An Ordinary Landscape of Violence

Women Loving Women in Guyana

“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.”
— Halimah A. F. DeShong, coeditor of Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender and Sexuality
“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.”
— Beverly Bain, assistant professor of women gender and sexuality studies in the Historical Studies Department at the University of Toronto-Mississauga Campus