DISSONANT INTIMACIES, Feminist Reflections on Southern Decoloniality

220pp., paperback, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2026 

ISBN: 9781776149902

Srila Roy explores recent interventions into higher education that seek to produce new forms of knowledge and solidarity across gender, race, caste and location/borders, and reflects on the limits and possibilities of a global decolonial feminist agenda in the Global South.

Roy has found the practice of transnational feminism difficult, even fraught, when faced with movements such as South Africa’s Fees Must Fall, India’s #MeToo and resistance to the genocide in Palestine. She reminds us that the Global South is not one thing, raising the stakes for decolonial feminist knowledge production and transnational solidarity while stressing the importance of building new epistemic infrastructures that orient us towards the South.

"Dissonant Intimacies must be one of the most erudite critiques yet of treasured positions in critical theory, including decolonisation, feminism, critical race theory and more. Writing from the vantage point of transnational feminism, Srila Roy brooks no holy cows and takes us beyond a circular politics of lament by advancing new knowledge while enjoining a solidarity buoyed by honesty and hope." Jonathan Jansen, DIstinguised  Professor of Education, Stellenbosch University

"Roy refutes the idea of a homogeneous global South, instead exploring frictions and asymmetries within South-South collaborations. She brilliantly analyses internal colonisation, caste privilege and nativism. She also sharply interrogates the infrastructure of academic publishing to ask what actual decolonisation in knowledge production might look like.' Ashwini Tambe, Professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington university

Srila Roy is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the author of Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India and Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement.