Paper short abstract:

In this talk, I will use examples from my ethnographic work in Bangalore, India with the education NGO Adhyaapaka to excavate the figure of the "brown savior". A focus on the brown savior allows us to attend to the ways that new racial subjects have emerged as the help economies have proliferated.

Paper long abstract:

In this talk, I will use examples from my ethnographic work in Bangalore, India with the education NGO Adhyaapaka to excavate the figure of the "brown savior". The brown savior is a figure that reveals the contradictions in the contemporary help economy: on the one hand, they are not white and therefore do not seem to carry the baggage of white/western led help interventions. Yet they mobilize many of the same tools as their white counterparts - technical knowledge, corporate backing, and transnational movement, which reproduce neocolonial racialized binaries along the axis of the savior and the saved.

Racialization as an analytical focus has been largely absent from theoretical engagements with the 21st Century help economies, especially in nation-states like India which have been seen as "outside" of global racialization. But what is important to remember is that the history of help all over the world, including in India, is inflected by colonial histories which, from its inception, produced racialized subjects along a savior/saved binary. This paradigm remains largely intact. However, much of the focus in both public and scholarly discourse has been on the racializing of those who are "in-need of saving". At the same time, much less attention has been paid to the racializing processes that produce saviors. This is why a focus on brown saviors is theoretically useful, allowing us to attend to the ways that new racial subjects have emerged as the help economies have grown over the past fifty years.