AFRC2219 - ‘Global Inequalities’: A Comparative History of Caste and Race.

Can we deploy a comparative lens to understand the categories of caste and race better? Does their juxtaposition illuminate new facets of these two structures of ‘global inequalities’? The course seeks to explore these questions by systematically studying how both caste and racial institutions, structures, and identities were historically produced, transformed, and challenged through their global circulation from the nineteenth-century to the present. Caste and race have been old co-travelers, and their various points of intersection can be traced at least to the nineteenth century. And so, in this course we will embark upon a historical adventure, one replete with stories of violence, political intrigue, intense emotions, as also episodes of incandescent resistance. Together, we will trace the genealogy of how modern categories of ‘caste’ and ‘race’ were systematically composed by colonial knowledge production, orientalist writings, and utilitarian discourse, both in Europe and the colonies. While colonialism and the global hegemony of European modernity were crucial to the co-constitution and the circulation of caste and race, anti-caste and anti-race politics too have historically brought a unique comparative lens to these two categories. And so, this course will also include a close analysis of critical works on caste and race by activists and intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the present from all over the world.
Taking our key question about the comparative study of caste and race as out point of departure, the course will interrogate this juxtaposition by closely studying some crucial analytical grounds commonly shared by the two structures in question. We will explore the intersections, exchanges, and divergences between caste and race by approaching them from the perspective of violence, colonialism, Slavery and Abolition, mid-twentieth century writings in American and South Asian politics, experience and testimonios, and subaltern international solidarities.