Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the futures that Japanese Buraku and South Asian Dalit are building together.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2003, a small group of Japanese sanitation workers has travelled annually from Tokyo to Chennai, India to meet with a group they understand as comrades - the Dalit. Every year, over the course of a week, the Japanese visitors tour Dalit places of work, their homes, and share with them stories of pain and discrimination - the difficulties of marginalization alongside the triumphs of resistance. Using this type of solidarity trip as my ethnographic crucible, my talk examines how Buraku and Dalit activists work to create better futures for themselves, together. I argue that we can understand politics here as the labor of creating together venues in which subjects practice being the selves they want to become.

At the center of my analysis is an examination of how and when the viability of political solidarity hangs on the cultivation of a "fellow feeling," a formative process of learning to feel alongside another. At times this cultivation is successful, at other times it not simply fails but renders the entire endeavor ethically suspect. Following the path of the sanitation workers, I examine the rules that permit and constrain that sympathetic traffic, as well as the moments that lead to its blockage. How is it that these efforts at establishing and affirming connection might allow imaginaries of a future without discrimination?