a very poignant critique of the military industrial complex. Those kinds of critiques offer us a pathway to organizing, to reflect on the world that we are trapped in and make use of narrative tools to unravel logics of violence. Literature and culture's capacity for shining a light on the world that we live in is so important to the work of demilitarization, and there's a lot of power in narrative to shape how we understand the world.
You said that you’re “constantly stuck” researching horrific violence—what makes this the case? Is there a link between that stuckness and the inspiration?
I think about that a lot, because I study weapons of mass destruction—things like napalm, herbicidal warfare, things that have caused horrific violence in our world. Obviously, it's not enjoyable work in a lot of ways, but I find it necessary; I do think we have to understand what led us to the violent conditions that we are mired within. How did we get here? How did weapons of mass destruction come to be normalized? There is a world before the military industrial complex—so how did this particular iteration of society become our norm? I think that's the tension between inspiration and stuckness that you're honing in on—that in order to be a scholar of demilitarization, to invest in anti-war social movements, I have to return to these violent moments to understand how they came to be. Reading the ways in which scientists and military commanders envisioned weapons—they envisioned this violence—sometimes it's so mundane how it's articulated in the archive, and it can be very jarring and painful to sit with those words and stories for long periods. But I also try to remind myself that it's in service of understanding the world, so we can build something better for our communities. To understand the anti-war movement means we have to understand the war machine that the anti-war movement opposed.
Was there an early moment that you became interested in these questions in particular?
I did my undergraduate training as an English major, and a lot of my early work was reading Asian American literature, particularly Vietnamese American literature. As the child of Vietnamese refugees, my entryway into Asian American studies was through personal and family experiences, thinking about, how did the Vietnam War affect my family's life and my own life? How is that structurally connected to a larger system of the U.S. empire?
And that led me to a specific interest in napalm; in Vietnamese American literature, napalm is a motif, a symbol, an idea that is constantly returned to. And oftentimes it would be this aside. It'd be mentioned. It would be a stand-in for something, a symbolic thing. For example, there was an interview that Ocean Vuong did with The Guardian where he talks about stories his grandmother would tell about the Vietnam War. He comments about how his grandmother would often mention napalm as an aside, such as “oh that came after the napalm,” but would never answer him when he would ask “what’s napalm?” I think there’s something significant about that exchange - napalm being omnipresent in these stories but lacking clear definition.
That interested me, so I began studying napalm’s history. The anti-war movement took up napalm as its iconic crime against humanity that the U.S. was committing in Vietnam. The infamous "napalm girl" photo that circulated in 1973 of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, for instance, catalyzed a lot of anti-war sentiments. But I also learned that napalm was developed during World War II and used in the Pacific Wars. It predates the atomic bomb. It was used in the Korean War. It was used in Israel's Six-Day War in 1967. For me, that posed a tension, in that napalm became this quintessential U.S. weapon used in Vietnam, but it stretches across all of these other histories of U.S. military intervention.
And so what makes it exceptional in the Vietnam War and normalized in other wars? Weapons are not just neutral objects, but themselves are bearers of political and cultural significance that shape the world that we live in. The tension between its symbolism and its material history is what sparked a lot of my interest in how cultural narratives around weapons of mass destruction are constructed, and then the work they do in consolidating the military industrial complex that we live in.
And what was your scholarly journey like, through Asian American Studies?
I was an English major at Dartmouth College, and then did my PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. I learned about Asian American Studies when I was at Dartmouth in rural New Hampshire, an “elite” Ivy League university, very white, very isolated. There I met a group of Asian American activists who were organizing on campus to establish an Asian American Studies program. That's how I began my venture into the field. I took the very few Asian American studies classes that were offered on campus by professors who are no longer there. But it provided a moment for me to think about the political stakes of Asian American Studies as a scholarly field. It demonstrated how Asian American studies was something we as students had to fight for. It was knowledge and an intellectual community that we had to fight for. That's what granted it a lot of meaning for me, is how we had to fight for the space to even learn about Asian American history, Asian American culture, Asian American politics, Asian American social movements. Students of Asian American studies know that the field has a long history of student organizing, that it emerges from the Third World Liberation Front, the student strikes in 1968 at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley that really established the field of Asian American studies and ethnic studies. I think that being in a place where it was something we had to fight for really was both a challenge but gave it, for me, higher stakes. And so I went on to do my PhD in ethnic studies and deepen my understanding. And so, living in San Diego, which is both a refugee city and a militarized city, it's very close to one of the largest military bases in the U.S., Camp Pendleton, and it houses a large refugee community of Southeast and also Southwest Asian refugees. Being at the Pacific borderland, as well as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, creates this acute sense of living in a militarized city. Living there, doing a PhD in ethnic studies, really granted me a space of interrogating how, as I've mentioned before, war and militarization invades everyday life, because it was all around me. And at the same time, I began organizing with Vietnamese American communities in Southern California, with Viet Unity Southern California, the Hai Ba Trung School for organizing, and the Missing Piece project which is an artist-activist collective, and those organizations were important to my political development, especially how I think about the enduring impact of war on people's lives long after war “ends.” My scholarly study is informed by how I moved throughout society, and these political organizations; at the end of the day, I'm trying to understand how war invades our collective everyday life, and invades my own personal everyday life, how I constantly see war everywhere I move through the world.
In 2021, you wrote the article, “Objects of Warfare,” and then in 2022, “More Than Human,” then in 2023, “Eugenic Ecologies,” in 2024, “Napalm University,” and this year “Incendiary War,” a talk I heard you deliver at the AAAS conference. All are related to this subject; it seems to me that you've really allowed napalm to guide you in this very beautiful, ecological way. For you, napalm is coming out of diasporic Vietnamese cultural production in particular, yet also, when you spoke of napalm and white phosphorous at the conference this year, where people were grappling with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians alongside it being 50 years since the fall of Saigon, you seemed to be proposing a way for the materialities and symbols of empire to map this more expansive solidarity, wherein napalm was figured as a “sibling technology” alongside others. That was initially why your work stood out so much to me—how can we think through this ecology? What does it mean to draw this filial connection between technologies of genocide and war?
Thank you so much. That question really gets to the heart of what I'm trying to think about. This past year, we've seen Vietnamese American communities really grapple with how the anniversary occasions a moment to think about solidarity. But the tension is that the anniversaries connote an end that we have to commemorate as other violence is ongoing. What my research tries to articulate is that violence is not only ongoing, but it's recursive. There is this ongoing Nakba, almost two years since the most recent Israel bombardment of Gaza began, but a genocidal campaign that's been ongoing for decades since 1948. In 2012, the Human Rights Watch published an article about white phosphorus, and they declared it the “new napalm,” based on the U.S. usage of white phosphorus in Afghanistan, as well as Israel's usage in Gaza in 2009 as part of Operation Cast Lead. This is notable because white phosphorus was invented prior to napalm, during World War I, and was used as an incendiary device in wars ensuing after. Once napalm was invented, white phosphorus was used as an ignition substance within napalm bombs - napalm is a gelled petrochemical that can burn hot and stay hot, but needed white phosphorus to provide the initial spark. White phosphorus is a pyrophoric substance, meaning it catches fire upon contact with oxygen. So napalm and white phosphorus have always been used together. But what happens after the Vietnam War, is that because of napalm's iconography, napalm and other incendiary weapons were banned by the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons treaty in 1980. White phosphorus is mostly unmentioned because it doesn't rise to the same cultural significance in terms of its iconography, so it goes unbanned. Then, it is continually used in the U.S. and Israel's wars in the years after. So my question about this sequence of events then is: what happens when we exceptionalize a weapon like napalm as exceptionally inhumane in comparison to other weapons of mass destruction? We risk inadvertently normalizing other technologies of violence, rather than saying, actually this entire structure of the military industrial complex needs to be abolished.
In this moment of the 50th anniversary, one of the things often unremarked about the radical anti-imperial, anti-war movements of the 1960s is that activists were making the claim that the U.S. was committing genocide in Vietnam. We're in a moment where there is a lot of debate over the term genocide. Who gets to claim the term genocide? But actually, the exceptionalization of the term obscures the ongoing structural conditions of violence that imperial nation-states continue to wage on colonized peoples. I draw a lot of inspiration from the 1951 Black Civil Rights Congress petition to the United Nations, “We Charge Genocide,” where a group of Black activists, three years after the UN Genocide Convention, which established the terms of genocide after the Holocaust, charged the U.S. with committing an ongoing genocide of Black Americans, dating through slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and all of these other forms of structural elimination. What this moment exposes is that if we allow genocide to be taken up at its full definition, then the U.S. would be culpable for all of these other imperial violences, from its ongoing structural racism against Black communities to its military interventions in Korea, in Vietnam, later in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as its support of Israel's genocide in Gaza and Palestine more broadly. These are questions to think about. Not to say it is or isn't genocide, but that the language offers a framework for understanding why the exceptionalization of the term obscures our capacity to understand how violence is connected in these expansive ways—not only in a way of analogy, like that Israel's genocide in Gaza is similar to the U.S.'s military intervention in Vietnam, but actually with material connections in the technologies that are created, used, and exchanged, and the ways in which those technologies enable new innovations across these joint military-industrial complexes to thrive. The severing of our capacity to recognize and map those connections across different moments of violence, is what leads us to think of war as an event rather than a structure, a one-time thing rather than a continuous structure of violence that we are living in.
That has to do with where you began—with forging new worlds, right? In and against the continuous violence of the world we live in now? How can we understand the structure of the current world?
Yeah. The world we live in is one of constant and permanent normalized war. People have this idea that war is a natural condition of human life, and I fundamentally disagree. War is manufactured, especially the way in which we articulate war in our current age. Contemporary war is completely different from pre-modern war, where you have clearly defined nations with clearly defined militaries engaging in combat on a battlefield. Now, war is very deeply seeped in everyday life. It's in our institutions. It's in our universities. It’s in our homes. It’s in our businesses, industries, corporations. People don't think of corporations like Google as a defense contractor, or a war company, but as recent campaigns like No Tech for Apartheid have demonstrated, Google has extensive contracts with the Israeli defense forces. And this is something that partially emerges in the aftermath of World War II, in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where U.S. politicians and scientists were able to point to the “success” of the atomic bomb, of the Manhattan Project, as this collaboration between the military, the government, and scientists, and say, this is good for national security. And they consolidated that as the way in which we live. That's why we have the ballooning of defense contracts for the military and government funding for U.S. universities to conduct research that, whether directly or implicitly, aids the U.S. war machine. That's part of how the U.S. university expands in the post-World War II moment.
So I think about this often—how do I reconcile my place in the academy with the immense entanglement that the university has with the military industrial complex? But at the same time, as I write about in my article in “Napalm’s University,” the university has also been a really important site of the anti-war movement, where students have been able to find intellectual, political community that radicalizes them into these kinds of organized anti-war movements. The 1960s was this early moment of both, and the sit-ins, encampments, and protests are reemerging in our current moment, as that relationship between the university and the military has only deepened. People get the sense that this is how it's always been, and therefore will always be, but if we understand that there is a history to this, that gives us a pathway to imagine otherwise, and to understand that this isn't a normal condition of intellectual life at the university, nor a normal condition of life. It can be contested. It can be abolished.
One of the differences between contemporary and pre-modern war is the invention and use of the weapons of mass destruction that you research—not only napalm and tear gas, but also herbicidal weapons like Agent Orange. Alongside the “genocidal,” I keep returning to “herbicidal” as a category that gestures towards the eradication, as you wrote, of an “ecologically-porous definition of enemy life”—the exceptionalism you discussed is also deployed in terms of the human, so I’m curious if you could tell us more about how the U.S. war machine involves and affects not just people, but plant matter, land and ecology.
Definitely. When I write about herbicidal warfare, I'm particularly thinking about the history of Agent Orange, which is a chemical defoliant that was used in the Vietnam War to eliminate mangrove cover as well as cropland in rural and jungle areas of Vietnam. So part of the idea behind the chemical defoliant is that it could remove the plant cover that guerrilla fighters were supposedly hiding beneath and would become visible to U.S. fighter jets flying above. It was the idea that if you can remove the ecological life that the insurgents were embedded in, you could better fight the war. So war became a battle over control of land and terrain.
Arthur Galston, who was a plant biologist, coined the term “ecocide” to refer to the destruction of the environment as part of military intervention. One thing we sometimes talk about is that the U.S. military is the number one polluter in the world, and the number one contributor to carbon emissions through ecocidal campaigns like in Vietnam, as well as the emissions produced by millions of fighter jets, hundreds of military bases. So it's important to put that ecological devastation alongside the obvious human devastation of it. What is happening in the shift from pre-modern war to the modern military industrial complex, is that all of society, technology, infrastructure, and resources are geared towards the inevitability of war and extracted from communities. The increasing cost of health care, housing, education, child care, the lack of resources for communities of color, low-income communities, those are all structural because they are resources taken from those communities to funnel into the war machine. War is ending our world in many ways, in terms of how it conditions us to think, and how it is ending human life, and how it is shortening the lifespan of our planet through ecocidal campaigns of violence and the destruction of our environment, and these are all entangled in terms of how the military industrial complex has this cascading effect on more-than human life across the globe that we will feel for generations to come.
You earlier mentioned the photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but in addition to images, you also write about novels and performance. Do you see these forms working differently in relation to fighting imperial violence? Perhaps emerging more prominently from your work is a sense of the solidarity and insights of a coalition of artists across different mediums intervening in the world as is and forging new worlds.
It’s a big question that I'm still grappling with, because I think there's something intangible about what inspires us about art and culture. You know, sometimes we are moved by a particular piece, and only years later do we really identify why. Sometimes it's immediate. Sometimes we're like, oh, I know why. But I think that for me, part of it is its capacity to intervene into the world and make other stories visible and possible. A film that I watched recently that left a deep impact on me was “We Were the Scenery” produced and directed by Cathy Linh Che, Jess X. Snow, and Christopher Radcliffe. The film is about Cathy's parents, who were part of a group of Vietnamese refugees in a refugee camp in the Philippines recruited to be extras on the film “Apocalypse Now,” which is a very infamous, iconic Vietnam War film. The film centers on their experiences as background extras in the infamous napalm scene in “Apocalypse Now,” where a fleet of U.S. fighter jets drop tons of napalm bombs during the war in the backdrop, and in the foreground a colonel proclaims, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” This very militarized and masculinist portrayal of fascination with the violence of napalm has become an iconic and infamous depiction of the war. But “We Were the Scenery” uses that moment as a way to center the background actors and their experiences of how they made life in the refugee camps. What the film does is it takes this iconic moment of violence and turns it around to tell another story about it, that is hidden beneath, that is literally lurking in the blurred background of this soldier speaking about his fantasies of violence. What is in the background is people's stories of refuge that allows us to think, what lurks in the background of political and military violence? How can we use those stories to propel us to think about these larger questions about Vietnamese refugee communities, the military industrial complex, and the way in which military propaganda shapes how people orient themselves to war? It allows us to start asking questions about what we take for granted in the world. And in asking those questions, it gives us space to imagine other kinds of ways of being.
Do you think, when it comes to narratives told about Asian American history or in Asian American Studies, war and the military-industrial complex are too often also lurking in the background?
I don’t think that’s the case, actually. I think Asian American studies has been an important field for engaging counternarratives to war and militarism - both with its inception in the anti-war movements of the 1960s as well as really brilliant contemporary scholarship. My work would not be possible without this work coming to be—I am really inspired by the work that Asian American Studies and more broadly, Ethnic Studies scholars have been doing to ask critical questions about the military industrial complex and the war society that we live in. From scholars of the Cold War and Vietnam War to people critically analyzing the contemporary war on terror, anti-war scholars across the field are making really important connections that we need to grapple with. Anti-war scholarship is integral to the work that we're doing and how it can align itself with anti-war movements, both past and present. How do these visions for a world without war drive the kind of scholarship that we do? That driving impetus is important. I do think that we’re moving in a direction that will continually grapple with the multidimensionality of war. That’s what I'm really grateful to see, that we're grappling with the multidimensionality of war.
Who are the scholars who inspire you in this respect?
There’s far too many to name, because there are so many great anti-militarist scholars out there doing incredible work. Jodi Kim’s book Ends of Empire, published in 2010, was an important moment in the field for giving us a framework for understanding the Cold War as a structure, not an event. It helped establish a vocabulary for analyzing Asian American cultural production in the aftermath of the Cold War as a vector for understanding the racializing dimension of the war, and I think that opened up a lot of different modes of inquiry for understanding war in our everyday lives. Asian Americanist scholarship on war and militarism is extremely rich, and I’ve learned so much from the work of Simeon Man, Christine Hong, Yen Le Espiritu, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and so many more.
I have also learned a lot from my former colleagues at the University of Illinois - Junaid Rana, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Rachel Kuo, and Maryam Kashani who have all really helped me situate a lot of this scholarship on war and militarism within our present conditions of ongoing genocide and violence. And I also have a lot of collaborators and co-thinkers around the intersections of war, science, and technology whom I’m constantly learning from, scholars like Natalia Duong, Aimee Bahng, and Heidi Amin-Hong. And finally, I’d also like to give a quick mention to the Mundane Militarisms collective, which emerged out of one of Sunny Xiang’s graduate student seminars at Yale University. I use this resource all the time in teaching, to show students how war lurks in the background of our everyday life so seamlessly and invisibly. This model of scholarly inquiry is so important in our day and age, as we try to make connections that are not always otherwise apparent.
Your attention to inquiry as a mode, even unconscious mode, is really striking in your work. For instance, you wrote about the deep imperial logic embedded in the asking of this question, “How can we make war more humane?” I’m curious, what better questions can we dwell with? Is it, how can we demilitarize? How can we forge new worlds?
Yeah, that question is one, as I write, that imperial militaries and nation-states like to proffer—how can we make war more humane, how can we innovate more precise technologies? Currently, we see the increasing usage of AI targeting in military campaigns to “lessen” collateral damage, and so technology is proffered as offering the potential to make war more humane by “only” eliminating “terrorists” and leaving “civilians” unharmed. But these are all constructed categories, and how they are defined and employed is very much deeply racialized in our current moment of the war on terror. And it also explicitly and implicitly ignores the very stark reality that war, in requiring the elimination of human life, is by nature inhumane. And if we move from that premise, then the question of how to make war more humane becomes obsolete precisely within asymmetrical conditions of imperial warfare and the structural conditions of racism that lead to it in the first place. The question more broadly we could ask is, how do we make society more humane?
And that would necessitate the elimination of war altogether, the absolute abolition of the military industrial complex that exists to maintain a particular status quo of imperial power, and the prioritizing of human life, environmental life, ecological life, planetary life, and the relations that sustain us.
I’m also wondering about the structure of war in relation to a word like “peace.” There’s this injunction often used against war consciousness, “keep the peace.” I want to understand what undergirds such a phrase, and “peace” in relation to other terms, “liberation,” “revolution,” and “utopias” that may be impossible to fully imagine or define. What are the terms that sit together with, or are dialectically related to, the structure of war?
That's a good question, because I’ve always had conflicting feelings about the word “peace.” It is very much set up in this dichotomous relationship to war as an event - a singular moment in time. If we are not at war, then we are at peace. It is a language that was used in the post-World War II moment to say that times of peace are moments where all segments of society need to be preparing for war, for national security and future war. The sentiment is echoed in scientific advisor Vannevar Bush's document, “Science, The Endless Frontier.” This idea of peace is not necessarily the antithesis of war, but envisioned as a momentary pause, a ceasefire, in a perpetual condition of war. That's why peace can make me feel uneasy, because it is captured in a colonial imperial imaginary rather than an actual break, a break from the condition of a permanent world that we see as inevitable. That’s why I constantly return to the language of abolition and what abolition looks like. Of course, this is very much indebted to prison abolitionists who are imagining a world without police and prisons. Abolition gives us the language and framework to think about demilitarization more wholesale, that doesn't mean imperial nation-states putting down their arms and not fighting in a momentary pause from a permanent condition of violence. The end of war requires a radical reorganization of society, from the economy to industry to education, because society's resources are almost fully oriented towards continual and perpetual war.
Earlier, you said you see war everywhere you go, and I’m curious where you're calling in from, and where you grew up—in these places, how have you seen war in your daily life?
I’m calling in from Seattle right now, it's where my parents live, but not where I grew up. I was born in Texas, first in Houston, then Austin, and then when I was about 10, I moved to Taipei, Taiwan. There, I attended Taipei American School, an institution originally founded by missionaries on the island who sought an “American” education for their children and the children of US military personnel stationed in Taiwan during the Cold War after the Kuomintang political party fled there. Not a lot of people at the school acknowledge this history or think critically about it, but in my years after leaving high school I often think about what it means for my education to have been routed through a circuit of US militarism - how military occupation laid the foundation for “softer” forms of US influence on the island that persist to this day even in the absence of “formal” US occupation. How did war shape what my education came to be? How does war lurk in the background of my own life, and how is my schooling fundamentally a product of violent war and Indigenous dispossession? These seem like large questions, yet they are relevant to us no matter where we grow up or live - precisely because the US war machine lurks everywhere. And part of my work is trying to think more deeply about these conditions.
Our personal lives are very much inflected by war. My parents came to the U.S. as a result of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. That is what led to their movement from Vietnam to Texas. And then it was my dad's job in the tech industry that relocated our family to Taipei, Taiwan. This is a perfect example of how two transnational circuits - one of militarized refuge and another of global capitalism - move people across the world but still connected to the web of U.S. empire. These histories of war and mobility have fundamentally shaped my life and also the different privileges I was able to hold, attending an international school somewhere like Taiwan and the kinds of experiences and education I received as a result. War and militarization create these kinds of cascading experiences in how they invade everyday life. War brings about our world in particular ways.
What about Chicago, where you live most of the year?
Chicago is—I mean, as everyone knows, a heavily policed city. The technologies of policing that are present in Chicago are very much militarized and about tracking the movement of certain populations—particularly for Black, Brown, and immigrant communities. At this very moment, we are witnessing ICE terrorizing our streets and invading our communities - this notion that “inner cities” are an important frontier of war is governing the regime of state violence against communities of color. So when we talk about war as a condition of our everyday life, it's not just about the battlefield, but it's the ways in which technologies of war and militarization are mobilized to police the movement of populations, as well as the increasing dimensions of immigration detention, the deployment of ICE, and the increasing ballooning budgets of ICE to identify the “enemy” and remove them from the country. At the end of the day, this is the prevailing racial logic of war: to identify an “enemy” for elimination. These practices are inherently violent and enabled by these increasing surveillance technologies that are products, particularly of the post-9-11 movement, of the Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Naturalization Services, the creation of ICE. We think these dimensions of society are normal, but are actually emergent in the post 9-11 moment of particularly acute Islamophobia and the policing of black and brown Muslim communities. It's war on the home front, as scholars of the war on terror constantly remind us. But Chicago is also a city with vibrant political movements, both historically and also in the present that have and continue to challenge this regime of oppression.
Seeing war everywhere, does that feel like a weighty experience? How do you hold and move with or through that?
It’s both weighty and I think we bear a responsibility to make it weighty, if that makes sense. War is so normalized in our everyday life, it lurks in the background in ways that most people don’t even notice its omnipresence. To make it weighty - to pause, reflect, comment, and challenge - is the work of untangling this constant presence that invisibly but indelibly shapes our movement through the world. And I think this is a crucial part of the work of demilitarization, to make visible what previously isn’t and to assert that war is not a normal condition of everyday life. And once that becomes our motivating thought, once that becomes our political compass, that gives us space to imagine something anew.
One thing I admire, during this interview, and in your writing, is the emphaticness of your sentences. I'm thinking of the way you closed “Incendiary War,” you said, “If napalm and white phosphorus are deemed exceptional, then that narrative only serves to inadvertently reaffirm a liberal narrative that there even exists an ethical, humane method for an imperialist nation state to wage asymmetrical wars against colonized others. I emphatically assert that there is not.” And then, rowdy applause throughout the conference hall. It feels like there's so much journey and substance behind or anteceding that emphaticness. It’s everything we’ve been talking about this past hour, but my last question is just—what is it like to arrive at this kind of emphatic sentence or emphatic voice? Where does it come from, how does one develop that kind of emphaticness?
My goal as a researcher and a scholar is to communicate my argument convincingly to an audience, and it always starts with the premise that it's emphatic, because my belief is emphatic. My belief in a world beyond war is emphatic. So I want to communicate that through with emphasis, a confidence in our ideas, but also not just confidence, a steadfast belief that this is possible, that a world without war is possible. The emphaticness that you are ascribing to my work is really a product that I want my work to offer a pathway into believing that something is possible. That is the first step to really envisioning these other worlds, is to actually believe it is possible to live in a world without war and then to find ways to bring that into being—through craft, through language that is about communicating the possibility to believe it is possible. That's one of the things that I strive to do in my writing, in my scholarship, is to leave no doubt that I do believe in this and that I believe that we can actually enact this world.
Winona Guo is a PhD student focused on Asian American literature at Columbia University, and author of Tell Me Who You Are (2019).
Dr. Rajorshi Das is a poet, scholar, podcaster, and incoming Teaching Assistant Professor in the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. This interview asks after the wondrous entanglements of their PhD dissertation, “Messy trans and queer storytelling: (un)doing Indian exceptionalism,” which they defended this past spring at the University of Iowa. Their work can be found in the GLQ (2025) and Interventions (2024). We called twice, between NYC and Rajorshi's parents' house in Kolkata.
I learned about your work because of Kareem Khubchandani, whom I wrote for editorial recommendations. I hope it's alright that I share what Kareem wrote back to me: "Rajorshi is the junior scholar focused on queer diasporic lit."
Thanks to Kareem for the recommendation. It's a very sweet one—although I don't exclusively focus on diasporic literature in my work. One of my dissertation chapters focuses on writers and editors, situated in India and the US, who were doing the kind of archival work that put Indian queer literature on the multinational publishing map in the late '90s and early 2000s.
Yes—when we emailed, you explained that you've written on Gayatri Gopinath, Jasbir Puar, and Ocean Vuong, among others, but you've since moved away from literary articulations in the diaspora to focus more on trans activist literature in India, especially in your dissertation. Our opening question is, What about Asian American literature inspires you? But let me add, how did you come to make that move? How have your literary curiosities and inspirations traveled over time?
When I think of Asian American literature, it's a very interesting category for me because, in India, I was reading some of these works, but I did not instantly think of the category “Asian American” because that's not necessarily how I was reading it. I was reading it more as South Asian diaspora, like Agha Shahid Ali or Suniti Namjoshi, and others who are writing from North America. Especially in the case of Ali, that was a way in which he was also negotiating a sense of loss in relation to India, Kashmir, and the occupation of Kashmir. So I was always making connections between how Ali was writing versus, let's say, George Abraham, who is writing now in relation to Palestine, and how Vuong or others are writing in relation to Vietnam and their experience of living in the States. But these are also very different and distinct experiences.
Ali's work seems to me more rooted in South Asia. I wanted that kind of rootedness in my work—especially in the grassroots, working class activism in the region—as somebody who has grown up in India and been involved in activism in India. I'm not saying that it cannot be working class across diaspora; it is. I just felt more invested in India as we know the land to be. But also, because it would be tricky to categorize writers like Ali within the Indian diaspora. He's from Kashmir and I'm not sure if he would have wanted to be included in the term, Indian. That was one of the reasons why I thought, okay, let me be a little more specific in my dissertation. Then it changed a bit.
At the same time, I was drawing from literary strategies that have been used by writers across North America, because that's where I was doing my PhD. Not just Ocean Vuong, but also Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and others. I kind of approached Asian American literature through the lens of queerness, and colonialism. That's how I realized, oh, these are conversations already happening in the diaspora. Diaspora is not at the center of my dissertation, but it’s something that I can draw from to inform my understanding of messiness and storytelling in India specifically.
What kind of literary strategies do you mean?
For instance, I have taught Vuong, Ali, Abraham and Piepzna-Samarasinha Samarasinha, also Trish Salah in my General Education Literature classes because of how they use language, the English language, and used specific genres. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong is constantly drawing attention to each sentence, and punctuation, and the role of English as a colonial language. His novel breaks into poetry to showcase the kind of pain that the narrator goes through when he loses a friend and lover. Here, the traditional genre of the novel is not enough to write about the pain. But his metaphors associated with the Vietnam war are messy and politically subdued as compared to what you see in Salah, and Abraham’s treatment of Palestine. Abraham’s “Broken Ghazal, Before Ghazal” does not intend to move with pain per se. It is meant to indict and show the power of refrain toward a political goal. He is more direct than Ali whose treatment of Kashmir is poignant but seems to shy away from naming India as an occupying power. And these are literary strategies, depending on your position and also the aspirations and vulnerabilities that you carry.
Ocean Vuong and Agha Shahid Ali, both of whom you mentioned, also appear in your dissertation in relation to “messiness.” First question, you cite Vuong early on when writing about the messy relationship with your mom—how did Vuong’s writing clarify this for you?
Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, when I had the first draft of my introduction, it was more anchored around On Earth. There's this very powerful line in the novel, where the character, Little Dog, says something like, “I'm a mess, Ma.” I think he's trying to explain what writing means to his mother who does not read English.
That encouraged me to begin my introduction with a personal note, unpacking my messy relationship with my mother who I also call Ma. But mess, need not have a negative association. It can be something that you see as untidy, that doesn't make sense or that seems incongruent—that has its own process. It can be very strategic, and makes sense if we approach it not from a deficit mentality. Messiness then requires labor, and requires a certain degree of rigor.
In the dissertation, I tried to first unpack my own messy relationship with Ma. She was born and brought up in Bangladesh, and only moved to India later and became a naturalized citizen through marriage. So it's very easy for me and my father to renew our passports, but for her, there's more inspection and surveillance. She's someone who is not very comfortable with my sexuality, even though I know she loves me. At the same time, she's someone who buys earrings for me, and stitches my blouses. So these are some of the interesting contradictions, which are part of our relationship.
At the same time, I felt that contradiction is not necessarily the word that explains what's happening here. I felt somehow that some of her approaches had to do with her own upbringing in a rural part of Bangladesh, being part of a political family, because her father was part of the Awami League. But at the same time, she comes from a privileged caste background though did not get an English school education like I did. At the same time, she understands gender fluidity because it is prominent here. Those factors also contributed to how she perceived sexuality and queerness, and not necessarily through certain markers. So it would be okay for her to see me wear certain kinds of clothes, but only in private, not necessarily in public. At the same time, I cannot have some discussions with her, even in the so-called private space of the home.
In your reply, there’s an insistence on the phrase, “at the same time.” How does this phrase, a gesture to temporal synchronicity, help you think about the region and the need to theorize messiness there?
I didn't notice the usage of the phrase until you pointed that out. I was thinking about how some of this work, labor intensive work, whether it's from activists on ground or activist storytellers—has a method of messiness. All of that is happening simultaneously, at the same time, because often when we are trying to understand politics—and I mean the ideological work that we do, inside or outside the university—we often are unable to reconcile with contradictions. Certain people think as if politics needs to be pure. Just because one person is supporting one cause, they also have to support, you know, the other X, Y, Z.
And for me, it was very important to point out that all of this is happening simultaneously precisely because it's messy. If you pay attention or embrace that messiness, you'll be able to understand why there are these contradictions, how they can be traced back to identity as a process, which then facilitates certain decisions or actions. I think unconsciously then I was also insisting on the fact that it has a temporal dimension. It's all happening at the same time. One can think about Stuart Hall's “conjuncture” as a theory of how these contradictions are kind of clashing against each other at a certain time frame. And then what kind of possibilities emerge from that coming together. I'm not saying it has to be resolved or anything.
You also named Agha Shahid Ali earlier. You’ve written about Ali’s refusal to be included in Hoshang Merchant’s anthology of gay writing from India. Could you unpack that moment for us in relation to messiness?
I didn't necessarily think about Ali as somebody who was messy in writing so much, but maybe in terms of other decisions. That's where I suppose his refusal to be part of Hoshang Merchant's edited anthology comes into the picture. I don't know what Ali was thinking; I can only speculate. Akhil Katyal reads it in his book The Doubleness of Sexuality as something that could have to do with Ali's father’s Kashmiri nationalism, and perhaps a degree of reluctance to out him through that anthology—though the word gay became a kind of a metaphor in Merchant's book and the way Merchant approached the word. I was arguing that maybe Katyal’s was not the only reading here. Maybe there was more to it in that decision.
So here, mess or messiness can be an optic, where I as a researcher am embracing the messiness of this entire process and then trying to unpack what could have led to that decision. And that's something that I do throughout my dissertation, especially when I think, okay, this doesn't make sense. Then I pay attention to why it is not making sense or why somebody uses certain myths in a certain way to achieve a certain end. I do that especially with regard to Ruth Vanita's use of Hindu myths versus A. Revathi's use of Hindu myths. Some of the myths are very similar, but in one (Vanita's) case, it celebrates Hinduism in a way that ignores the violence of the caste system. Revathi is more rooted in an anti-caste vision, and yet does not necessarily reject all Hindu myths. And that would be very different from Living Smile Vidya's approach to Hindu myths, which is a complete rejection. So one needs to understand where these approaches are coming from. Even though they may feel messy, they are very strategically deployed because there is a political aim into what you want the book to be, or who your target audience is. The readership counts here, and of course, books have a life of their own. And that's where the podcast also came into play. I wanted to trace that through some of the podcast interviews that I did.
Let’s talk a little more about the methods and archives you used. How did the concept of “messiness” travel and thread through the podcast?
When I was initially thinking about the methodological part of my dissertation, as somebody who has been trained in literary studies, we obviously rely more on close reading. And in some cases, of course, other kinds of reading. But I wanted to also talk to people, writers and organizers who have inspired me over the past couple of years, to understand what it means to do the kind of politics that they are doing. I needed a different kind of method, and initially, I even thought of doing an ethnography. But then, in the English department, we don't necessarily do that, the way an ethnographer in Anthropology would do that, like I may not be able to spend a year in India to do that. I was also constrained by the pandemic, because at that time when I was preparing for my comps, we were in the first phase of COVID with less safe options to talk face to face.
I thought the best way for me to approach it would be through podcast interviews, which then were done largely virtually. So that was also a messy process in the sense that I have to be very mindful of the kinds of access that people have. Let's say if I'm hearing a certain kind of hesitance in their voice, I cannot assume that it’s coming from the question itself, but sometimes also from the surrounding that they are in, like when people are being interviewed from their natal houses or public space, they may not be able to share certain things with you.
The post-interview process was also very messy because some people realized that they said certain things and didn't want it in the published version. Often when, let's say, an ethnographer doing interviews, it may be more of a private collection as opposed to a public podcast. Then the process involves certain ifs, and buts, or dos and don'ts. That involved a degree of care, which perhaps I wouldn't have been able to do if I was just relying on close reading. Let’s say people wrote something 10 or five years back, they may be in a completely different positionality now. Sometimes the shifts didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I was able to understand why people were making certain decisions as I spoke with them more and more.
You’ve called your materials, “trans activist literature.” What constitutes that term? Does “trans activist literature” challenge ideas of “literature” that may be received from or more intelligible to the university?
That's a great question, because I was thinking, what is activism? What is literature? What is activist literature? I didn't really define them, and I don't think I can. It's more about how these texts are circulating, and what they're trying to do. It's perhaps a very traditional answer, because everybody talks about gender as something that you do, and not what you are. But I believe that's also something true of literature. Maybe you would think of Dickens’ Hard Times as activist literature in Victorian England. But I don't think, for me, that is activist literature now. It’s about the time, the situation, the positionality.
And at the same time, not every text that I've included is necessarily activist literature. Sometimes I've included them to have a harsher criticism of their process, or to compare them against a more grassroots anthology or text—for instance, in chapter one, when I discuss s editorial approaches. I wanted to think through the lens of what Anjali Arondekar describes as abundance. It's abundantly available to us, so you don't think of certain communities as in deficit, or approach them from a deficit perspective. But at the same time, just because someone is doing grassroots activism doesn’t mean that activism is anti-caste or anti-right-wing. So, I had to bring in other work. The word activism has to be a certain kind of activism, at least from my perspective, because everybody is an activist. I had to be mindful if writers have the reputation of being anti-Muslim, for instance, in the Indian context. There is a vast difference in just being an activist, and being somebody who is more radical and willing to take chances and make certain political decisions that might even make them vulnerable, such as a lot of people who are currently incarcerated in India, including one of my professors, Hany Babu.
In some ways, the people you encountered may have been more opaque to you, or ephemeral, than a copy of Hard Times on the table. Did you adopt a kind of radar for what their political commitments overall are? Or do you rely on other testimonies of those people?
I didn't want to say it out right, but in one or two cases, I knew that a person’s ideologies may not match with mine. I was thinking, okay, do I interview them? I eventually did but I didn’t get the answers that I was looking for. And that’s okay. You have to talk to people who don’t share your values but have a threshold, I suppose. Again, in some cases, I realized through common circles that certain guests have turned out to be vocally right-wing later.
Also, when I was revising my dissertation, the genocide had already started. So I was also looking at who was saying what on my social media. Some people turned out to be surprisingly Zionist and anti-Muslim, and I didn't know that when I engaged with their work. The trick with social media is that it's very fragile, and it can change very quickly. Of course, if a post is public, you can still cite it. I did that with a few scholars to hold them accountable precisely because of their position in queer literature or theory.
Did you draw from other archives as well for the dissertation?
I had started by looking at traditional archives and libraries in universities. Cornell had Hoshang Merchant's manuscript archives. But I didn't necessarily engage with them beyond a certain point, because while the decisions there could have been unpacked, I felt there is a lot of joy in talking to the person directly. I interviewed Merchant in 2022, I think. It was so much fun. This was my second interview with him actually, and he opened up quite a bit.
Thanks to the support that I received from the grad college through several fellowships, I was able to go to Hyderabad to do the interview. That also made me spend more time in communities in West Bengal. That's why the fourth chapter takes a turn to auto-ethnography. Initially, the plan was just to have fun with friends or acquaintances at LGBQ+ events. But there was a certain kind of care I hadn't experienced earlier in queer and trans circles, or kothi and non-binary circles in India, which I found there, and I wanted to write about it. And that became its own method. I thought given the fact that I was entering certain spaces as a very privileged person, I needed to discuss a different kind of literature being produced through them—which may not be written in English, or published in the form of a book or a monograph. Rather, they may be pamphlets, open invitation calls to come to certain events or impromptu dance performances. That's why often the distinction between text and performance also becomes very blurry in my work.
In the process of the dissertation, how did you come to identify and listen to your own joy and put a priority on it?
I had a very supportive mentor in Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, who let me do the things that I genuinely wanted to do and believed in. Where Kareem’s comment may be relevant, is that initially I wanted to work on English literary texts, but beyond a certain point, I was not finding the joy in just reading the texts. I wanted to be in a space where people could talk to each other, and then I also felt that people whose books have been circulating as Indian queer literature come from very privileged positions. I don't want to name them; of course, people know who is privileged because of their surname, which also give away your caste, right? So that pushed me to look for other kinds of texts. From texts, I realized performance is something that I have to think about, because most of the works on and by Indian trans and hijra communities have been centered around performance, and issues of livelihood.
As I read more and more queer or color critique, Jose Esteban Muñoz’s work and others, I realized performance is where I wanted to go. All these activist spaces are also spaces of performance or spaces where people are dancing without necessarily thinking, I'm being watched. Kareem's book has been very remarkable in that sense. I’m referring to Ishtyle, which talks about the transnational nightlife in India and the U.S. Obviously people are being watched, but that's not the primary concern, but rather the desire to dance in community and sometimes to dance for certain people too. That's something I wanted to write about but centering the grassroots. And my mentor was very supportive in that regard. I think it matters who is on your committee or their vision of the idea of your dissertation. In my case, I got a lot of freedom to pick texts, do texts.
You shift between terms in the dissertation; there's pink-washing and then saffron-washing, homonationalism as well as Hindu-homonationalism. There’s a rigor in which you theorize messiness in the context of cultural capital, or caste capital. When messiness travels from India to the diaspora, how does the language of the optic evolve? Can you tell us more about how to calibrate the messiness differently, based on the context?
First of all, thank you so much for reading the dissertation. It's still amazing that someone actually read it. I mean, someone outside my committee and, you know, some select friends who I know read it. But yeah, thank you so much for that labor.
To give an example, when I talk about Telangana in chapter three, I have to be mindful of how people are approaching the question of self-respect or Swabhimana. That Swabhimana is very much rooted in the region and in the anti-caste traditions of that area, but at the same time, it also disidentifies, and I'm using the word the way Muñoz theorizes it, in the sense that they don't completely align with the anti-caste traditions of intellectuals like Periyar. A lot of the organizers of the 2015 Hyderabad Pride Walk, which later came to be known as the Swabhimana Walk, and which was documented by Moses Tulasi's film Walking the Walk, were a coming together of people from disparate ideologies, but it was completely led by working-class hijra and trans workers. Many of them were sex workers. During the podcast interview, Rachana Mudraboyina, one of the organizers, explained to me that anti-caste activists share a very tricky relationship with sex work because in devadasi traditions and various other contexts, sex work was and is caste-based labor, so it's often perceived as slavery. But in the past, a lot of people like Namdeo Dhasal and others have tried to go beyond the traditional Ambedkarite and Periyar's opposition to sex work by embracing sex workers. So maybe, there is a slight distinction there between the work and the worker, and it's a struggle. It's still happening. That needs to be distinguished from a Gandhian supposedly anti-colonial opposition to sex work, or a Leftist intellectual opposition to sex work as work. So unless one understands the region, unless one understands the investment of trans sex workers in Telangana, one cannot understand self-respect.
And that requires an optic of messiness. At the same time here, what's amazing about the walk is that people like Mudraboyina, Vyajayanti Mogli and others who were part of the organizing group—they also practice messiness. Of course, they may not be calling it messiness. But when I see the work that they are doing, I feel like they're deliberately practicing messiness, because we are invoking local customs festivals to bring people together and make them feel that, okay, this is pride, but it's not necessarily the pride that we see often in the so-called West. It's different, it's more rooted. So you can come here and do different things. Of course, there is also the criticism that I cite from people like Kancha Ilaiah, who don't want some of these festivals to be embraced by the working-class Bahujan. “Bahujan” is a word that literally translates to “majority,” but here, following Kanshi Ram, it refers to a coalition of sorts between people from different oppressed groups, or people who care about oppressed groups. But, in the interview that I did with Tulasi, the director, he mentions that many of these festivals were appropriated by mainstream Hinduism, so they may not be necessarily Hindu in origin. It is now perceived as Hindu, and the state gives a lot of money or showcases these festivals as state festivals. So here, there is a practice of messiness, where you don't want to give up on certain codes, even though these codes may seem mainstream at this point. So it's a delicate balancing that they do. That's what makes messiness work, at least in this context. It may not work in other contexts.
In the diasporic context, one can look at how organizations such as Anjali Rimi’s Parivar Bay Area have collaborated with or supported grassroots community groups in India. In fact, Mudraboyina was on their team earlier. I don’t discuss Parivar in my dissertation much, but it’s interesting how Rimi shares her proximity to both Democrats like Harris and Biden as well as Indian right-wing like Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. Unlike many trans organizations in India which maintain a distance from right-wing trans or hijra leaders, Rimi does not mind sharing her proximity with Tripathi on social media. Messiness is helpful here, so that I don’t ignore associations that may romanticize Hinduism or Harris’ Indian roots at the cost of downplaying the caste and anti-Muslim violence in India and in the diaspora, and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
Is Swabhimana located specifically outside the university? I see it as a thread throughout your work, this deep commitment to interdependency with queer and trans spaces outside the university. You write that academia cannot aspire to being a place of trans joy, due to its ingrained need for productivity and accumulation. And how when you go back to Kolkata, you feel alive and joyous in the presence of fellow trans-Kothi activists. Could you describe your practice of moving in and out of the university during your PhD, and the energy you experience in these different locations?
So when I was writing a significant portion of my introduction, we—I’m thinking of the U.S. in this context—had already gone into genocidal mode. I was deeply disillusioned by the responses from U.S. universities, because the protests hadn't started yet. They started rather later in Columbia, CUNY and other places. I was wondering, is there a place of resistance and love within the university? Because at the end of the day, even when I am writing, I'm doing this work also for my own academic profile, my career. There’s that pressure to publish in certain journals or with certain people and then get a job, so on and so forth. But how does that do anything? Is it supposed to do anything to at least make sure that we are not doing the same shit that people have been doing, whether it's India in the context of Kashmir—upper castes continuously trying to annihilate Dalit and other caste-oppressed communities, or in the U.S., where they are funding the destruction of Gaza? One has to recognize that without the money and the backing that Israel has right now, none of this would have happened.
That's where the fourth chapter happened, because I wanted to return to the spaces which have nourished me over the years. I come from very elite university backgrounds. I did a large part of my education in Calcutta University, then in Delhi University. I was briefly also enrolled as a PhD student in Jawaharlal Nehru University. All these spaces allowed me to meet some radical people and build connections. But at the same time, there are spaces outside those universities which are perhaps even more important. A lot of these battles are being led by people who may not have gone to the university or may not have finished their schooling. And yet they are the ones who are leading these struggles for dignity, for work, or stable work, something as basic as dignified livelihood.
Of course, the university has been under attack, whether it's in India or the U.S. Hany Babu is still in jail. Students like Sharjeel Imam are still in jail in India right now. The Polis Project carried his prison letter a few months back.
But I wanted to show how the university is not the only site of knowledge production. I write about how Sintu Bagui or Sumi Das are organizing in Seoraphuli and Coochbehar with or without academic support. What is happening beyond the metropole or the city? I don't think I have gotten really deep into it, because I'm still a very city-bred person.
You also use this term standpoint. You quote Patricia Hill Collins, that “standpoints may be judged not only by their epistemological contributions, but also by the terms of their participation in power relations.” I really admire how throughout your work, you're engaged in this powerful critical interrogation of your own standpoint in relation to being an upper caste scholar and as you write, not trying to reproduce savarna ways of knowledge production. You even close the article published in Interventions with this very emphatic moment that goes, “The queer savarna then must die. However, I don't see it happening anytime soon.” Can you tell us about this injunction? Why did this feel crucial for you to say?
It's a very contradictory statement, because if I'm writing as a queer savarna, clearly I'm not practicing that kind of dying, right? I think I derived that idea from Manmit Singh’s understanding of “Rahao,” which is a pause. They are in conversation with Shaista Patel's work and the pedagogy of pausing. But at the same time, how much of that practice should you do? If you're writing, if you're getting published, aren't you also not pausing and centering yourself? And to be honest, this was my comprehensive exam article. And I was like, should I publish it? Should I not publish it? And eventually I did send it out because I thought, okay, I'm going to be in the job market. So I need to send something out. That's how the article happened.
The idea of annihilation also comes, most importantly, from Bhimrao Ambedkar, in the Annihilation of Caste, where he talks about annihilating the caste system because it segregates laborers through the segregation of work. When Ambedkar was writing the book, I think he was also thinking about Hindu society as a whole. This was much before his conversion to Buddhism, so you can see a shift in his own thinking where he perhaps did not even believe that Hinduism could be redeemed. And that explains his later decision. His strong radical critique of Hinduism, you know, gave people like Gandhi and others a lot of pain. That's why there were vehement disagreements between these two contemporaries. Again, that's where messiness can be helpful in unpacking the optic. Like, okay, this guy may have led this so-called non-violent movement. I'd say so-called because there's a degree of violence in that entire rhetoric of non-violence. But then when you think of Ambedkar, it seems very decolonial, and not just anti-colonial, in the way that he is thinking of completely changing the premise of Hinduism, which is the caste system.
So, these are some of the conversations that one needs to have when one is thinking about death, which of course is metaphorical in this sense, but it also means, do you continue to publish on this topic or do you stop? And maybe because self-criticism could be its own centering of guilt. So then how much of that is needed? Or have you reached that saturation point where it's no longer required? I'm sure if I ever publish a book, it will not have the same degree of it. It will still have the standpoint—Collins, and the standpoint theorists like Sandra Harding and others, and more recently, Shailaja Paik has talked about Dalit feminist standpoint—that is important, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can appropriate it, to take up so much space that it becomes only about you.
It reminds me also of the way your work has this very life-affirming and life-saving quality to it. I’m thinking of how you end the dissertation, you write, "Mess is an inevitable part of life. It is untidy, wet, sticky, and chaotic. It exhausts both Ma and me, demands unpaid labor, but also teaches us how to love and hold hands—metaphorically or not—and not give up on life.” I'm curious, from this standpoint of having completed the dissertation, how has all of this labor and work influenced your life more broadly? When you say “messiness does not give me hope, even as it gives me clarity”—has it offered you a kind of clarity that is also the will to live with which you close your dissertation?
I'm glad that you thought it was more positive and life-affirming, because when I was writing the conclusion, I was actually thinking the other way around. I had this entire conversation happening with my therapist, and I was trying to find something to hold on to before submitting the document to my committee members, because we were in the second year of this genocide, and it's still continuing and it just keeps getting worse when you think there cannot be anything worse than what has already happened. That's why I was wondering, what is the point of all of this? What is the point of even trying to theorize mess? We can call it what it is, but at the same time there are people who are getting killed and people who are being starved, whether it's in the Biden era or in the Trump era. For them, messiness may not be useful. For them, clarity may not be useful. Messiness is perhaps only then useful for certain scholars, because it's also a little distant—some scholarship is distant, not because scholars are not invested in what is happening on the ground, but because they have a certain purpose. We are part of the academic industrial complex, and so the purpose of the book or the article is not about doing something good or creating a moral compass of sorts—maybe that is the purpose for a few scholars—but at the end of the day, it's often about more and more knowledge production, through a very mechanized manner.
So right now, I don't see a lot of hope, honestly, in embracing messiness, beyond seeing it as an optic that helps me understand actions, and reactions, or afterlives. It's helpful to me as a researcher, and may not be that helpful to me as an ally of Palestinians or as an anti-caste ally. At the same time, of course, I love having conversations. I haven't published a podcast interview since December, but I'm going to do one soon. I love those conversations and I love that part of it, and I hope I can do that irrespective of whether or not I'm in academia. There is some possibility of political change, yes. But it also depends on the state machinery and how brutal it can get, or what it will do, or whether or not it will listen to certain stakeholders. I think that's what makes the situation a little bit scary—when you think that despite the large-scale protests or despite the resistance, this is not ending, and why? We can discuss these questions and their messiness may be very helpful, but may not help in achieving a certain desired end.
What do you hope to talk about next on the podcast? And what questions are on your mind going into the fall semester?
I know I'll be very busy with teaching soon, so I'm hoping that in the next couple of months, I'll get to do a few interviews. I want to talk to people about the question of race and racism in the Indian context, which I think has come up a little bit in some of my earlier conversations with Davidson and Pavel who founded the Chinki Homo project. But I don't think I've explored that enough. I also need to be more in conversations with people who are currently in West Bengal, because that's where I am right now. I'm hoping to interview some more activists from the region. And also, maybe approach some people from the diaspora. And yeah, also I think, despite my best attempts, most of the people who are on the podcast are still Hindus, from different castes but still Hindus. I'm hoping that I will get to interview Indians who practice other religions. All that’s in the back of my mind.
Winona Guo is a PhD student focused on Asian American literature at Columbia University, and author of Tell Me Who You Are (2019).
