When one thinks of histories of oppression in the world, Caste in India and Race in the United States rise to the surface of our collective conscience as naturalized models of systems of exclusion. At the same time, such legacies of historical oppression provide an impetus for social change in the present. This panel brings together an emerging body of work on Race, Caste, and Indigeneity to focus on two aims: 1) to present a new, historically informed understanding of the workings of caste and race in and beyond South Asia; and 2) to provide the basis for a comparative understanding of the long-run processes of caste and race and their reproduction through historical time in tracing experiences of structural violence rooted in the South Asian experience. Spanning India, the United States and the Caribbean, the panel focuses on historical actors and the long histories of ethnic ranking and discrimination through different time periods (nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries) and spaces. But with its focus on empirical depth and particularities, it opens avenues to frame new solidarities within anti-racist and anti-caste endeavors, in academia and beyond. How do our histories shape our present, and does this present shape the potentialities of emancipatory futures? This question lies at the heart of the panel.

Shailaja Paik, in imagining women’s networks from the margins, envisions a new feminist politics that centers on the relationality between Dalit and Black women. Balmurli Natrajan, on the other hand, emphasizes on the productive potentiality of divergences by cautioning against the relativist perils of multiculturalism in the politics of resistance. Purvi Mehta locates the affective in transnational affiliation between Dalits and African American communities. Uday Jain takes these affiliations to a dialogue between Ambedkar and Du Bois in socially restructuring the imagined communities of the oppressed through public education. Gaurika Mehta explores the co-construction of Race and Caste in the Caribbean through the figure of the indentured worker, illuminating nuanced processes of othering. Sanghamitra Das complicates the discourse of Indigeneity in India by placing the health of the indentured worker, particularly women, at the center of casteized labor relations in colonial and post-colonial plantations. Finally, Pinky Hota, offering an alternate conception of South Asian Indigeneity, places the Indigenous Adivasi at the center of caste capitalism in India, challenging ahistoric framings of Adivasi/Indigenous exceptionalisms.

The panel therefore brings together scholars from diverse disciplines utilizing historical methods, ranging from archives and historiographies to oral histories and narratives. Together, these papers generate a conversation around Race, Caste as well as Indigeneity that enable new thinkings on emancipatory politics, attentive to the role of state, economic and cultural institutions in reproducing entrenched systemic exclusions. The authors thus bring out the convergences and divergences of experiencing otherness in South Asia, the United States, the Caribbean, and beyond.