
Namrata Verghese
Namrata Verghese is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature. She is also pursuing a joint JD at Stanford Law School. Her work spans postcolonial studies, queer theory, and the legal humanities.
Project Description
My work spotlights encounters between British colonial law and queer literary production in twentieth century India. Specifically, it examines four trials in which queer literature came under legal scrutiny. These trials—held on grounds ranging from obscenity to “hurt sentiments”—offer glimpses into how legality interacts with queer literary production. What strategies did writers use to depict queerness without being censored and subject to legal charges? How did the law adapt to such strategies? How does the longue durée of these colonial laws continue to shape queer South Asian literature? I use the dense space of the courtroom to think more broadly about the affective dimensions of law and literature, arguing that affect is central to legality, rather than divorced from it. In tracing how colonial legal instruments attempt to police and mute unruly queer affects, my project conceptualizes the law as a desiring entity with its own unruly affective investments. Every attempt to police desire is, after all, also an expression of desire. I trace affect in legal texts using methods from literary studies (affect theory, close reading) and the digital humanities (sentiment analysis). Such a model ruptures static western understandings of the law as objective and disembodied, and instead opens up alternative avenues in legal humanities scholarship.