Includes bibliographical references and index.

In the absence of reliable ghosts : archives -- A history I am not writing : sexuality's exemplarity -- Itinerant sex : geopolitics as critique.

"Anjali Arondekar's Abundance asks what would happen if we shift the structuring narrative of the history of sexuality from that of archival loss and a paucity of evidence to one of abundance-"we have all the evidence we need," as one of the author's archivists remarks. Arondekar employs this approach in an historical account of a group of former Goan Devadasi, an "Other Backward Castes" community. Arondekar starts with this sense of abundance and then raises a set of connected historiographical issues to show what histories might tell if we constructed them differently. Her focus on a subaltern group that moves back and forth between Portuguese and English domination in South Asia, opens to larger questions about histories of sexualities as parts of area, colonial, and decolonial histories"-- Provided by publisher.