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Caste, Outcaste and Anticaste
Reflections on the Ethics and Politics of Knowledge
Speaker
This talk will reflect on broad trends in the study of caste including debates and discussions drawing on poststructuralist, Marxist, and anthropological approaches which have tended to approach caste as a distinctive form of hierarchy and social distinction. This framing will help to illuminate the challenge of new approaches and intellectual formations, which center critical caste and Dalit studies, scholarship on anticaste thought, and studies of global caste.
How does a politics of the present inflect social transformations of caste, as well as the resistance to its inequities? What are the potentials and the perils to studying caste through global fields of power and comparison? How might we bridge institutional logics and disciplinary constraints in effecting novel forms of critique?
A Q&A session will follow the talk.
Speaker
Anupama Rao
Anupama Rao graduated with a B. A. from the University of Chicago, and a PhD from the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. She is Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and outgoing Senior Editor, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, a position she held between 2012 and 2019.
She is completing a monograph entitled Ambedkar in America, and the forthcoming volume, The Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar. She has recently edited and introduced Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R. B. More (2019). She has edited the 2018 reader Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (2018), a sequel to the well-known and much-circulated volume, Gender and Caste (2006). In addition to numerous essays, she is the author of The Caste Question, a work of social and intellectual history, which has received critical acclaim for transforming the field’s understanding of the relationship between caste and democracy, and for its contributions to political thought and history more broadly.
Anupama directs the Ambedkar Initiative, which approaches B. R. Ambedkar as among the twentieth century’s most important democratic thinkers, and aims to resuscitate links, both implicit the explicit, between the world’s oldest and the world’s largest democracies through institutional and disciplinary histories of Ambedkar’s alma mater, Columbia University through engaged pedagogy and public outreach.
