out of time: the queer politics of postcoloniality (oxford university press, 2020)
Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament became the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for its threatened imposition of the death penalty and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who lobbied for its passage. Focusing on this Ugandan law and the global frictions that it produced, this book investigates the politics of sexuality and religiosity as well as the political economy of contemporary homophobic moral panics.
Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain – three places that are yoked together by British imperialism, of which anti-sodomy laws are one inheritance. The book explores how colonial memory reverberates in the postcolony, shaping the attitudes of both conservatives and radicals on matters of sex and state.
Awards: Sussex International Theory Prize (2021), ISA International Political Sociology book award (2021)
Symposia: Contexto Internacional, Third World Approaches to International Law Review, Critical Studies on Security
‘This brilliantly-visioned book breaks open the now-stultified debates about sexuality and statecraft. Taking the temporal pulses from the postcolonies, Rao upends the presumed trajectories of normative queer theorizing. A tour de force’
— Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages
‘Out of Time stands out not only as a ground-breaking text in queer and postcolonial interrogations of international politics, but also as a testament to what can be achieved by research that embraces the personal as political’
— Joseph Hills, International Affairs
‘Sitting at the intersection of anthropology, international relations, queer theory and postcolonial studies – but being not entirely within any field – this excellent and refreshing book throws up many new questions. Rahul Rao's voice is engaging without being hectoring, and he explores his topic with nuance, speaking to activist concerns’
— Arvind Narrain, Alternative Law Forum
‘Rao offers a wonderfully untimely engagement with the temporalities of queer politics in the aftermath of colonialism … his work is scholarly and combines impressive breadth of analysis with a fresh, sophisticated, and always generous approach to questions that all too easily prompt simplistic, ungenerous ethical and political answers’
— Kimberly Hutchings, Queen Mary University of London
‘Rao's writing is beautiful, weaving theory, ethnography, history, literature, and autobiography together in the best traditions of postcolonial queer scholarship. This is a brilliant, timely, important book that changes the field’
— Clare Hemmings, London School of Economics and Political Science
‘Timely and important, Rao's Out of Time will sit alongside the work of Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages and Lisa Duggan's The Twilight of Equality as one of those must-read texts on every queer studies syllabus. It is that good’
— Cynthia Weber, author of Queer International Relations