INTRODUCTORY NOTE

This conversation about feminist friendships and coauthorships emerged from a collective interview with Richa Nagar, conducted in 2011 by Ozlern Aslan, Nadia Hasan, Omme-Salma Rahemtullah, Nishant Upadhyay, and Begiim Uzun (hereafter, the Toronto Group) for the Turkish feminist magazine Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaçimlar (Feminist approaches in culture and politics). (1) The Toronto Group are five doctoral students and student workers at the University of Toronto and at York University in Toronto. Located in departments of political science and sociology, they formed their group as a critical intellectual space outside their formal academic affiliations and conducted a series of interviews with feminists of color that were published by Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaçimlar. Richa Nagar is a feminist scholar, teacher, and alliance worker who writes as a theorist, poet, theater worker, and sangtin in English, Hindi, and Awadhi. Her academic research has evolved at the nexus of transnational and postcolonial feminisms, critical geography, and political praxis. This conversation, which came about in 2014 and 2105, focuses centrally on her coauthored book with Sangtin Writers, Sangtin Yatra: SaatZingiyon Mein Lipta Nari Vimarsh (2004), which was published in English in 2006 as Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India, and her more recent book Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism (2014). (2)

JOURNEY OF A FRIENDSHIP

Intrigued by the collective efforts embodied by the book Playing with Fire, we, the Toronto Group, sat down in 2011 with Richa to talk about the process of collaborative writing, how it challenges hegemonic modes of knowledge production, and what types of relationships sustain such an engagement. That initial interview sparked conversations about each of our journeys as activists, intellectuals, and immigrants who live multiple, often bi-national, political lives. After the interview, the Toronto Group undertook the intensive labor of transcribing and editing it over several months, and we emailed it to Richa in India in December 2011 for further refining before translating it into Turkish for publication. An opportunity to read and reflect on the transcribed interview proved generative for Richa, for whom it sowed the seeds for an upcoming lecture for the Gender, Place, and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Lecture series, which she delivered in February 2012. (3) The "truths" of coauthoring feminisms that crystallized in this lecture owed their origins to the interview and led Richa to envision the book that would eventually become Muddying the Waters.

Thus, our initial face-to-face meeting paved the way for a serendipitous and close intellectual partnership, giving the interview a long and vibrant afterlife and an important place in Richa's intellectual journey as a sangtin (an Awadhi word for close companions in solidarity) and in the translations of that journey for the academy. When, in 2013, Richa learned about Feminist Studies's interest in the theme of feminist friendships, she wrote to the Toronto Group proposing to build upon the interview. Two and a half years after our initial meeting, we found ourselves connected again across continents, revisiting our conversation, and...