Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights by Kanika Batra (review)

Reviewed by: Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights by Kanika Batra Asha Jeffers (bio) Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights by Kanika Batra, New York: Routledge, 2022. 222 pp., $136 hardcover, $39.16 paper. One of postcolonial theory and criticism's most productive attributes is its attention to sameness and difference across disparate geographical locations and historical trajectories. While research and writing focused on specific nations are important as well, the comparative lens and skepticism towards purely nation-based analysis that are integral parts of postcolonialism allow its practitioners to continue to produce powerful scholarship with a global perspective. The value of these characteristics is especially clear in the context of feminist research, as the complex nature of categories of gender and sexuality throughout the world remain a core concern for those who are invested in the creation of transnational feminist and queer solidarity and the rejection of colonial practices masquerading as feminist action. Kanika Batra's Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities engages in the sort of comparative work that enriches multiple fields and discourses while digging deep into its various contexts. The goal of Batra's project is to offer "a feminist-queer history" based on readings of feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer movement publications from the late 1970s to the late 1990s (1) in order to "chart common grounds of feminist-queer solidarities toward decolonial futures" (2). To this end, over the course of three parts, Batra explores the history and context of feminist and queer publishing in three key nodes of the postcolonial world: Jamaica, India, and South Africa. These three locations are well chosen; they are each national contexts which have played and continue to play a key role in their region's literary and cultural landscape. At the same time, the differences amongst them also are part of why they are worthy of comparison. Jamaica's cultural, economic, and political role in the Caribbean is substantial, but it is a significantly smaller and less populous country than India and South Africa, and, as Batra points out, "their political and economic prominence (as members of the five-nation BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa] group) has ensured greater scrutiny of their records on the rights of women and sexual minorities" (6). South Africa's specific history of apartheid also deeply influences the trajectory of its discourses and practices around gender and sexuality, especially in terms of how they intersect with race. Each country also has a distinct linguistic context, although all three are former British colonies where the use of English continues to have middle- and upper-class connotations. In each of these three, disparate spaces, women and queer people of a variety of gender identities produced activist periodicals that sought to advance feminist and queer liberation causes, in a [End Page 251] variety of deeply contextual ways. In so doing, they produced what Batra calls "print counterpublics" (9) in the Global South. These counterpublics shared many concerns, including those related to sexual and gender-based violence, sexual health, access to contraceptives, and laws that criminalized reproductive and sexual choice. Batra provides thoughtful analysis of her archive to explore how these publications address these concerns. Throughout, she identifies the notable similarities and differences between the various periodicals' approaches, including the strategies adopted in relation to appeals to the concept of human rights, the possibility of influencing government policy, and the development of solidarities with other marginalized communities or interest groups. One of the most vital aspects of Batra's book is that it asserts feminist and queer histories, communities, and conversations that are often forgotten by subsequent generations, not least because they were produced for an immediate audience in the age of print media, giving them an urgency but also almost ephemeral quality. The queer periodicals that she explores are especially difficult to track as they were at times produced in secrecy under the threat of criminalization. In many ways, the archival work behind this monograph is its greatest achievement and intervention. Most of its readers, after all, will not have been recipients of The Jamaica Gaily News, Shamakami: Forum for South Asian feminist lesbians, or the Durban-based women's magazine, Speak. Images...