Geeta Patel | University of Virginia (original) (raw)
Geeta Patel is a Professor at the University of Virginia, with three degrees in science and a doctorate from Columbia University, NY in inter-disciplinary South Asian Studies (in Sanskrit and Urdu). She has published widely in both academic and popular venues on the collusive conundrums posed by bringing gender, nation, sexuality, finance, science, media, capital, and aesthetics together, and translated lyric and prose from Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi and Braj. Her first monograph, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry, writes the history of Indian literary modernism through its harbinger Miraji. Lyrical Movements imagines its landscape through Urdu lyric infused with sexuality that takes on the depredations of colonial incursions into literary imaginaries. Dr Patel’s second book, Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy: Reflections on Sexuality, Media, Science, Finance, uses techno-intimacy as the locus for interrogating capital, science, media and desire. In Risky Bodies Dr. Patel tunes into science in unexpected ways in order to investigate political economy, nationalism, sexuality, financialization, cinema. She is the co-editor of three special issues that engage several of her areas of expertise. “In Queery/In Theory/ In Deed” and “Area Impossible,” for GLQ and “Trust and Islamic Capital” for Society and Business Review. Dr. Patel is completing several other projects: a manuscript on the Muslim woman writer Ismat Chughtai using the history of scientific realism, light, quantum and special relativity as vectors; a manuscript on fantasies embedded in advertising called “Billboard Fantasies.” She is the completing research for and writing a series of small books on historical pensions, insurance, credit and debt. The first is on the first private public pension fund—the Madras Civil Fund which was started in the late 1700s and whose articulation brought Mughal and European notions of financial compensation together. This book will rewrite the commonly understood history of pensions and the welfare state – relocating it from Europe to India and backdating it by about 100 years. It will also rescript the history of capital. Her current research is on the ways in which the history of bacteriology and our relationship to our own bacterial life produces our everyday sense of nationalism as genocidal colonialists in our own bodies. Dr. Patel and Meghan Hartman are also compiling a monograph of their new translations of Miraji’s poetry. She has recently begun composing her own lyric under the lockdown in India, which adds to the bio-fiction short pieces she has been publishing since the 1990s.
Professor Patel also teaches courses on the following: interdisciplinary methodologies starting with field biology and physics and turning to finance, political economy, aesthetics, architecture, political geography, history, anthropology. Popular culture in South Asia: 1800-present. Bollywood. History of trade, finance and traffic in Oceanic South Asia and Indian Ocean—Mohenjodaro-1600s. Poetry, art, music. History of science. Sexuality and cinema in South Asia.
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Papers by Geeta Patel
Colby quarterly, 2001
Zanaanah is a Persian word, derived from the plural, zanaan or women. Zenana is a word that along... more Zanaanah is a Persian word, derived from the plural, zanaan or women. Zenana is a word that along with women's apartments also means feminine, an effeminate person or womanly. F. Steingass (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1992),623. First edition published in 1892. 2. I use "postcolonial" and colonial here as terms that historically site/cite discussions about gender. These terms have been subjected to a prolonged critique. Although I am uncomfortable with the particular demarcations implied by them, in this paper they serve as areas whose traces I mark so that I can engage in a discussion about them. This paper has been transformed by various people,
Pakistaniaat, Sep 7, 2012
Public Culture, 2004
WANTED-for Bombay Patel boy, widowed, early thirties, foreign-returned, Ph.D., with well-paying j... more WANTED-for Bombay Patel boy, widowed, early thirties, foreign-returned, Ph.D., with well-paying job in multinational wheat -complexioned Patel girl from Bombay or Ahmedabad family, thirties, foreign-educated, homely, preferably Ph.D. Caste no bar. 1 N otwithstanding my complexion, I would have been an almost perfect candidate for the position. Such an advertisement, accounting as it does for the (modern, faux-secular Hindu-caste no bar) Patel diaspora, could be one that my parents might have answered several years ago when I was within marriageable
The Journal of Asian Studies, Nov 1, 1992
The Journal of Asian Studies, 1993
Comparative Literature, Jun 1, 2018
Vernacularization as a concept has gained circulation in our time within the ambit of South Asia:... more Vernacularization as a concept has gained circulation in our time within the ambit of South Asia: scholars use it to name what they designate as local—whether sexuality, language, architecture, religion, capital, or aesthetic practices. When claims are made for “vernacularization” as a process of opening spaces for “the local,” vernacular languages, ontologies, and epistemologies are paradoxically oriented towards English/the West. What happens if the word, term, concept, process “vernacular” loses this purchase? What might we notice if we refused to rehabilitate vernacularization in this fashion and mobilized instead an accounting of the brutalist colonial histories where it was deployed for colonial transformation? The Urdu modernist poet Miraji (1912–1949), eschewing the term “vernacular,” mined English and European languages, and other Asian and Indian literary lineages, to fill Urdu’s possible legacies through translation. Miraji established possible futures for Urdu through bygone chronicles, stories, and lyrical possibilities that were not subservient to the fluctuations of value that vernacularization carried with it.
Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies
Choice Reviews Online, 2002
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, 2016
The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India, 2019
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2020
It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher ... more It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher of gender, sexuality, and governmentality, Judith Butler. When Gender Trouble came out in the United States, it hit the stands like a hit; it transformed and unraveled the modalities through which ontologies and epistemologies of gender came to be. This was especially the case with the trouble, the disturbances, the turbulence that Gender Trouble carried along with it. Gender Trouble's thematics sometimes syncopated against familiar habits of belief that were and are carefully nursed and held to one's heart, upending them in sometimes unexpected ways. The concept of “performativity,” for instance, generated a buzz, partly because it unhinged and reoriented several fail-safe, deeply felt materialized beliefs, such as the ontological immutability of gender cohering resolutely and unremittingly in and through an inveterate notion of the biological (belief certainty in the sense that...
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2018
Society and Business Review, 2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to trace the history and legacy of Islamic finance (IF) in S... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to trace the history and legacy of Islamic finance (IF) in Sri Lanka in the context of the emergence of life finance. It tracks the social life of finance through a genealogy of trust and capital. Design/methodology/approach The methodology used is qualitative. It is an extended case study using conversations, company documents and newspaper archival research. Findings Trust, transparency and ethics must be understood locally to have salience. The implicit effect of locally understood ideas of trust that have been built into the movement of capital (via ethical branding and transparency in IF, education and social awareness) can reconfigure relationships between communities in a country that has been ravaged by war. Research limitations/implications There have been few studies on IF in Sri Lanka; this study will enrich those offerings. However, they must be understood in relation to the emergence of life finance. Practical implications This study...
Cultural Critique, 2015
Using the nationally prominent cases of farmers in 1970s Gujarat, Bt cotton, the Green revolution... more Using the nationally prominent cases of farmers in 1970s Gujarat, Bt cotton, the Green revolution and the current push to cultivate GMO corn (the gold revolution) as a focal point, and the history of financial practices as its setting, this essay weaves an analysis in which the plight of Indian farmers is seen through a conceptualization of a new form of alchemy. At the heart of the analysis is the idea that financing schemes that meld credit, debt, and protective instruments into a form I call “life-finance," which are offered to farmers for the purchase of new types of factory-seeds and ‘inputs’ that include this finance, perform a form of alchemy assuring farmers that their labour torqued through the purchased packages can be spun into gold. The alchemical possibilities of durable value ensconced in the financial arrangements promise flowing futures as hedges against losses of livelihoods and lives in the present. These arrangements (financial practices, procedures, technologies and grammar), often extended as a panacea or tonic against precarity, remake the ecologies, lives and livelihoods of farming communities and lead them towards death. The history of promised aspirational futurities alchemized in seeds -- a type of market alchemy -- has accumulated for decades, producing a morbid new form for farmer communities (called to the margins) who shunt golden futures promised by life-finance through foreshortened families and whose culmination is suicide.
Schwarz/A Companion, 2007
Colby quarterly, 2001
Zanaanah is a Persian word, derived from the plural, zanaan or women. Zenana is a word that along... more Zanaanah is a Persian word, derived from the plural, zanaan or women. Zenana is a word that along with women's apartments also means feminine, an effeminate person or womanly. F. Steingass (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1992),623. First edition published in 1892. 2. I use "postcolonial" and colonial here as terms that historically site/cite discussions about gender. These terms have been subjected to a prolonged critique. Although I am uncomfortable with the particular demarcations implied by them, in this paper they serve as areas whose traces I mark so that I can engage in a discussion about them. This paper has been transformed by various people,
Pakistaniaat, Sep 7, 2012
Public Culture, 2004
WANTED-for Bombay Patel boy, widowed, early thirties, foreign-returned, Ph.D., with well-paying j... more WANTED-for Bombay Patel boy, widowed, early thirties, foreign-returned, Ph.D., with well-paying job in multinational wheat -complexioned Patel girl from Bombay or Ahmedabad family, thirties, foreign-educated, homely, preferably Ph.D. Caste no bar. 1 N otwithstanding my complexion, I would have been an almost perfect candidate for the position. Such an advertisement, accounting as it does for the (modern, faux-secular Hindu-caste no bar) Patel diaspora, could be one that my parents might have answered several years ago when I was within marriageable
The Journal of Asian Studies, Nov 1, 1992
The Journal of Asian Studies, 1993
Comparative Literature, Jun 1, 2018
Vernacularization as a concept has gained circulation in our time within the ambit of South Asia:... more Vernacularization as a concept has gained circulation in our time within the ambit of South Asia: scholars use it to name what they designate as local—whether sexuality, language, architecture, religion, capital, or aesthetic practices. When claims are made for “vernacularization” as a process of opening spaces for “the local,” vernacular languages, ontologies, and epistemologies are paradoxically oriented towards English/the West. What happens if the word, term, concept, process “vernacular” loses this purchase? What might we notice if we refused to rehabilitate vernacularization in this fashion and mobilized instead an accounting of the brutalist colonial histories where it was deployed for colonial transformation? The Urdu modernist poet Miraji (1912–1949), eschewing the term “vernacular,” mined English and European languages, and other Asian and Indian literary lineages, to fill Urdu’s possible legacies through translation. Miraji established possible futures for Urdu through bygone chronicles, stories, and lyrical possibilities that were not subservient to the fluctuations of value that vernacularization carried with it.
Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies
Choice Reviews Online, 2002
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, 2016
The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India, 2019
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2020
It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher ... more It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher of gender, sexuality, and governmentality, Judith Butler. When Gender Trouble came out in the United States, it hit the stands like a hit; it transformed and unraveled the modalities through which ontologies and epistemologies of gender came to be. This was especially the case with the trouble, the disturbances, the turbulence that Gender Trouble carried along with it. Gender Trouble's thematics sometimes syncopated against familiar habits of belief that were and are carefully nursed and held to one's heart, upending them in sometimes unexpected ways. The concept of “performativity,” for instance, generated a buzz, partly because it unhinged and reoriented several fail-safe, deeply felt materialized beliefs, such as the ontological immutability of gender cohering resolutely and unremittingly in and through an inveterate notion of the biological (belief certainty in the sense that...
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2018
Society and Business Review, 2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to trace the history and legacy of Islamic finance (IF) in S... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to trace the history and legacy of Islamic finance (IF) in Sri Lanka in the context of the emergence of life finance. It tracks the social life of finance through a genealogy of trust and capital. Design/methodology/approach The methodology used is qualitative. It is an extended case study using conversations, company documents and newspaper archival research. Findings Trust, transparency and ethics must be understood locally to have salience. The implicit effect of locally understood ideas of trust that have been built into the movement of capital (via ethical branding and transparency in IF, education and social awareness) can reconfigure relationships between communities in a country that has been ravaged by war. Research limitations/implications There have been few studies on IF in Sri Lanka; this study will enrich those offerings. However, they must be understood in relation to the emergence of life finance. Practical implications This study...
Cultural Critique, 2015
Using the nationally prominent cases of farmers in 1970s Gujarat, Bt cotton, the Green revolution... more Using the nationally prominent cases of farmers in 1970s Gujarat, Bt cotton, the Green revolution and the current push to cultivate GMO corn (the gold revolution) as a focal point, and the history of financial practices as its setting, this essay weaves an analysis in which the plight of Indian farmers is seen through a conceptualization of a new form of alchemy. At the heart of the analysis is the idea that financing schemes that meld credit, debt, and protective instruments into a form I call “life-finance," which are offered to farmers for the purchase of new types of factory-seeds and ‘inputs’ that include this finance, perform a form of alchemy assuring farmers that their labour torqued through the purchased packages can be spun into gold. The alchemical possibilities of durable value ensconced in the financial arrangements promise flowing futures as hedges against losses of livelihoods and lives in the present. These arrangements (financial practices, procedures, technologies and grammar), often extended as a panacea or tonic against precarity, remake the ecologies, lives and livelihoods of farming communities and lead them towards death. The history of promised aspirational futurities alchemized in seeds -- a type of market alchemy -- has accumulated for decades, producing a morbid new form for farmer communities (called to the margins) who shunt golden futures promised by life-finance through foreshortened families and whose culmination is suicide.
Schwarz/A Companion, 2007
Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy traverses disparate and uncommon routes to explore how people gr... more Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy traverses disparate and uncommon routes to explore how people grapple with the radical uncertainties of their lives. In this edgy, evocative journey through myriad interleaved engagements-including the political economies of cinema; the emergent shapes taken by insurance, debt, and mortgages; gender and sexuality; and domesticity and nationalism-Geeta Patel demonstrates how science and technology ground our everyday intimacies. The result is a deeply poetic and philosophical exploration of the intricacies of techno-intimacy, revealing a complicated and absorbing narrative that challenges assumptions underlying our daily living.
This is a wonderful review by Rahul Gairola of Risky Bodies & Techno-intimacy.
46th Annual Conference on South Asia, 2017
Foregrounding performative and narrative modes of reflexivity, the scholars and artists in this p... more Foregrounding performative and narrative modes of reflexivity, the scholars and artists in this pre-conference bring to light some of the ways in which patriarchy, heteronormativity, and the closet––which are never fully named, specified, or explicitly demanded of all of us––emerge as a presence in the work that we do, the relationships we form, the identities we have, and the spaces in which we operate. We examine how these three facets of what has been called “normativity” rear their heads in institutional processes such as fieldwork, conferences, and job searches, as well as in racial, sexual, and gendered micro-aggressions that code the western academic tradition of manifesting authority and authorship.