Join us for International Women's Day to celebrate the presentation of Lata Mani's latest book, Myriad Intimacies (2022). Lata Mani, Ph.D., is a feminist historian, cultural critic, contemplative writer, and filmmaker. She has published books and articles on a broad range of issues, from feminism and colonialism to illness, spiritual philosophy, and contemporary politics. She is the author of The Integral Nature of Things: Critical Reflections on the Present (Routledge, 2013), Interleaves: Ruminations on Illness and Spiritual Life (Yoda, 2011), Sacred Secular: Contemplative Cultural Critique (Routledge, 2009), and Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (University of California Press, 1989). She is the director of the film, Leela’s Journey (2009). She is based in Oakland, CA.

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.

This event is presented by Las Maestras Center for Xicana(x) Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Praxis, and co-sponsored by the Capps Center and other UCSB centers. 

Here is the video for this event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6yRZyo73CU