Myriad Intimacies

“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

“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 a book of contrasts. It is a layered work that grapples with macro ideas, and at the same time, takes an intimate look at a microscopic aspect of a large idea." - Nandita Chowdhury Bose, India Currents

"Myriad Intimacies undoes staid hierarchies and binaries that structure scholarly and activist thought—between the spiritual/intellectual, mind/matter, observation/theory, art/science—and instead celebrates the radical interconnectedness with all persons and things as a precondition of creativity. In so doing, Mani reminds us that intellectual and activist work express, at their heart, aspects of our creativity." - Saiba Varma, Anthropology Book Forum

"Myriad Intimacies reflects an ambitious endeavor to rethink the time, form, and structure of our lives and the interrelated world we live in. . . . This book will be particularly valuable to those interested in alternative style of critical writing because it sets up a good example for those who want to perhaps challenge the standards for the 'rigor' of academic writing, in terms of the modes of critique and presentation." - Da Ye Kim, E3W Ethnic and Third World Literatures

"The experiment of Myriad Intimacies aims not just for scholarly innovation but also for the reimagination of the contours of the world we inhabit together." - Swati Rana, The Immanent Frame

"I read Myriad Intimacies with joy and wonder. It is a beautiful book that frames itself as an offering, rather than an intervention — a spiritual journey between secular and sacred. It pushes against knowledge as capture, and for an understanding of life as sensuous, sentient, and situated." - Miriam Ticktin, The Immanent Frame