Short Abstract

This panel investigates race and caste as material forces within contemporary capitalism, offering analyses of concrete instances of racialization and/or casteification in connection to (gendered) processes of class formation, labor struggle, and/or imperialist accumulation.

Long Abstract

If race is the quintessential form of durable inequality emerging from modern transatlantic history, caste is the seemingly un-eradicable problem of South Asian history. Both empirically and conceptually, however, the two have intertwined, inviting us to think about what a bridging of analyses of race and caste can yield. This panel seeks to contribute to this bridging from a particular point of view, namely the view of race and caste as material forces within contemporary capitalism – forces that color the differentiating tendencies of capitalism, enshrine the inequalities that capitalism requires, and/or constitute its processes of class formation. We thus seek to investigate racialization and casteification in connection to (gendered) processes of devaluing and/or disorganizing labor and of managing imperialist accumulation. This means leaving aside efforts to bridge discussions on race and caste by using one as a metaphor for the other – a “metaphorical analysis” that Oliver Cromwell Cox already identified in 1948 as a major obstacle for more materialist understandings. Other problems, however, remain, notably how to continue to read race and caste as products (not causes) of a social system (Fields & Fields 2012) while not reducing race and caste to class. This panel invites papers that grapple with these analytical challenges in their effort to provide novel, radical understandings of concrete contemporary processes/relationships either in the realm of race, in the realm of caste, or in the connections and/or interstices in between.

In collaboration with the IUAES Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology (CGTMA)]

Propose paper