This special edition of Porn Studies entitled ‘South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene’ makes a substantial and long overdue contribution to the study of pornography and sexual cultures in South Asia. Importantly, the articles contained in this special edition collectively explore and complicate a diversity of cultures, practices and traditions across a region to critically engage with, rather than reproduce, western stereotyped notions of a homogeneous South Asia or ‘Indian subcontinent’.
It has been our ambition since the inception of Porn Studies that we would commission and publish research articles that speak to the diversity and specifics of sexual representation, sexual cultures in territories outside of the West and pornography's place in these contexts. We are therefore delighted that Anirban K. Baishya and Darshana S. Mini responded to this call by collecting together these fascinating articles for this special edition.
Their collection draws together a breadth of scholarship that pays attention to a diverse range of objects of study and social and cultural contexts in a region that is equally diverse and various. The editors have produced a substantial introductory article ‘Translating Porn Studies: Lessons from the Vernacular’ that establishes a critical frame for the subsequent articles. Not only do the authors foreground the mechanisms through which South Asia is constructed as an entity in Area Studies and the local divergences and practices that frame the consumption of pornography in the region, but also that the concept of the ‘vernacular’ becomes a lens through which to consider what pornography might mean in specific regional contexts.
We are mindful to Baishya and Mini's concern about the imperialist history that undergirds the invocation of ‘South Asia' as a region. This is a concern that motivates and provides impetus for the articles presented here. As Baishya and Mini note in their detailed and reflexive introduction ‘the regional category of South Asia that is at work in this issue invokes multiple temporal and spatial registers – of now separate geopolitical entities and nations that are tied together by longer histories of colonialism and fractured modernities.’
Notwithstanding this problem we recognize the value of sharing research that coalesces under this heuristic banner for the field of porn studies more generally. It is essential that porn studies, as a discipline, is alive to the lacunae of Western Anglo-centric focus and it will continue to be our ambition to encourage, support and publish academic work on pornography that attends to production, consumption and critical contexts outside of Anglo-American culture.