Eine Weise, eine Kriegerin

Meena Kandasamy writes about the Mithuna couple, a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu, India, depicting lovers. Kandasamy unfurls a multi-layered, multi-directional narrative built from images, questions and contradictions evoked by the sculpture. "How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it?" Kandasamy asks and then examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. Such knowledge complicates easy associations of love that may be evoked by the couple.Refusing any impulse to idealize or exoticize, Kandasamy connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom, and how. She sets the intimate alongside the institutional to interrogate terms such as decolonize, restitution and preservation. Through an astonishing stylistic mix, including Twitter, academic discourse, poetry and memoir, she talks back, forward and sideways with the object. Series Objects Talk Back published by Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss

THE WOMEN'S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED POET AND PROVOCATEUR<BR>An iconic, must-read novel of incels, influencers and AK-47s<BR>'Best book of the year' NUSSAIBAH YOUNIS<BR>'One of my books of the year' NICOLA STURGEON<BR>'Fearless and brilliant' LEMN SISSAY<BR>'One of the greats' NIKITA GILL<BR>'A South Asian feminist Uncut Gems' ASH SARKAR<BR>'Brilliant and brutal' PILAR QUINTANA<BR>'A tour de force' NIKESH SHUKLA<BR><BR>I mute the audio. I replay the video four times.<BR>It is not me. It is my fucking face.<BR><BR>Amrita Chaturvedi goes by Amy. Amy identifies as a communist on Twitter (her profile omits a stint on Big Brother and a billionaire daddy running the show at the High Court of Delhi).<BR><BR>Then reality hits: a deepfake porno of her forwarded around by WhatsApp aunties goes viral. On her birthday, Amy wakes to a stoning in the digital town square that could cancel the likes of Kim Kardashian.<BR><BR>Her executioners? A cartel of unhinged virgins styling themselves after V for Vendetta - except these keyboard warriors are on a ruthless crusade to wipe out desi jezebels and Make India Hindu Again.<BR><BR>A muscular, monumental work of internet literature in which the online turns offline turns bloody, Fieldwork as a Sex Object is not a novel you read but a novel that reads you: what are you prepared to risk for what you claim to believe?<BR><BR>'Fieldwork as a Sex Object will simultaneously shock and reel you in' VOGUE<BR>'One of the most urgent voices of tomorrow' HARPER'S BAZAAR<BR>'Kandasamy is fearless on the page' ESQUIRE<BR>'A one-woman, agitprop literary-political movement' INDEPENDENT<BR>'One of fiction's most fiery and unclassifiable' GUARDIAN