The Biopolitics of Caste

Anupama Rao, Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Barnard, will speak about what she terms the “violence of recognition” through the reading of a recent “caste atrocity” that occurred in 2006, which involved the sexual brutalization and murder of a Dalit family in western India. Her lecture will address the symbology of caste violence through an engagement with (and extension of) the concept of biopolitics associated with the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.