Nishant Shahani

  1. Professor
Email Addressnshahani3@wsu.edu
Phone509-335-8755

Biography

Nishant Shahani received his MA in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Mumbai, India and a PhD in English at the University of Florida with a specialization in gender and sexuality studies. At WSU, he teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in queer and feminist theory, LGBT studies, health humanities, and postcolonial theory and literature.

Research/Teaching Interests

Queer Theory and Politics (specifically queer of color critique and transnational sexualities); Trans studies; Feminist Theory; Health Humanities; Disability studies; AIDS histories and historiographies; Postcolonial Theory and Empire; South Asian Studies (specifically India); Utopian Studies; Film and media studies.

Shahani’s most recent book monograph, Pink Revolutions: Globalization, Hindutva and Queer Triangles in Contemporary India (Northwestern University Press, 2021) (*See disclaimer) describes how queer politics in India occupies an uneasy position between the forces of neoliberal globalization, on the one hand, and the nationalist Hindu fundamentalism that has emerged since the 1990s, on the other. While neoliberal forces use queerness to highlight India’s democratic credentials and stature within a globalized world, nationalist voices claim that queer movements in the country pose a threat to Indian national identity. The book argues that this tension implicates queer politics within messy entanglements and knotted ideological triangulations, geometries of power in which local understandings of “authentic” nationalism brush up against global agendas of multinational capital.

Shahani’s first monograph, Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return (Lehigh University Press, 2012) (*See disclaimer) examines the retrospective logic that informs contemporary queer thinking; specifically the narrative return to the 1950s in post-1990s queer and LGBT culture in the United States. The book inquires into what motivates the return to a historical moment informed by the bruises and wounds of history; but more importantly, it poses the question of how such a turn backwards could be theorized as reparative or even hopeful. This book shows how the framework of queer retrospection offers new ways of understanding history and culture, of reformulating disciplines and institutions, and of rethinking traditional modes of political activism and knowledge production.

Shahani’s co-edited book AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke University Press, 2020) (*See disclaimer) engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced. Among other topics, the authors examine the writing of the history of AIDS; settler colonial narratives and laws impacting risk in Indigenous communities; the early internet regulation of both content and online AIDS activism; the Black gendered and sexual politics of pleasure, desire, and (in)visibility; and how persistent attention to white men has shaped AIDS as intrinsic to multiple, unremarkable crises among people of color and in the Global South.

Publications

Books


Pink Revolutions: Globalization, Hindutva and Queer Triangles in Contemporary India (Northwestern University Press, 2021)


AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke University Press, 2020)


Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return (Lehigh University Press, 2012)

Selected Articles, Book Chapters, and Special Issue Journals

*Disclaimer: This link leads to an external website that is not hosted by the university. The views and content expressed are those of the faculty member and do not represent the official positions of the university.