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.
List of Videos ix
Acknowledgments xi
In your hands this book xiii
Introduction. Integral Entanglements, Formal Experiments 1
1. The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Tantric Invitation to Humanity 9
2. The Nocturnes with Nicolás Grandi 14
3. Speaking to the Sacred 18
4. The Algorithm of Love 22
5. De Sidere 7 with Nicolás Grandi 23
6. Intimate Stranger 30
7. Tantra and the Body 31
8. To Bend into the Wind 34
9. Love Is Not a State of Exception 39
10. California Poppy 42
11. "A Glorious Thing Made Up of Stardust": What Pat Parker and Rohith Vemula Ask Us to Consider 43
12. Benediction 48
13. Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than You Think: Beyond the Rhetoric of Otherness 49
14. Words Fall into Empty Mind with Nicolás Grandi 54
15. Does the Mind Have a Heart? 55
16. Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones . . . but Words? On Social Justice Rhetoric 58
17. "What I Noticed Most Was That I Had Become a Poet": Renewing the Language of Politics 63
18. Continual Evolution 68
19. Am I Doing Enough? Crisis, Activism, and the Search for Meaning 69
20. The Tantra of Action 73
21. "We Inter Are": Identity Politics and #MeToo 77
22. A Malleable Border Teeming with Life 84
Afterword 87
Dark Goddess 96
Out of the One Many 94
In Silence the Mind Breathes with Nicolás Grandi 97
References 99
Index
