Myriad Intimacies

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. Duke University Press, 2022. 2023 Silver Award Winner in the Lyric Prose or Hybrid Works Category presented by Nautilus Book Awards

Featured in The Immanent Frame Experimental Book Forum with essays by editor Mona Oraby, Ken Wissoker, Swati Rana, Miriam Ticktin and me.

Endorsements

“There is a quality of luminous brilliance in this evocative offering that Lata Mani has placed in our hands. Expansive in vision, vast in scope, microscopic in attentiveness, Myriad Intimacies takes up the existential and the quotidian dimensions of our lives while remaining rooted in an ancient question whose urgency has never left: How do we be human, webbed as we are with ALL of existence, all that is, without limit, without exception? Its polyfluous registers bring us home to the multiple intimacies of our imbricated lives, the intimacies inside ourselves, the cadence of breath. There are no strangers here. Myriad Intimacies is a grand alchemy.” — M. Jacqui Alexander, author of Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred

“Myriad Intimacies is that rare book that continues to haunt long after you put it down. Lata Mani’s deft, precise, and beautiful use of words, images, and concepts challenges us to think deeply about our interwoven relationalities and interdependencies as travelers on this earth. Drawing on wide-ranging, often unexpected, multiscalar bodies of knowledge, Myriad Intimacies is a profoundly theoretical, emotionally textured, and rich reflection on the material and metaphysical intimacies that sustain all our lives. A book to savor, guide, and sustain us in these difficult times.” — Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity