An Ordinary Landscape of Violence

"This book demonstrates how coloniality replicates the power structure of colonialism, defining all aspects of Guyana. Gender, race, class, and sexual identity nurture violence in these women’s lives. . . . Highly recommended."

"Attentive in its scholarship, ethically focused on the remits of its research, this is not only a text of academic merit, but a living register of queer experience in postcolonial Guyana. Kumar avows her commitment to the book's 33 interview subjects in unambiguous, even devoted terms, underscoring her mission 'to describe what happens to these women-loving women when violence is folded into their lives.'"

"This groundbreaking book is as compelling as it is devastating. . . . This text is noteworthy because it remains one of the only anthropological or historical studies of queer women in former British colonies as well as in the broader Latin America and Caribbean region. . . . The book is also unique for an academic text in its raw and personal perspective. . . . Undoubtedly, Kumar provides groundbreaking ethnographic documentation of the experiences of WLW in Guyana as they relate to the ongoing violence of coloniality and patriarchy."

"An Ordinary Landscape of Violence is an urgent text!  With her ethnographic study of women loving women in Guyana, Preity Kumar shifts the ground for confronting violence in the Caribbean and moves us beyond narrow frames of reference that cite violence as structural, institutional, embodied or interpersonal. The 'everydayness' and 'excess' of violence is presented at the intersections of, and beyond, complex systems of power and difference. A thoughtfully written interdisciplinary text, this is a must read across several fields and sites for the analysis of violence, coloniality, and change."

"In An Ordinary Landscape of Violence, Preity Kumar weaves a beautiful tapestry of the geography and landscape of Guyana, a country complicated by a colonial past and its on-going effects of racial, class, and heteropatriarchal violence. While centering the violence and trauma between women loving women, Kumar also gives us a glimpse of the ways these women negotiate spaces of pleasure."

"A landmark in feminist geography, queer studies, and Caribbean scholarship. By theorizing violence as ordinary affect, Kumar illuminates how statecraft, religion, rurality, jealousy, and despair coalesce in producing vulnerability. . . . Indispensable."