Debating Race In Contemporary India

Race debates have become more frequent at the national level, and the response to racism in the media and by politicians has shifted from denial to acknowledgment to action. Focusing on the experiences of communities from India's Northeast borderland, the author explores the dynamics of race debates in contemporary India.

Race debates have become more frequent at the national level, and the response to racism in the media and by politicians has shifted from denial to acknowledgment to action. Focusing on the experiences of communities from India's Northeast borderland, the author explores the dynamics of race debates in contemporary India.

The coastal belts and hinterlands of East Africa and South Asia have historically shared a number of cultural traits, commodities and cosmologies circulated on the wings of the monsoon winds. The forced and voluntary migrations of Asians and Africans across the Indian Ocean littoral over several centuries have reverberated in the memories, literatures, travelogues and religious, architectural, and socio-political imaginations of both the regions. And, they continue to do so in various forms and platforms. This book explores nuances of various narratives on these long-term transcultural exchanges with a special focus on India. It explores the ways in which Africa and Africans have been narrated in South Asian history and culture in order to unravel the nuanced layers of reflexive, rhetorical, stereotypical, populist, racialist, racist and casteist frameworks that informed diverse narratives in vernacular texts, songs, films and newspaper reports. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary approaches of narratology, Afro-Asian studies, and Indian Ocean studies, the contributors enunciate how the African lives in South Asia have been selectively remembered or systematically forgotten. Through multi-sited ethnographies, multilingual archival researches and interdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter provides theoretical engagements on the basis of empirical research in such regions as Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai as well as in Sri Lanka. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

The Routledge Handbook of Race and Ethnicity in Asia introduces theoretical approaches to the study of race, ethnicity and indigeneity in Asia beyond those commonly grounded in the Western experience. The volume’s twenty-eight chapters consider not only the relationship between ethnic or racial minorities and the state, but social relations within and between individual and transnational communities. These shape not only the contours of governance, but also the means by which knowledge of national identity, ‘self ’, and ‘other’ have been constructed and reconstructed over time. Divided into four sections, it provides holistic and comparative coverage of South, South East, and East Asia, as well as Australasia and Oceania; an area that extends from Pakistan in the West to Hawai’i in the East. Contributors to this handbook offer a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, opening a domain of scholarship wherein the relationship between phenotype and racism is less pronounced than European and North American approaches, which have often privileged the so-called ‘colour stigmata’, leading to further exclusions of particular ethnic, racial, and indigenous communities. This volume seeks to overcome racism and white ideologies embedded in theories of race and ethnicity in Asia, proving a valuable resource to both students and scholars of comparative racial and ethnic studies, international relations and human rights.

In Global Visions of Violence, the editors and contributors argue that violence creates a lens, bridge, and method for interdisciplinary collaboration that examines Christianity worldwide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By analyzing the myriad ways violence, persecution, and suffering impact Christians and the imagination of Christian identity globally, this interdisciplinary volume integrates the perspectives of ethicists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers to generate new conversations. Taken together, the chapters in this book challenge scholarship on Christian growth that has not accounted for violence while analyzing persecution narratives that can wield data toward partisan ends. This allows Global Visions of Violence to push urgent conversations forward, giving voice to projects that illuminate wide and often hidden landscapes that have been shaped by global visions of violence, and seeking solutions that end violence and turn toward the pursuit of justice, peace, and human rights among suffering Christians.

Racism is a world problem. From Morocco to China, Brazil to Indonesia, racism is being debated and contested. Multiracism broadens the horizon on this global challenge, showing that racism has a diverse history with multiple roots and routes. Drawing on examples of racism from across the globe, with particular focus on cases from Asia and Africa, Alastair Bonnett rethinks the origins of racism and the connections between racism and modernity. Arguing that plural modernities are interwoven with plural racisms, he explores the relationship of racism to history, religion, politics, and nationalism, as well as to anti-Black prejudice and discourses of whiteness. Empirically rich, with numerous in-depth case studies, Multiracism equips readers to understand racism in a multipolar world where power is no longer the sole possession of the West. It provides and provokes a new, international, and post-Western vision of racism for the twenty-first century.

The volume discusses critical issues surrounding the developments in gender movements in the last two decades in India following the Delhi rape case and the ensuing massive protests in December 2012. A critical documentation of some of the key moments surrounding the contemporary gendered formations and radicalisms in South Asia, the chapters span questions of class, caste, sexuality, digital feminisms, and conflict zones. The book looks at anger, protest, and imaginations of resistance. It showcases the ‘new’ visibility that digital spaces have opened up to lend voice to survivors who are let down by traditional justice mechanisms and raises questions regarding ‘individualized’ modes of seeking justice as against traditional ‘collective’ voices that have always been a hallmark of movements. The volume analyses and criticizes the complicity of the state and the court as agents of reinforcing gender violence – an issue that has not been theorized enough by activists and scholars of violence. Further, it also delves into the #MeToo movement and the LoSHA, as both have raised contentious, controversial, and often conflicting debates on the nature of addressing sexual harassment, particularly at the workplace. Calling for further debate and discussions of cyberspace, gender justice, sexual violence, male entitlement, and forms of neoliberal feminism, this volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers in the areas of women and gender studies, sociology and social theory, gender politics, political theory, democracy, protest movements, politics, media and the internet, political advocacy, and law and legal theory. It will also be a compelling read for anyone interested in gender justice and equal rights.

Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian Christian women, Sonja Thomas explores how this community illuminates larger questions of multiple oppressions, privilege and subordination, racialization, and religion and secularism in India. In Privileged Minorities, Thomas examines a wide range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and legislative assembly debates, to interrogate the relationships between religious rights and women�s rights in Kerala. Using an intersectional approach, and US women of color feminist theory, she demonstrates the ways that race, caste, gender, religion, and politics are inextricably intertwined, with power and privilege working in complex and nuanced ways. By attending to the ways in which inequalities within groups shape very different experiences of religious and political movements in feminist and rights-based activism, Thomas lays the groundwork for imagining new feminist solidarities across religions, castes, races, and classes.