Description
Feminist and queer scholarship has read the figure of the 'uncle' – or the “avunculate” (Sedgwick, 1994) – as holding the potential to carve out space for non-conformity, or for thinking relationality beyond the nuclear family form. Yet invocations of the ‘uncle’ also call up more unsavoury references to figures that uphold these very structures: from Uncle Sam, to Uncle Tom, to the right-wing Hindu ‘Sanghi’ Uncle, to the uncle circulating online conspiracy theories. Centering this less sympathetic reading of the uncle, this paper homes in on a particular iteration of this figure: the Hindu, upper caste diasporic uncle, operating in lockstep with capitalism, imperialism, and (settler-)colonialism. In this way, this paper moves away from prefiguring the uncle as necessarily challenging convention, or as otherwise transgressive – a tendency that also shapes scholarship on diaspora. The paper similarly pushes against particularist, domestic, reading of the uncle. Rather than privileging the fragment, as is common to feminist and diaspora studies, drawing inspiration from emergent literature within ‘Critical Aunty Studies’, this paper explores the varied, political, economic, and cultural projects mobilized through the figure of the uncle. Reading the uncle in relation to scholarship on middlemen, compradors, and the native elite, this paper shows that the kinship and affiliative networks of these figures are not territorially bound, nor is the nuisance they present confined to the proverbial kitchen table. Instead, these uncles uphold
and advance wider hierarchical and exclusionary structures that undergird contemporary crises, presenting a problem on a global scale.
