Race and Caste: A Conversation

Catalog description

Isabel Wilkerson’s widely read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), deploys the term “caste”, understood as a “fixed and embedded ranking of human value”, to explore persistent rigidities and hierarchies of anti-black racism in the United States. In so doing, she partakes of a long-standing conversation between historians, anthropologists and sociologists, as well as writers and activists, primarily across the United States and South Asia, who have put these two terms in conversation. This course explores not only the analogies and differences drawn between these two terms, but also attends to histories and contexts of borrowing and comparative framings through which this conversation has unfolded. We explore histories of empire, slavery and indenture through which racial orders and transformations of caste structures emerged within colonial modernities, drawing on South Asia and the Black Atlantic world. We examine sociological and anthropological theories of race and caste within the United States and South Asia, examining “affirmative action” in the United States and the “reservation system” in India. We explore the writings of scholar-activists W.E.B Dubois and B.R. Ambedkar, a key figure of the anti-caste Dalit movement in India, who brought these terms together for their own ends. Tracking Black/Dalit Marxism, Black/Dalit feminism, the Black Panthers/ Dalit Panthers, autobiographies, films and journalism, we examine conceptualizations of race and caste in movements for social justice across systems of inequality, national borders, and the differentiated workings of empires and colonialisms. In addition to Wilkerson, some key texts include Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, Dubois’ writings such as “Caste in America” (1904), Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste among others.