While my dissertation is currently under an embargo, the dissertation defense video is available to watch via the department's YouTube channel. It can be viewed below. For those who are interested, I have also included the abstract below. Excerpts from the introduction and literature review were published in the journal, Integral Review. 

Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands: a Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness

ABSTRACT
 
This dissertation uses Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands framework to facilitate the transculturative process of shifting into a new consciousness in the border zones of kyriarchy, coloniality, and modernity. The borderlands are conceived of as an alternative to that which is written in history. De-linking from Western modernity’s assumption of universality allows me to make a claim to a modernity that acknowledges the histories of Western colonialism and imperialism. It further enables me to reconstruct meanings and practices found in transnational spaces configured as the Other: tradition, the past, nature, the feminine, the “primitive,” the household. I enact this decolonial recovery at the edges of my South Asian/brown postcolonial feminist subjectivity.

The borderlands framework makes possible a profoundly relational onto-epistemological praxis, in which I examine the configurations of voice, vitality and authority in my experiences, identities, and motherlines. I contend with the dominant narratives of brahmanical patriarchy continuing in the lives of women in India. The post-secular sacred locates as essential a critical interrogation of all forms of oppression. Engaging the self in relation to culture, I utilize borderlands thinking and aesthetics to recover and resignify complex images of female identity, and to suggest an episteme of the sacred for healing and liberation of post-patriarchal possibilities. The critical mobility of spiritual mestizaje invites me into a wholeness of sorts that forefronts the grandmothers, the foremothers, and the experiences of women of color on their own terms.

The dissertation locates itself within a transdisciplinary post/decolonial feminist research paradigm. It accomplishes its tasks of deconstruction and reconstruction through the processes of feminist critical hermeneutics (Schüssler Fiorenza) and autohistoria/teoría (Anzaldúa). Both methods of inquiry make possible a processual and relational epistemology that challenges the borders around the modes of knowledge creation.

I woke up to the wonderful news that my dissertation won the 2020 Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology. Am overjoyed and honored! In their email, the Award Committee wrote: 

​"The ASWM 2020 Kore Award Committee is proud and honored to inform you that you have been named the winner of the 2020 Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology. Your dissertation, "Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands" is especially recognized for its daring work in methodology, vision and scope. The importance of decolonization in scholarship is vital and your bringing that to the foreground is both bold and necessary. As a reader, I felt challenged and opened by the work, and wanted to apply what I was learning to my own scholarship. Your beautiful writing is a joy to read."

I join an amazing list of scholars who have won the award in the past. 

So, we are in a world with less and less certainty. All of us in India, Iran, Iraq, Kashmir, US, UK, Australia...

This is when we turn to our ancestors and foremothers - the angry ones, the ones who held on to their hope and vision, the defiant ones. This is when we bring each other within our circle of care. 

This, more than ever, is when we rely on our ability to develop new rudders. 

Just breathe in this body. Just breathe into that space, its patterns of folding, contours and dissolving, difficulties and expansion. 
 
What is not into form is also right here, along with all that did form. We have inherited information and signatures that have shaped us, and our DNA is not just form but space, and space is infinite possibility. 

The answers are within us - and will come into the play of possibility through relationship, through conversations, with each other. The answers are not only within us.   

Just breathe through the body. 

With each other, we can go into what feels heavy, because we have a way back when we are together.   

• ​Intimate: An American Photo Album by Paisley Rekdal

​An inventive looping of mutiple genres to invoke the history and ambiguity of identity, intimacy, belonging and othering in contemporary America. 

• The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty 

Djinns and the medieval Middle East and a badass heroine who is a con artist. Need I say more?

• I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded trans. by Ranjit Hoskote

What does it mean to have a life of spirit amidst turbulent times?—how does one deepen, shed, emerge through utterance?   

• Living A Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed

Still reading this one slowly. For everyone who wants to think about how to inhabit this world while questioning it.

• Circe by Madeline Miller

Brilliant reimagining—how Circe grows into a sorceress and then a human.

• Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

A book “structured by pain”—Mailhot writes her way through the pieces (of colonial, intergenerational trauma), finding and restoring the connections.

• Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

Evocative of a slow-moving river—a mother going under, memories resurfacing.

• The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

Words as spells--recovering words that describe nature to bring back enchantment.

And Also These Books:  
 

• Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
• Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner
• Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
• Midsummer Night by Freda Warrington
• Save Me The Plums: My Gourmet Memoir by Ruth Reichl
• The Little Snake by A.L. Kennedy
• The Queen of Jasmine Country by Sharanya Manivannan

MOVIES

• I Dream in Another Language (Sueño en otro idiom) dir. by Ernesto Contreras

The slow displacement of non-western realities by modernity, the cultural/magical ecology of indigenous languages.

• The Breadwinner dir. by Nora Twomey

Gender and empowerment, life under the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan. These words do not get to how affecting this animation is.

• Boy dir. by Taika Waititi

A whimsical tale of sons and a father, and fantasies that turn into opportunities to become heroes. 

And also Article 15 dir. by Anubhav Sinha.

ART

I have four poems in the October-December issue of The Indian Quarterly. Thank you to the most amazing poetry editor, Sampurna Chattarji, for the attentiveness with which you read these poems! 

(I was invited to write a guest post by Zoe Tuck.)

Sometimes I wonder about the resistance to poetry or art perceived as inaccessible. Part of art's job is to not be accessible - at least, not immediately; at least, not to the consciousness arising from the noise and frequencies of the modern, capitalistic world. I am gesturing here to places that are outside the hum of activity - hum of the ordinary - as places where poetry can linger. 

I also want to discourage our tendency to want to turn our world into text that makes sense - and for our texts to complete a human supremacist arrogance that we may fully know and control the world. Poetry, at least, must escape the grasp of the Cartesian thinker.

Instead of the commonplace definition of accessibility, where we the readers want to be served a clear soup - pre-digested if possible - I wonder about a different definition for accessibility. Does the poem have doors through which we can enter, or chinks through which we can slip in/something can slip out - to mutually interact - changing our very bodies? Is the being before us translucent? Is she dark, savage, deviant, other? If she is not immediately accessible, is there something in our linguistic ecology or onto-epistemological paradigm that is not allowing us to know her?

The binaries of accessibility and inaccessibility can restrain the poet in the exercise of her occupation. (Though, really, I like certain kinds of restraints.) To stay with "the perpetual ignorance of poetry, the induced chaos from which a poem begins" (Derek Walcott) is wisdom of a different order. Then something beyond graspability can move within the poem, reach for us, allow us to become our own other.

Even as many of us are beginning to agree on the centrality of engaging with our planetary ecological moment, we that are modern still sometimes find ourselves assenting to dominant cultural assertions of rationalism and materialism.

In a world where we know the nonhuman to be inextricably linked with the human, Earth-based enchantment and myth, folk belief and practice need not present themselves as phenomena opposed to the rational realms of policy and action⁠—of activism. The revolution we need today needs both/and⁠—all of it, all of us. Western-influenced secularism's othering of folk or "nonmodern" discourses is not the answer the world needs today, as we find ourselves on the brink of the human turning into something it may not recognize itself as/in. Answers will be found in deep interconnectedness⁠—in visions that lead us into our own humanity, while securing that of others. If the Earth is alive, so are all of her inhabitants⁠--visible and otherwise--and this multicausal universe asks of us responses and interventions that are both complex and inclusive.

As I was lighting dhoop and incense for my daily practice, I was thinking about all that fire teaches us. How it teaches us about warmth and clarity and transformation and vision and control/being out of control. 

I was thinking about the smoke in Sao Paulo. The smoke, last year, during the wildfire season in California. Skin pricking, thirsty, unable to breathe. Eyes. Masks. 

I was thinking about the deep medicine in the Amazonian forests - so ancient that modern man cannot hope to get it even by force. To get it, the modern man will need to change - into some other kind of being - someone who has deeply sensed their own part in the ever-emergent medicine of the world, in the wheel of reciprocity. The many emotions this will ask the modern man to get in touch with. 

Instead, the modern man burns the medicine, the trees, and the forest. The modern man thinks AI will get them there, into the heart of the mysteries. 

But the mysteries scare them, really. So they burn them down. They think they can come up with their own definition of man, nature, intelligence, interaction. Cut off from where they find themselves - on Earth. 

I was thinking about philosopher V.F. Cordova, who wrote that even when languages are lost, the concepts they embody survive as pattern systems of “forms and categories.” No, the mysteries will never really be lost. The medicine will never really be lost. It is here, it is here on Earth, it is here in our bones, and our bones know how to shift the spark of life running through our bodies into new pattern systems that the modern man may or may not recognize. Life always remembers. 

What is being lost is something irretrievable - modern man's ability to return unto an alliance with life. The rust taints all of us. It is in me. The selfishness. The pettiness. The greed. The inability to open our palms and claim our own largesse, so full, intricately connected with the finest weave of dark and light. 

I've had a rock of misery inside my heart. No more. I will choose to remember and feel, I will ask to right my relationship with fire, I will go to the waters and grieve. 

Our species learnt how to tend fires. How to quench fires. We are made of the balance of elements. Balance is always ours to learn/relearn. Our ancestors are in us. The quicksilver of spiral is within us. The phoenix is an ally of human spirit. Our very nervous systems encode the secret. 

If we say, then, that love and healing and renewal are ours to make possible, we are not far from what is right and true. 

I am working on a new poetry manuscript based on older poems written in Delhi, Notre Dame/Mishawaka, and San Francisco. The length of the volume is no problem. Yet, I am finding myself judging this MS-in-incipience somewhat. It feels (though really is not) personal--not that there is anything wrong with poetry that is personal! These poems perhaps do not have the same reach towards the divine, or the imperative for change on earth, which I want to bring more and more into my writing. 

I also know I am harshest on what I have already created. 

And, that it is not honest to just dismiss these poems. They tracked my growth, my consciousness--my becoming who I am today. So, to honor the journey—to honor, too, all the different poets I have been so I could arrive here. Mine has not been a linear love affair with poetry and literature. I have needed to work through what it means to my life, to my gift and purpose. 

Even my going away from certain poetry/writing communities was about acquiring new perspectives and values, about arriving in a place within myself where I would connect to Source, and belong. Having answered the call and made these travels, I can incorporate this signature frequency in what I bring/how I relate with these tribes.  

Perhaps what I considered "false" belonging is not so much inauthentic as calling for wisdom to be brung unto it. 

My favorite part about a video call with Polish photographer Karolina Gembara—who titles a photo series and a forthcoming photo book after a line from my poem "Capacity"—was how years ago she came across my poem in an anthology at The Bookshop in Jorbagh, took a photo, and kept it with her as she lived and photographed in Delhi. 

These are the moments. All heart. 

(Though I remain mystified which anthology this must have been, since I don't remember this poem in the anthologies of Indian poetry I know as anthologizing my work!)