Aman Sinha
About me
My name is Aman Sinha 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: Unsettled Identities: Trajectories of Self/Selves within Queer Autobiographies from India and South Africa.
My PhD project looks at queer autobiographical literature that has emerged from India and South Africa in the last two to three decades. I explore how writers like Suniti Namjoshi, Zackie Achmat, Robert Hamblin and Mona Ahmed, deploy the inherent malleability of the genre to counter Western registers of sexual dissidence, which travel across global media channels as aspirational narratives of liberation. Including tropes of coming out, the closet, and marital rights, these narratives hinge on the politics of a stable subjecthood that can claim rights, welfare and citizenship within the project of nationalization. As opposed to this, the aforementioned writers intentionally fictionalize the contours of the autobiographical and use that as a point of departure. In such a framework, queerness, instead of being articulated as a fixed hybrid position, is hinted at within the immediate, the non-monumental and the everyday materiality of navigating networks of power and oppression. However, this is done without taking recourse to a site of native authenticity that frames either queerness or queer-phobia as a consequence of Western imperialism.
This project is being supervised by Dr Ross Forman (Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick).
Conference Presentations
“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.
“Of Language in Poetry: The Contemporary Relevance of Spoken Word”, Perceptions and Portrayals, Delhi University, March 2018.
Publications
[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)