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Source: Las castas. Anonymous, 18th century, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. We use this art to signal some of the older and non-South Asian origins of the word "caste"/"casta"; in this case in historical forms of ethno-racial hierarchy in Mexico.
Speaker Bios
Amit R. Baishya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. His monograph Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival was published in 2018 by Routledge. His essays have appeared in Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, Himal South Asian, South Asian Review and several collected editions. He is also the co-editor (along with Prof. Yasmin Saikia) of a collection of essays titled Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017). A co-edited volume with Prof. Suvadip Sinha titled Postcolonial Animality is forthcoming in 2019 (Routledge). Baishya translates short stories and novels from Assamese to English. His translation of Debendranath Acharya’s Assamese novel, Jangam (The Movement, Vitasta Press), on the “forgotten long march” of Indians from Burma during WWII was released in May 2018.
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Mona Bhan is Otto L. Sonder Jr. Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University, Indiana. She is also the co-editor of HIMALAYA, the flagship journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Bhan has authored Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? (Routledge); and co-authored Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (Cambridge). She recently co-edited a book on Kashmir, Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (UPenn), with scholars from the Critical Kashmir Studies collective of which she is a founder member. Her research articles on resource and territorial sovereignties, military and corporate humanitarianism, environmentalism, gender, race, and tourism, have appeared in the Critique of Anthropology, Biography, Cultural Anthropology, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of Asian Studies, and South Atlantic Quarterly. She is also the co-editor of a special issue on States of Occupation in the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law.
Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza is a Lecturer in the History of Race and Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. His work deals with questions of caste and race, in India and Mexico, during the twentieth century. Jesús is currently working on two projects. The first one is an intellectual history of the Indian intellectual B.R. Ambedkar looking at the way in which Ambedkar linked the concept of untouchability to broader political questions such as political representation, race, space and liberty. In his second project, Jesús has been studying the influence of the American philosophy of pragmatism in the Global South.
Sureshi M. Jayawardene is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University. Her research raises questions about Black geographies, race, coloniality, Africanity, and self-definition in the lives of Afrodiasporic communities in South Asia whose ancestors were brought to the region through the Indian Ocean slave trade. Jayawardene also serves as an affiliate faculty with the Digital Humanities Center and the Department of Women’s Studies at SDSU. She also co-directs the Afrometrics research institute.
Mabel Denzin Gergan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University. Her research in South Asia combines political ecology, tribal/indigenous studies, anti-colonial and materialist theory. So far her research has focused on the Indian Himalayan borderlands and the oppositional trends shaping the relationship between the margins and the center, characterized on the one hand by state-led development interventions in this region and on the other, through the movement of racialized bodies from the borderland to India's urban heartland.
Pallavi Gupta is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, law, and space. Her PhD research focuses on caste, materiality, affect, and waste. She has worked for many years with noted non-profits in India on issues related to gender and child rights and has published on these issues, in prominent journals like Economic and Political Weekly and Indian Journal of Social Work.
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Dolly Kikon is a senior lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the political economy of extractive resources, migration, development initiatives, gender relations, and human rights in Northeast India. Prior to obtaining her doctoral degree in Anthropology from Stanford University, Dr. Kikon worked as a human rights lawyer and a community organizer in India. Focusing on land rights among tribal communities in Northeast India, her legal advocacy works extensively dealt with constitutional provisions with regard to land and resource ownership, as well as autonomy arrangements for securing ethnic rights and guarantees. She is the author of Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India and Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (forthcoming book with Bengt Karlsson. She is also working on a co-authored book titled Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism and Urbanism in Dimapur with Duncan McDuie-Ra.
Jessica Namakkal is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in the International Comparative Studies Program at Duke University. Her research focuses on the global networks established through colonial conquest and the ways in which movements for decolonization have utilized, challenged, and/or transformed these networks. Her first book project is a history of decolonization in 20th-century French India, Unsettling Utopia: Decolonization, Borders, and Mobility in 20th Century India. Her manuscript in progress shows that the colonial borders the British and French constructed during their rule in South Asia were adopted and reinforced by the Indian state, subsuming many movements for post-colonial autonomy that emerged on the ground in French India. Decolonization, an event that historians often consider complete, did not destroy colonial systems but instead opened new spaces for settlement, making way for settler colonial projects under the guise of cultural and spiritual tourism and utopianism. Her new research from her second project on race-mixing and diaspora in South Asia and Europe is forthcoming in the Journal of Women's History, Summer 2019.
Balmurli Natrajan is a Professor of Anthropology at William Paterson University of New Jersey, USA, and a Visiting faculty at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. An anthropologist and engineer by training, Murli’s research and teaching interests are on Caste-Class-Gender-Culture (Group Formation & Identity); Culture (Transmission, Cognition, Meaning); Development (Artisans, Farmers, Domestic Workers, Sanitation); Hinduism-Hindutva (Philosophies, Traditions, Nationalism, Fascism). He has published in scholarly journals, books, and in popular media on globalization, caste, politics, culture and religion. His books include Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity and Inequality in a Multicultural Age (London: Routledge, 2011) based on work among an artisanal caste in Chhattisgarh, and a co-edited volume with Paul Greenough Against Stigma: Studies in Caste, Race and Justice Since Durban (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009). His current research is on explanations of toilet behavior (Chhattisgarh, India), and collectivization of domestic workers (Bengaluru, India), and on caste myths.
Sunil Purushotham is an Assistant Professor of History at Fairfield University. He is a historian of modern South Asia, with a specific focus on twentieth century India. His research examines decolonization in South Asia, interrogating the constitutive relationships between violence, sovereignty and democracy. Professor Purushotham received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2013, where he taught for two years before joining the History Department at Fairfield.
Pasang Yangjee Sherpa is an anthropologist from Nepal. Her primary research areas include human dimensions of climate change, Indigeneity, and development in the Himalayas. Her secondary research involves Sherpa diaspora in the United States and South Asia. She is currently affiliated with the South Asia Center of the University of Washington. She served as program director of their Nepal Studies Initiative until 2018. Previously, she was a lecturer in the department of anthropology at Penn State University and a postdoctoral fellow at The New School. She recently co-edited the special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias on "Indigeneity".
Sara Smith is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a feminist political geographer interested in the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. In her research she seeks to understand how politics and geopolitics are constituted or disrupted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth.