Forum on Rahul Rao’s Out of Time, Part III: Hopeful Lines? – Method and Style

Abstract In this Forum, six scholars reflect on Rahul Rao’s recent book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality from other geographies, themes and radical possibilities. Part III explores the way Out of Time traces out its argument, focusing especially on Rao’s meaning-making, the care by which he makes distinctions and ambiguities, and the intimacy of his prose. In the first section, Laleh Khalili shows that generosity is key to the book’s method and style. Khalili takes Rao’s brief treatment of Freddie Mercury as emblematic of how Out of Time dwells in ambivalences and thematic echoes across its chapters. Chamon shows how disorientation remains a central question of the book, ‘but not only,’ since Rao also finds key ways to orient politics at the same time. In the second section, Chamon sensitively explores how Rao tries simultaneously to hold together multiple temporalities and permanences, mutations and grammars, and conviviality and oppositionality—all in order to understand how Rao’s lines of prose, first lines and last lines, exist in productive tension with the sovereign lines that make international politics possible.