Aman Sinha
About me
I am Aman and my pronouns are He/Him. I am a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick, exploring discourses around postcolonial subjecthood, life-writing, and queerness within spaces of the Global South.
My other research interests include:
- Spatiality and sexual dissidence
- Memoir and auto-fictions
- Intersections within feminist and queer theory
- Contemporary poetry and spoken word
- Creative writing
Feel free to contact me at:
Aman.Sinha@warwick.ac.uk
Thesis Description
Proposed Title: Auto-Material Worlds: The Politics of Epistemic Failure in Queer Autobiography
My project investigates how queer and trans artists from India and South Africa use autobiographical practices to locate self-making within the material violence of late capitalism. By tracing the genre’s expansion into its contemporary antecedents, including memoir, auto-fiction, blogs, vlogs and portraiture, I argue that these varied forms have become structurally embedded within the cultural frameworks of neoliberalism in post 1990s India and post-apartheid South Africa, that valorise queer difference. My project shifts the dominant analytic within autobiography studies that centres around the negation of authenticity and truth, as foundational tenets of the form. Instead, I argue that such a taxonomical crisis is a symptom of the uneven conditions of late capitalism within which globalisation and queerness intersect. By reading artists such as Suniti Namjoshi, Mark Gevisser and Zanele Muholi in a comparative frame, it examines how their work renders visible the material histories of urban dispossession, caste-based violence, racialised surveillance and labour migration. In doing so, this project articulates autobiographical acts both as the cultural and aesthetic dimension of global homonormativity, as well as a potential form of resistance against its efficacies.
This project is being supervised by Dr Ross Forman (Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick).
Conference Presentations
"Who is Writing Whom?: Dialectics between Self and Space in Zackie Achmat's 'My Childhood as an Adult Molester: A Salt River Moffie' (1995), Status Quo and Besides, Literature Association of South Africa, May 2025.
"Is Any Homecoming Possible?: Transactions of Subjecthood in Mark Gevisser's Lost and Found in Johannesburg (2014), Intimations of Incomparability: Tending to the End/s of Comparison, Tribune, Université de Montréal, November 2024.
“Against Revelatory Gestures: Silence and Sensuality in Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf (Quilt) (1942), Saying Nothing to Say, University of Warwick, May 2023.
“Queering the City: Textualising Sexual Alterity within Modernist Fragmentations”, Spatiality, IIT Madras, April 2021.
“Sisterhoods and the Home: Queer Female Subjectivities in Fire (1996) and Parched (2016)", Solidarities, Delhi University, Feb 2019.
Publications
[Article] Sinha, Aman. “The Dialectics of Self and Space in Zackie Achmat’s ‘My Childhood As an Adult Molester: A Salt River Moffie’ (1995) and Thomas Mann’s 'Death in Venice' (1912)”. Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 41, Oct. 2025, p. 14 pages, doi:10.25159/1753-5387/19889.
[Article] 'Against Closure and Identification: Textual Visual Trajectories in Myself Mona Ahmed (2001)' in Voyages, ed. by Emily Di Dodo and Rachel Hayes (= MHRA, Working Papers in Humanities),18 (2024).
Tilt, a poetry anthology by Queerabad, “Semblance of an Ode to Desire” and “In his Absence – A response to Eunice D’Souza’s She and I” - April 2022
Research Networks
Co-Convenor for Sex:Queer Research Network (SQRN)