About

Purnima Mankekar is a Professor and Vice Chair in the UCLA Asian American Studies Department. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1993. Her areas of interest include Feminist Media Studies, Post-9/11 Public Cultures, Affect Theories, Outsourcing and Information Technology, Transnational Cultural Studies, South Asian America, and South Asia. Her scholarly work explores media and cultural production, transnational erotics, and the affective organization of everyday life through various media forms. Mankekar has contributed to the understanding of television, erotics, and nationalism in postcolonial India, and her research has been recognized through awards such as the Fulbright Senior Faculty Research Award and the Distinguished Faculty Award from Stanford University. Her publications include edited volumes, special journal issues, and numerous scholarly articles that examine the intersections of media, culture, and transnationalism.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Media studies
• History
• Gender studies
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Law

Selected publications

• The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Transnational Mutations of Racial Capitalism

  Literature · 2026-04-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this article I interrogate how the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist aligns with as well as problematizes racial capitalism. The optic of racial capitalism enables me to trace the film’s articulation of race relations within the US and the power of white supremacy internationally, particularly as they manifest in the geopolitics of the US empire. The optic of racial capitalism foregrounds the inextricability of what Cedric Robinson termed racialism and the historical development of capitalism(s). The film demonstrates how racial capitalism is naturalized through the creation of aspirations for the symbolic markers of upward mobility and the acquisition of wealth, which is to say, cultural as much as financial capital. The film also illustrates that racial capitalism is a work in progress; it is neither singular nor homogeneous in its effect as it mutates across the world; it derives its power from the construction of racial infrastructures, political–economic institutions, states and, as I will argue in this essay, through regimes of racial affect.

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• The Future of Futurity

  2025-01-01

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• Genealogies of Knowledge Production: Information, Data, and Algorithmic World-Making

  Critical AI · 2025-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This essay turns to genealogy as a theoretical framework for situating “data” in postcolonial India. In doing so, it is concerned with mapping the fields of power that produce the genealogies of knowledge within which information, Big Data, and algorithms are generated and embedded. Thus, rather than seek an originary moment or linear history, the article engages the continuities and discontinuities between past and present formations. It first tracks the centrality of information in development projects launched after independence in 1947, then turns to the author's own research and to ethnographies of Aadhaar, the Indian state's Big Data project that entails the production, archiving, and mining of biometric information. Aadhaar's interlinking of databases is deployed toward the creation of taxonomies and the biopolitical management of populations. While is not in itself an “intelligent” platform, Aadhaar's data is available for intensive mining and knowledge production and forms the basis of computational policy formation and decision-making.

  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Futurity

  2025-02-28

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurity—an affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of time—enables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers’ daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futurity’s imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.

  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Futurity

  2025-02-26

  book1st authorCorresponding
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• Algorithmic archaeologies and genealogies of hate: hidden histories and the scrambled temporalities of political affect

  Postcolonial Studies · 2024-07-02 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• 5 Affective Sovereignties: Mobility, Emplacement, Potentiality

  2023-03-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Over-the-Top

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  In this chapter, we examine online (OTT or ‘over-the-top’) media to unpack the manner in which caste has been rendered (in)visible and (ill)legible in cultural productions portraying Indian marriages. These OTT productions, which include Amazon’s Made in Heaven and Netflix’s The Big Day and Indian Matchmaking, have been launched during a historical moment marked by a precipitous rise in caste-based violence in India. Yet, in contrast to an earlier moment when paradigmatic films like Achoot Kanya (1936) and Sujata (1959) directly confronted the fraught relationship between caste, gender, and sexuality, caste is an absent presence in these OTT portrayals. We focus on the Netflix series, Indian Matchmaking, to unpack how, despite the fact that it is rarely explicitly mentioned, caste is always present in discussions of skin colour, ‘community’, and the discourse of the ‘good family’. This is striking given that caste remains one of the most unbreachable boundaries in marriage in India and across multiple Indian diasporas. Indian Matchmaking is particularly significant in how it renders (in)visible and (il)legible the transnational travels of caste: it brings to the fore the complex relationship between racialised chromatics and gendered formations of kinship in Indian American spaces.

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• Capital on the Move

  2022-03-16 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Quantico, an American thriller television series aired on the ABC, begins with the aftermath of an explosion: Grand Central Station in New York City has been razed to the ground in a terrorist attack. Mobility and the production of cultural and racial difference have long been intimately related and, in contexts of contemporary capitalism, the hypermediation of difference is co-implicated with the entrenchment of neoliberal multiculturalism and late-capitalist mutations of cosmopolitanism. Brand Chopra exemplifies how discourses of racial difference structure the production of value in capitalism. Displaced onto multicultural difference and cosmopolitanism, inequalities of race emerge as structuring forces in the consolidation of the security state and racial capitalism. Labor arbitrage is a prerequisite for outsourcing to be profitable for transnational and multinational companies and becomes a process of racialization when it is based on a calculus according to which the labor and time of workers in the Global South are undervalued.

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• Affective Sovereignties

  2022-12-19 · 12 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Akhil Gupta

  45 shared

• Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

  40 shared

• Vasudha Dalmia

  37 shared

• Nilanjana Chatterjee

  36 shared

• Saleem Ahmadullah

  New York University

  36 shared

• Robert Horwitz

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  36 shared

• Sharon Hays

  36 shared

• Farah Zaib Khan

  36 shared

Awards & honors

• Fullbright Senior Faculty Research Award for research on cal…
• Distinguished Faculty Award, Asian American Studies, Stanfor…
• Bunting Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,…