In Myriad Intimacies postcolonial theorist, spiritual practitioner, and filmmaker Lata Mani oscillates between text and video, poetry and prose, genre and form, register and voice, and secular and sacred to offer a transmedia exploration of the interrelatedness of lives, concepts, frameworks, and aspects of self. She draws on concepts from tantra-a philosophy that celebrates matter as alive, embodiment as sacred, and the senses as a form of intelligence-alongside feminist, critical race, and cultural theory to meditate on the ways in which everyone and everything exists in mutually constitutive interrelations. Addressing issues ranging from desire, the body, nature, and love, to otherness, identity politics, social justice, #MeToo, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Mani foregrounds the power and necessity of recognizing relationality as foundational. Throughout, she offers a way of reframing what we think we know and how we come to know it, demonstrating that it is only by acknowledging and embracing the indivisible and interdependent nature of existence that we restore our true intimacy with each other and the world.

About the Author
Lata Mani is an independent scholar and filmmaker and author of The Integral Nature of Things: Critical Reflections on the Present and SacredSecular: Contemplative Cultural Critique.

Reviews
"Myriad Intimacies is a book of contrasts. It is a layered work that grapples with macro ideas, and at the same time, takes an intimate look at a microscopic aspect of a large idea." - Nandita Chowdhury Bose (India Currents) "Myriad Intimacies undoes staid hierarchies and binaries that structure scholarly and activist thought-between the spiritual/intellectual, mind/matter, observation/theory, art/science-and instead celebrates the radical interconnectedness with all persons and things as a precondition of creativity. In so doing, Mani reminds us that intellectual and activist work express, at their heart, aspects of our creativity." - Saiba Varma (Anthropology Book Forum)



Book Information
ISBN 9781478015659
Author Lata Mani
Format Hardback
Page Count 277
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 340g