The Herculean endurance it takes to produce a dissertation as a scholar oceans away from home amidst regimes constantly felling you emotionally, financially, politically cannot be sustained solo, despite my best efforts. First and foremost, my thanks to my advisor and the chair of the English department, Dr. Deepika Bahri, who, in 2019, took a chance on my scholarly vision, and sent me an email after my offer from Emory, expressing excitement that was “afoot” at the prospect of my arrival with her “leading the charge.” These little gestures offer great mileage for a scholar like me who runs on fumes of interface and affirmation in this solitary writerly life. I am thankful for her posh soirées, our delicate conversations on literature, this blighted academy that we love so much, and the pursuit of a good life, and, for me, most importantly, her scholarship, so rich yet light, stylish and severe, from which I learned that, yes, there are more ways than one to be a literary scholar: to write with panache without relinquishing any of the complexities of our thoughts. Thank you, Dr. Bahri, for your mentorship.

Dr. Harshita Mruthinti Kamath in the MESAS department at Emory has been my north star. She is a teacher and scholar par excellence from whom I have learned patience with my students, synthesis with my peers, thoroughness in my research, and grace with powers towards whom we turn our critical eye. Throughout my time at Emory, she has been an enthusiastic and enterprising interlocutor, enlightening me constantly to the work of others, and showing me how important it is to build community through a more diverse citational practice. She has created opportunities for me through workshops and conferences, lectureships, and prizes that few senior scholars in the academy do for young folks like me. I am grateful to have met her and to have been her student.

My thanks to Dr. Paul Kelleher in English, whose feedback on my chapter drafts have always been constructive, encouraging, and kind. Whenever we have had a chance to follow up in person or via Zoom, I have always admired our conversations on queer literature that take us meandering through their resonances in cinema and television, music and fine art, to show how as literary scholars in this postmodern age, we are only ever interdisciplinary. My thanks to Kareem Khubchandani at Tufts who agreed to serve on my committee. I admire LaWhore Vagistan as performer and scholar, and have parlayed this glorious Aunty’s intricate sociocultural pastiche to the wonder and frisson of many of my students. Thank you, both, for all that you do for our young queer students in these days where we might feel antagonised by the powers that be.

I am indebted to the professional wisdom and generous friendship of Dr Gautham Reddy, Emory’s South Asian Studies and Religion Librarian, who helped me anchor myself as scholar and citizen both in this university and in Atlanta. I am grateful for his employment of me as his Cataloguing Assistant which brought me in proximity to queer South Asian archives of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, which I have used both in my own research, and to design assignments that made these materials accessible to my students. I am especially grateful for his collaboration on my spring 2024 series on South Asian queer cinema from the 1990s, “Odbhuth” India, where I cultivated valuable lessons on programming and co-curricular event planning.

Staff members of the Robert W. Woodruff Library service desk are a collective of some of the kindest librarians I have had the pleasure of working with. I express my gratitude to Lyndon Batiste, who brought me on as the student supervisor during my tenure as graduate student at Emory, and introduced me to some of the most enterprising people I havemet. My thanks to Mark D. Johnson, Kandace Clifton, and Khalia Dunn at User Services, Kevin Miller, our Equipment Manager, Jessica Perlove, the Course Reserves Coordinator, and our Senior Accounts Specialist, Rachel Zion. Their effervescence and empathy made this slice of the library a home and refuge for me.

I want to express my gratitude to the dedicated members in libraries and archives across the Atlantic who have supported my research, especially as it pertains to the first chapter of this dissertation. I am indebted to the staff of King’s College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge, especially Rebecca Hughes, Assistant Archivist there; members of Special Collections at the University of Reading; and personnel at the Henry W. And Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. My thanks also to Peter Parker, the estate of J. R. Ackerley, and Penguin Random House for permissions.

Jareema Hylton has been a steadfast colleague and friend of mine throughout the program. I could not have weathered many of the challenges of writing, our solitary 20s, and the demands of academia without her. To Gedaliah Dreyfuss, I owe my short-lived love: for Atlanta, for a life beyond my work, for that brief tease of domesticity that remains forever elusive to me. Thank you, always, for the Cajun Riviera. I owe my health to doctors, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners at Student Health Services and Emory University Hospital, Midtown whose dedication and kindness to my body kept me alive, long enough to finish this dissertation.

This dissertation is for my friends I made at Oxford: Young Sun Park, YuHsuan Chuang, Madeleine Mitchell, and, especially, Lorraine Lau. They believed and affirmed the ambition of my research, and had faith that it will find its home in some institution some day.

Thank you, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, our Director of Graduate Studies, and my teaching mentor, for adding fuel to those affirmations when I was first making my inquiries about applying to Emory back in 2018, and for your kind yet firm directions towards this degree’s completion. I have learned precision and grace from you manifold. I am grateful to my Oxford mentors, Dr. Dominic Davies, Dr. Michelle Kelly, and Dr. Graham Riach who have supported my work. My Jadavpur professors, namely, Dr. Ramit Samaddar, Dr. Sonia Sahoo, and Dr. Sutanuka Ghosh gave me the wind I needed to lift off as an unassuming literature undergrad in Kolkata. This dissertation is in memory of the late Dr. Santanu Biswas, whom I admired and was unnerved by in equal measure. It is for Dr. Ananda Lal: with age, I hope I am able to practice my scholarship with half the grace, skill, and conviction with which you have held many generations of Jadavpur students in rapture.

My grandmother and comrade, Sukumari Paul (1950-2024), would have loved some of the images and issues this dissertation conjures, if I ever had the opportunity to return to Bengal or Assam in those little pockets of reprieve amid the pandemic, and translate my words for her. I do not come from a family of readers, so I am thankful for Sourjya Mitra, my honorary sibling, who reads my words, always, gently, without bias, and has found something worthy there. Thank you, Sourjya, for affirming my work, but, most importantly, for your friendship, which has been a steady source of solace for me, and for your intelligence, that nourishes me, and inspires me to think and be better. Even though they sometimes struggle, in their own words, to read my scholarly work, yet, have always believed that I have scholastic worth to be out in the world, I thank my mother, Tanima Paul, and my father, Ranadhir Chakraborty, to whom I owe this mind, body, and soul, with which I fight daily, to hone my craft, my trade, and seek a seat at the table.