Caste, Gender, Diaspora
The transnational resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement has incited communities across the globe to raise their voices against discrimination and inequality and to work across demographics and colonial histories to reflect more broadly on shared affinities and political solidarities. The resonances between caste and race have been an especially important site for rethinking global activism and political praxis: comparative and historical studies of caste societies, that is, societies characterized by durable forms of heritable hierarchy has provoked impassioned debate across the South Asian diaspora.
A recent wave of caste protections has swept across the country with universities like Harvard, Brown, Brandeis, the California State University system adding caste as a protected category under their non-discrimination policies. The Columbia University Senate added caste to its non-discrimination policy on April 28, 2023, arguing that “there was no conversation about caste on university campuses.” Barnard announced the inclusion of caste in its anti-discrimination policy on September 14, 2023. Meanwhile, Seattle became the first city to outlaw caste discrimination details, while SB403 seeks to put California on the map as the first state to recognize the ongoing harms of caste.
In 2023, Barnard’s Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture will draw on the rich legacy of connected histories and diasporic activism to honor scholarship on caste in diaspora with special focus on the relationship of sexual reproduction and social distinction in making global caste. How might the experience of indenture and migration reshape our understanding of the complex relationality of caste and race? How does caste continue to frame social relations of intimacy and exclusion? What are the perils and potentials of anticaste organizing in the diaspora? These are just a few questions that animate our effort to address emergent perspectives for complicating our approach to the study of caste in diaspora.
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About the Speakrs
Yashica Dutt (she/her) is a leading anti-caste expert, journalist and the award-winning author of the non-fiction memoir, Coming Out as Dalit. Coming Out as Dalit, Dutt’s first book, has been lauded both critically, and embraced by readers. It was recently awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puruskar, 2020 (India’s National Academy of Letters’ Young Writers Award; among the country’s highest literary honors). A meticulously reported memoir that presents a scathing and intimate account of how the caste system brutally affects Dalits in today’s India, Coming Out as Dalit is currently being taught at several universities across the United States.
Yashica Dutt is an emerging figure recognized for highlighting Dalit rights globally and her voice has been instrumental in understanding the realities of caste within the increasingly prominent Indian diaspora. Dutt’s work seeks to expose caste as ‘the invisible arm that turns the gears in nearly every system in India’, and highlights why this issue needs urgent attention. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic and Dutt has been featured on The BBC, The Guardian and PBS Newshour. Dutt graduated from Columbia Journalism School and lives in New York. She is planning to soon release Coming Out as Dalit worldwide.
Gaiutra Bahadur is an associate professor of journalism and English at Rutgers University-Newark. Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the British literary award for artful political writing. Her reporting, essays and literary criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Boston Review, The Guardian and other publications.
The recipient of literary residencies from MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, she is a two-time winner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for prose. Her work as a scholar in the humanities has been recognized and supported with fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, the University of Cambridge, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, among others. A former newspaper staff writer, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 2007-2008 for her reporting on the lives of immigrants and refugees.
Anupama Rao is Professor of History (Barnard) and MESAAS (Columbia). She is Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and spent over 9 years as Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, between 2012-2019.
She is completing a monograph entitled Ambedkar in America; a forthcoming volume, the Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar; and has recently introduced and edited The Many Worlds of R. B. More: Memoir of a Dalit Communist with Wandana Sonalkar (Leftword, 2019), and the edited volume Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (Women Unlimited, 2017) a sequel of sorts to the 2006 Gender and Caste.
In addition to numerous essays, she is also 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.
She directs the Ambedkar Initiative, whose vision includes: situating Ambedkar as a global thinker, and among the twentieth century’s most important voices in the radical democratic tradition; engaged pedagogy; and public outreach. Most of all, it aims to resuscitate the links, both implicit the explicit, between the world’s oldest and the world’s largest democracies.
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Accessibility
For accessibility needs please email skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This is an in-person event, free and open to all. Please review our COVID safety guidelines. Registration is preferred.
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Image credit: “Mai” by Malvika Raj
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This is the 2023 Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture.