Caste and Race

Catalog description

Put on your goggles. What if instead of seeing beyond difference we tried to see through it? In this course we will consider caste and race and ask how they have enabled modes of seeing, thinking, being. How have critics, theorists, poets and artists attempted to define, undefine, imagine, deconstruct, historicize, problematize, race and caste? For the Black British critic Stuart Hall, the question was not only of race in and for itself, but of 'the whole social formation, which is racialized.' For B.R. Ambedkar, the father of both the Indian constitution and the untouchable caste - 'Dalit' - movement in India, caste was not 'a wall of bricks, like a line or barbed wire,' but 'a state of mind.' We examine how the varied experiences and discourses of caste and race might intersect, both historically, and in our contemporary moment. We will study a range of narratives of caste and race - that of the migrant and the student, the laborer and the prostitute - in fiction, poetry, film, painting and music. We also examine critical theories of race and caste that have produced new questions, terminologies and categories: fugitivity and humiliation, double consciousness and Dalit love.