Khalid Anis Ansari is a sociologist interested in postcolonial modernity, democratic deepening, anti-caste movements, and transformative politics in general. Khalid acquired his PhD from the University of Humanistic Studies (UvH), Utrecht, The Netherlands.

His doctoral work explored the conceptual relationship between pluralism, democracy, and internal minorities through the case study of the anti-caste Pasmanda Muslim movement in India. He has emphasised the limitations of the dominant religious lens (and associated conceptual dyads like majority-minority and secularism-communalism) in understanding contemporary minority politics.

His most recent publication is a book chapter titled Pluralism and the Post-Minority Condition: Reflections on the ​‘Pasmanda Muslim’ Discourse in North India. (Routledge, 2021). Khalid is currently developing the Pluralism Studies project, particularly concerning the crisis of contemporary Indian democracy.

Abstract: Can a Muslim be a Dalit? Notes on Decolonization of Anti-Caste Thought

Three critical conceptual innovations by the orientalist-colonial knowledge/power complex have had a lasting imprint on the discussions of caste and hierarchy in South Asian Islam. One, the recasting of caste from a secular principle of stratification and power to its religionization as an internal moment of Hinduism. Two, the framing of Hinduism as tolerant-inegalitarian and Islam as intolerant-egalitarian. Three, the analytical distinction between “Indic” (Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.) and “foreign” religions (Islam, Christianity, etc.). While the stamp of caste within South Asian Islam is acknowledged in the emergent social scientific literature, the discussions in the legal, policy, and even significant anti-caste movements are beset with aporias. The conceptual grip of the orientalist-colonial orthodoxy on caste looms large.

In contrast, the lowered-caste Pasmanda Muslims—a conglomerate of converts from the Untouchable, Shudra, and Adivasi communities that constitute eighty-five percent of Indian Muslims—struggle for legitimacy and recognition through the anti-caste Pasmanda movement. The Pasmanda movement has historically opposed the politics of the Hindu Right or Muslim Right as restorative anti-democratic attempts by the privileged Savarna/Ashraf caste groups and worked toward an aspirational pan-religious solidarity of lowered castes/classes. However, the aspired affinity of subaltern classes faces a hurdle in the opposition by some anti-caste practitioners to the legal recognition of Muslims (and Christians) of Untouchable (Dalit) origin as Scheduled Castes (SC)—an affirmative action category that includes Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist Dalits. I argue that while this opposition can be pragmatically explained as the elite capture of subaltern movements but calls for a more critical conceptual reexamination of the dominant anti-caste articulations from the lens of decolonization.

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Shared text: Awwal Kalima, by Kavi Yakoob, translated by Naren Bedide - link

Youlendree ‘Len’ Appasamy is the communications co-lead at Whose Knowledge? Len is a feminist free radical based in South Africa, working in the spaces of writing, zine-making and collage. Len has a Masters in Political Studies from University of Witwatersrand and is interested in how Indian indentureship in South Africa influenced kinship structures, violence and gender/race-making in Indian South African communities. They’ve also worked on using (e)zines and collage as ways of documenting and amplifying African feminist work and movements. Len is a member of the Kutti Collective, a queer art and cultural work collective that supports young African artists and writers of South Asian ancestry.

Abstract: Making a scene: what’s love and friendship got to do with solidarity?   

Nosipho Mngomezulu and Len (we) offer dialogue - a communing; invocation - reflecting on our ethnographic and archival work in South Africa and Mauritius. Having mined the affective terrain of the libidinal draw of rainbow(ism), uncanny familial archives and water’s symbolic register, we make a scene [zine]. If caste and anti-blackness are the answers, what are the questions? Through the medium of zine-making, we ponder what it means to be an outcast, the limits of intimacy and elaborations of kinship. Equally suspicious of the rhetoric of incommensurability, relativism and essentialist claims in harmonising metaphors in these rainbow nations, in this conversation we utilise everyday objects to engage the spectacle of antagonisms and teleologies of repair borne of the epistemic debris of colonialism’s long shadow over a cup of inky black sweet tea. We posit that love and friendship have been used in official responses to inter-communal antagonisms as inhibitory idioms which preclude and divert conversations about the when and where of structural violence, revelling instead in the spectacle of the what. Taking our cue from Francoise Verges "The age of love” (2001) we offer this zine reflecting on our conversation/performance at Race and Caste; Hierarchies and Universalities as an intervention into the impasse and possibilities of thinking the question of “solidarity”.

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Shared song: DJ Platinum-D, Ou pa ka fe sa (feat. Bann'D) (Version longue) - link

Paula Chakravartty is James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. She is currently completing a monograph on Media and Economic Violence. She is also working on two on-going collaborative projects: a co-authored book on Media, Race and the Infrastructures of Empire; and a field-based partnership research project on migrant mobility and debt in Uttar Pradesh, India. She has published widely in numerous journals in Media Studies and Communication. Her books include Race, Empire and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Media Policy and Globalization (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and Global Communications: Towards a Transcultural Political Economy (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008). She serves as the Vice President of the NYU Chapter of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors).

Abstract: Unpayable Debt: Constructing Feminist Solidarities

My presentation will provide a brief overview of a 5-year collaboration examining the prospects of what in the development literature is called “decent work,” between academic researchers based in New York and Toronto and two partner organizations based in India: Khabar Lahariya, a “woman-run, ethical independent news platform” based in rural North India and the Building and Woodworkers International (BWI) a global trade union representing  workers across the country in the building trades. Our collective research, based in the state of Uttar Pradesh focused on the upayable debt of migrant workers to recruiters and middle-men that often traps workers across the gendered, caste and class hierarchy of construction labor in a cycles of poverty and unfreedom, despite and often through their mobility across local and transnational borders (Buckley, Chakravartty & Gill, 2022). This presentation will focus on the relationship between internationally funded research and what we (as scholars) owe, based on what we learn from the debtors themselves? To do this, I will share notes on the making of a documentary (co-directed by Megha Acharya and Geeta Devi) that has grown out of our collective research called Miles to Go that attempts (with no guarantees) to tell the story of unpayable debt from a new angle, that of the lower caste women brick kiln workers themselves.

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Shared text: Kindred, by Octavia Butler - link

Ruchi Chaturvedi is a political and legal anthropologist who works on cultures of democracy, popular politics and political violence in postcolonial democracies. She received her M.A. in Sociology from University of Delhi and her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Chaturvedi’s key research focus has been on formation of antagonistic political communities and emergence of violent majoritarianism in India. She is the author of Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India, which will be published by Duke University Press in 2023. Her publications and editorial work have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle-East, Economic and Political Weekly, and Contributions to Indian Sociology. Her new project compares histories of nationalism and majoritarian formations in South Asia and South Africa attending particularly to womxn’s experience of violent transitions from coloniality to postcolonial rule. Chaturvedi also maintains a strong interest in the career of university apartheid in South Africa mapping changes that have taken place in Social Science and Humanities curriculums and pedagogies since 1994. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume on Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (Wits University Press). Chaturvedi is the co-convener of the Mellon Foundation funded international consortium on Other Universals: Theorising on Aesthetics and Politics from Postcolonial Locations (link). The project brings together students and faculty keen to think through 'universals' that have emanated from the experiences of marginality primarily from the Southern Hemisphere, particularly the African continent, South and South-west Asia, and the Caribbean.  

Abstract: Justice in the Time of Supremacism(s)

What did justice look like in apartheid South Africa during the state of emergency? What does it look like in the time of Hindutva’s racist supremacy? This paper draws on Natal Coastal Region Black Sash archives of grappling with and persevering in the face of apartheid laws designed to maintain white supremacy and black subjection. These archives, in turn, help us recognize, name and apprehend forms of justice that Muslims and members of “lower caste” groups are seeking in India even as they reel under the onslaught of a majoritarian legal system and a hateful supremacist state. That search for justice seeks to restore rights in order to, very importantly, repair life. But such repair remains fleeting and precarious. Fleeting, precarious repair, I suggest, might be the only form of justice possible in the age of supremacism(s). Projects that strive for it contain however clues for forging new forms of political association and (dare I say) living other universals.

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Shared text: Kathie, by Dora Taylor - link

Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi is Associate Professor in English at the University of Johannesburg and Director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class. She is a research associate of the Institute of Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University (New York) and a senior research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study (JIAS) at the University of Johannesburg. Prof Collis-Buthelezi has held posts in English at the University of Cape Town and as a Senior Researcher at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests include Black intellectual history as well as Caribbean, African, and African American literatures. She has published in Small Axe, Callaloo, and The Black Scholar, in which she co-edited a special issue on “Black Studies in South Africa”.  She is a member of the Other Universals Collective, which explores intellectual histories of exchange across Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Her current book project, Ends of Empire, Black Liberation, excavates the print cultures of Black migrants to Cape Town from the Caribbean, the US, West Africa and other parts of South Africa before the rise of anti-colonial nationalism.

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Shared song: David Rudder, 1990 - link

Chinnaiah Jangam is an Associate Professor Department of History at Carleton University Ottawa, Canada. He writes on the social and intellectual history of Dalits and anti-caste movements in modern South Asia. Oxford University Press published his first book Dalits and the Making of Modern India, in 2017. It presents the critical role of Dalits in the imagination and making of modern India. In addition, his translation of the seminal Dalit text Gabbilam (Bat) by Gurram Jashuva, the father of Dalit literature in Telugu, was published as Gabbilam (Bat): A Dalit Epic by Yoda Press in 2022. Presently he is writing a book on the long durée history of caste formation that resulted in the unequal structures of power and domination. It traces the history of caste back to its precolonial roots in Hindu Brahmanical religious and secular texts, works that laid the ethical, social, and religious foundations of caste. The book argues that in the formation of racialized societies across the world in modern history, caste acted as a template for social organization and violent institutional structures. He is also writing a memoir about his mother, Chinnubai Jangam, aka Devudu Chinnakka, dedicated to the local goddess. It presents the everyday life of caste, patriarchy, and masculinity among Dalits that exploits women sexually and subordinates them as lesser beings.

Abstract: Dalits and Anti-Caste Universalism in India 

I will not follow the lines of caste and religion

Will not be bound by those cobwebs

The entire world can judge anyway

It will not diminish my being

I am a universal human being 

- Gurram Jashuva, a Dalit poet

For centuries, the caste system denied access to education and knowledge to the oppressed sections of society, especially the untouchables, aka Dalits. The denial of knowledge led to the erasure of anti-caste emancipatory imagination based on the principle of equality that opposed Brahmanical inequality. Moreover, the misrecognition made the caste system seem banal and a product of consensus between the oppressor and the oppressed. This paper challenges the dominant historical, sociological, and anthropological knowledge and argues that the anti-caste articulations are as old as caste and the oppressed always contested Brahmanical dehumanization. Based on the archival records and everyday practices of oppressed castes, this paper presents anti-caste alternative histories as liberating philosophies. Most importantly, through an anti-caste lens of Dalits, this paper aims to de-brahmanize and decolonize knowledge systems and construct an anti-caste universalism based on equality, liberty, fraternity, and human dignity. It also uses the rich repertoire of anti-caste writings of Jotiba Phule, B.R. Ambedkar, Periyar Ramaswamy, and Gurram Jashuva to reconstruct anti-caste universalist visions that embraced global-level emancipatory struggles against race and gender-based oppression.

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Shared text: Caste from Below: Memory and Subversion of Caste in Chindu Yakshaganam, by Chinnaiah Jangam - pdf

Shivani Kapoor is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Writing Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University. She has a doctorate in Political Science from Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research focuses on the relationship between caste, sensory politics and labour in the leather industry in India. 

Abstract: More than Badboo: The Many Lives of Caste, Leather, and Labour

Dalit autobiographical and literary writing on caste and against caste has produced crucial knowledges on how caste is experienced and performed. An important component of this writing has been a deep focus on how bodies and objects are situated and contextualised within the caste discourse. In these texts, writing about the caste-marked bodies and objects thus becomes an exercise in producing a complex phenomenological archive of the sensual and affectual politics of caste. Leather, an object deeply marked with the material and sensorial stains of caste, in particular its foul smell –badboo– is a recurring theme in Dalit writing produced by the leatherworking castes, often used to interrogate notions of disgust and humiliation on the one hand, and a powerful sense of history and pride in their craft on the other. This paper examines the literary lives of leather and the dual position which it occupies as an object of pride and humiliation in the lives of the leatherworkers. In doing so, the paper seeks to complicate our understanding of the concepts of humiliation and disgust to argue that the experiences of stigmatised occupations such as leatherwork offer a more nuanced conception of affectual and material histories of labour and objects.

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Shared text: The cracked mirror: An Indian debate on experience and theory, by Gopa Guru and Sundar Sarukkai - link

Shared film: Court, by Chaitanya Tamhane - trailer

Dr. Sara Kazmi is a scholar, translator and protest singer. She is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literatures, Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. Sara is interested in the literary and cultural production of anticolonial, Marxist, feminist, and left-leaning movements in Punjab, India/ Pakistan, and the Punjabi diaspora abroad. Sara has also worked as an actor and organiser with the Sangat, a collective of artists, writers and musicians engaged in street theatre and political education based in Lahore, Pakistan. 

Abstract: Mazdoor, Kissan, Mussalli: Critiquing Caste and Vernacularising Marxism in 1970s Punjab, Pakistan

This paper analyses articulations of anti-caste politics, regional histories of resistance, and vernacular Marxisms in 1960s and 1970s Punjab, Pakistan through a close reading of the bulletin and pamphlets published by the Mazdoor Kissan (Workers and Peasants) Party (MKP). I analyse left-wing counter-cultures of print in Pakistan to present a ground-up history of the communist movement, challenging the bordering logics of methodological nationalism by delinking caste from a ‘Hindu’ framework to insert it into discussions of landlessness and peasant struggle in ‘Muslim’ Pakistan. Further, the paper will centre vernacular production to spotlight subaltern intellectuals and regionalist interpretations of planetary debates around decolonisation, Marxism, and popular struggle.

The MKP emerged from a split along the lines of the Sino-Soviet rift within the National Awami Party in 1968. The MKP’s Maoist outlook championed a program of ‘people’s revolution’ that trained its energies on the countryside, propagating armed struggle against the postcolonial state. The party’s organ, the MKP Circular, was published on cyclostyled sheets and circulated only among party members, many of whom were organising underground. As an evolving, rough and ready, accessible and compact medium, the MKP Circular provided a forum accommodating perspectives from across the spectrum of political imaginations that co-existed within the party. Thus, although dominant tellings of left-wing histories in Pakistan and the party’s own memorialisation revolve around a handful of middle-class male leaders, a focus on the Circular allows a view into political and intellectual experiments that were taking place outside the party’s mainstream, led by grassroots organisers and thinkers in small towns and villages across Punjab.

Recent work by Shozab Raza (2022), Virinder Kalra and Waqas Butt (2013; 2019) has focalised these marginal voices within the MKP and its associated milieus, training attention onto articulations of ‘Sufi Marxism’ and oppositional expressions of regional identity. Building on this body of work, I analyse the creation of alternative political vocabularies by the party’s Dehaat Mazdoor Tanzeem (Agrarian Worker Movement, DMT) and its subaltern intellectuals like Mussalli leader Malik Agha Khan Sahotra. Mussalli or ‘Muslim Sheikh’ communities are marginal caste or Dalit Muslims. The DMT organised among them in the Punjabi countryside by drawing on an eclectic synthesis of Marxist, Dravidianist, internationalist, anticolonial, indigenous, and regional categories of resistance in their political organising, street theatre, and poetry that appeared in the MKP Circular. In particular, I closely examine a pamphlet titled “Harappa Conference,” which centred the Mussalli as the revolutionary subject whose experience of exploitation became the prism for MKP intellectuals to radically reconstruct Pakistani and Punjabi history. Invoking Harappa, the ancient archaeological site of the Indus valley civilisation in its oppositional, border crossing literary-cultural vision, this pamphlet and the party circular’s literary content as a whole conjured an imaginative geography of an un-Partitioned, historical Punjab, mapping a four-thousand-year old cultural formation through a multi-lingual literary method. In so doing, the MKP Circular offered a view into under-explored Dalit, indigenous and regionalist engagements with debates around revolutionary culture, proletarian consciousness, national identity, and decolonisation that preoccupied the Pakistani left in the early decades following formal Independence.

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Shared text: The text I would like to share is a Punjabi poem by Sant Ram Udasi (1939-1986), a Dalit Maoist poet from Punjab, India, who was involved in the Naxalbari uprising of the 1960s. I am enclosing two links: to a musical rendition of his poem "The Kammi's Courtyard" (link) and to a partial translation that I completed (link). Both can be found on my Instagram page, @mein.beqaid which is an online archive of protest music and poetry from South Asia.

Dr. Nosipho Mngomezulu holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the university currently known as Rhodes University (2015). She is interested in contemporary youth identification practices in South Africa and Mauritius in the afterlife of slavery, focusing on three interrelated areas (1) how young people imagine the postcolonial nation, (2) intimacy and categorical identification and (3) anticolonial epistemologies. She is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar (2011), a former visiting fellow at MICA, Ahmedabad (India) (2016); and lectured critical race theory in the Stanford Bing Overseas Studies Program in Cape Town (2016-2019). Nosipho has worked as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town and is currently a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. Nosipho co-hosted The Academic Citizen podcast (6 seasons).  In 2020 she was named as one of the Mail and Guardian's Top 200 Young South Africans. In Winter 2022 she was a UMAPS visiting Fellow with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and is currently a Research Fellow in Science Communication (Stellenbosch University, Journalism Department 2022-2025).

Abstract: Making a scene: what’s love and friendship got to do with solidarity?   

Nosipho and Youlendree ‘Len’ Appasamy (we) offer dialogue - a communing; invocation - reflecting on our ethnographic and archival work in South Africa and Mauritius. Having mined the affective terrain of the libidinal draw of rainbow(ism), uncanny familial archives and water’s symbolic register, we make a scene [zine]. If caste and anti-blackness are the answers, what are the questions? Through the medium of zine-making, we ponder what it means to be an outcast, the limits of intimacy and elaborations of kinship. Equally suspicious of the rhetoric of incommensurability, relativism and essentialist claims in harmonising metaphors in these rainbow nations, in this conversation we utilise everyday objects to engage the spectacle of antagonisms and teleologies of repair borne of the epistemic debris of colonialism’s long shadow over a cup of inky black sweet tea. We posit that love and friendship have been used in official responses to inter-communal antagonisms as inhibitory idioms which preclude and divert conversations about the when and where of structural violence, revelling instead in the spectacle of the what. Taking our cue from Francoise Verges "The age of love” (2001) we offer this zine reflecting on our conversation/performance at Race and Caste; Hierarchies and Universalities as an intervention into the impasse and possibilities of thinking the question of “solidarity”.

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Shared text: The age of love, by Françoise Vergès - link

Shared song: We people who are darker than blue, by Curtis Mayfield - link

Polo B. Moji has a PhD in Comparative and General Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) in 2011. Her research interests are comparative approaches to literature, African and Afrodiasporic narrative forms, literatures in translation (French/Francophone), Intersectional Feminisms and Critical Black Urban Geographies. She has co-edited the special journal issues "Ghostly Border-Crossings: Europe in Afrodiasporic Narratives” (2019), "The Cinematic City: Desire, Form and the African Urban" (2019) Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City, Social Dynamics (2021). She led the organizing team for the 4th African Feminisms Conference (November 2021). She is author of Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022)

Abstract: Minor or Minority? – Literary Manifestos and Race in the French-Francophone World

In this paper explores the question “who is the minor?” by engaging the racialised cartographies of the French-Francophone world through two literary manifestos; Eloge de la créolité [In Praise of Creoleness] (1989) by Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant and Pour une “littérature monde” en français [For “World Literature” in French] (2007), signed by forty-four writers. While the former, penned by writers from Martinique (a French overseas territory), promotes Creoleness in a manner that complicates the linguistic affiliation France or the latter calls for the end to francophonie and the exclusive “pact” with the nation by supporting the birth of world literature in French. Reading both literary manifestos through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “minor literature”, I compare how the heterogenous identitarian schema central to both manifestos takes into account a multiple linguistics and identarian affiliations differ in their ambition to transcend the cartographic stratification of the French-francophone world. I then consider the liberatory promise of the “the minor” as articulated by Ajay Skaria in “The Subaltern and the Minor”, comparing the controversy generated by both two manifesto’s, notably Françoise Lionnet’s searing critique of the “literature monde”,  to explore the identitarian and political divergences which lead Creole writers such as Maryse Condé or Patrick Chamoiseau to support differing manifestos.

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Shred text: Reading Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar as teenager and “seeing” myself as a black woman in a novel for the first time - link

Ahmed Mulla holds a PhD in postcolonial anglophone literatures from the Université de La Réunion. He is presently an Associate Professor of English Studies and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Languages and Humanities at the Université de Guyane, French Guiana. He teaches American, Caribbean and Commonwealth literatures to undergraduate students. He also teaches a course devoted to the topics of culture and identity in the context of migration, and another one dealing with the theme of exile in the literatures of the Americas, both addressing graduate students. A member of the MINEA research center (Migrations, Interculturality and Education in the Amazon region, University of French Guiana), he is a co-founder of the FEMPOCO seminar, a research program that seeks to study theories related to postcolonial feminism. He is presently Vice-President of SARI, a research association devoted to Indian studies based in France. His research interests focus on identity issues in diasporic contexts. He is the author of articles on questions of identity, gender and migration in the works of Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul and Shailja Patel.

Abstract: Subverting the Social ‘Order’ of the Plantation: The Path Towards Fraternity in Abhimanyu Unnuth's “Laal Pasina”

Mauritian author Abhimanyu Unnuth's novel Laal Pasina (Sweats of Blood, 1977) is one of the very first works of fiction devoted to the experience of indentured Indians uprooted from their land and sent to Mauritius to work in the sugarcane fields. It echoes the bhojpuri songs that helped preserve the memory of these immigrants while amplifying their message. The fictional form indeed allows for the unfolding of time and the inscribing of individual stories in a larger historical phenomenon, that of indentureship. This form also helps to better understand the very diverse character of this immigrant population that made a significant contribution to the settlement of Mauritius. Both historical novel and sociological document on the world of the plantation in a British colony, Laal Pasina shows the complexity of power relations between masters and indentured workers. Interactions are mostly painful and result in a bloody sweat, as the title of the novel figuratively suggests. Other types of exchanges lead to the birth of a form of solidarity between "the wretched of the Earth", to use Fanon's expression.

Our article aims to analyze the way in which the relations of domination inherent in the system of indentureship and colonialist policies contributed to the establishment of a segregated society in Mauritius, in the wake of slavery. In addition, this work also proposes to study the other side of the question, namely the way in which this oppression was experienced by the dominated caste, and the strategies implemented to resist a fundamentally unequal society.

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Shared songs: I would like to share this Mauritian website page related to Bhojpuri songs performed by descendants of indentured workers - link

Amrita Pande is Professor in Sociology at University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research focuses on the intersection of globalization and the intimate. Her work has appeared in many international journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender and Society, Journal of Gender Studies, Medical Anthropology, Critical Social Policy, International Migration Review, Qualitative Sociology, Feminist Studies, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Anthropologica, PhiloSOPHIA, and in numerous edited volumes. Her most recent books include Birth Controlled: Selective Reproduction and Neo Eugenics in India and South Africa (Manchester Univ Press, 2022), Scripting defiance: Four Sociological Vignettes (With Ari Sitas, Sumangala Damodaran,  Wiebke Keim, and Nicos Trimikliniotis, Tulika Books, 2022) and Wombs in Labor: Transnational Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press and Primus Press, 2019). Over the past two decades she has conducted multi-sited research on fertility clinics, traveling egg provision and cross-border surrogacy in India, Cambodia, Ghana and South Africa.  She is also an educator-performer touring the world with a performance lecture series, Made in India: Notes from a Baby  (Global Studies Production, Denmark) based on her ethnographic work on surrogacy. She is currently leading a national research foundation (NRF) project exploring the flows of eggs, sperms, embryos and wombs, which connect the world in unexpected ways.

Abstract: Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Justice, and Reproductive Labour: Notes from Dalit Black Feminist Thought

The hegemony of western ethics and liberal feminism is best captured by the singular emphasis on individual self-determination and questions of autonomy and choice in any discussions around reproduction. This primacy given to “choice” and individual rights is fundamentally based on liberal conceptions of politics. In the past decade, feminist scholars have cautioned against an excessive reliance on the rhetoric of choice because, one, it romanticizes people’s ability to make their own decisions and conceals the structures of power that shape these decisions. Two, this belief in the liberatory power of choice minimizes the responsibilities of being the bearer of such choices. In this presentation, I focus on the fertility industry (the industry for fertility treatments, repro-genetic technologies and third-party reproduction, for instance, egg and sperm donation and surrogacy), to argue that the emphasis on reproductive rights and choice, is not just analytically insufficient, it is politically inadequate in addressing issues of justice embedded in this rapidly booming industry. I am not the first one to say this – the reproductive justice movement, initiated in the 1990s by a group of Black reproductive health activists frustrated with the linear emphasis of the women’s movement on pro-choice discourses, argued that access to reproductive health services is impacted by lived and intersecting experiences based on race, gender, class, and sexuality. In this presentation I connect this argument to my broader critique of the production/reproduction binary in analyzing the fertility industry. I draw from Ambedkar’s writing (particularly his writings on stigma and labour), Black feminist thought on reproductive justice and Dalit feminism on sexual labour to argue  that, for any discussion about justice to hold sway, there is an urgent need to go beyond the bioethical critique of commodification of life and instead conduct a Dalit Black feminist analysis that reveals the multiple complexities of a fundamentally stratified and highly racialized labour market.

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Shared artwork: Untouchable Woman with Brahmin, by Savindra Sawakar - link

Shared song: Baraye, by Shervin Hajipur - link

Suren Pillay is  Associate Professor  at the Center for Humanities Research and Deputy Dean: Research and Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. His current research focuses on the intellectual and political legacies of colonialism in the present. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in New York. A  previous editor of the journal Social Dynamics, he currently serves on the editorial collective of the journal Transformation, and the journal Postcolonial Studies. His most recent publication is the edited volume,  On the Subject of Citizenship, Late Colonialism in the World Today, Bloomsbury: London (2023).

Abstract: The Racialization of Ethnicity: Revisiting Tribal Identity and Ethnic Belonging Before and after colonial rule in South Africa

In the literature on indirect rule and apartheid, it has been argued that a distinction developed between race and ethnicity, as a mode of administering settler colonial domination through difference. In particular, this argument holds that these categories were translated into legal-political identities, enumerated through census, and recognised through identity documents. The legal framework after 1948 was defined by a number of legislative decrees but in particular the Population Registration Act (1950), and the Bantu Self-Government Act (1959). Through these Acts, those classified as races were declared citizens who belonged in South Africa, and those declared ethnicities, or tribal subjects, were expunged legally as citizens, declared subjects of ethnic homelands. Who belonged in South Africa and who belonged in a homeland was decided on by the distinction between race and ethnic tribal identity. A considerable amount of scholarship has given attention to the consequences for those racially defined inside of South Africa, as a way to describe the pernicious realities of life under apartheid. This paper seeks to look more closely at the ethnic dimension of this history, in effect a dimension that affected the majority of black South Africans. In particular, this paper seeks to trace how a distinction between ethnicity and tribe developed in an intellectual and administrative fashion. The paper wishes to draw attention to a pre-colonial account of ethnicity, in contrast to a colonial account of ethnicity. It argues that ethnic identity becomes tribalized through a racial understanding of who could belong and hold a particular ethnic identity. It argues therefore that the distinction between race and ethnicity that develops as part of the bi-furcated nature of apartheid rule, was itself shaped by a racial understanding of ethnicity.

Shared song: Independance Cha Cha, by Grand Kalle - link

Santhosh Sadanandan is a cultural theorist based in New Delhi, India. He co-founded and teaches at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi. Drawing on his training as an art historian, his work critically examines the structural dynamics of the institutionalisation of culture from a minoritarian perspective. His doctoral thesis Spectres of Caste: Institutionalisation of Art in Modern India (2018) examines various aspects of the institutionalisation of culture and the role of categories such as caste in the structuration of artistic production in modern India. He writes on contemporary cultural politics in India, with an emphasis on deconstructing technologies of visuality and the affective dimensions of the political.

Abstract: Decasting Caste: Spatiality, Sociality and Pluriversality

This paper is an attempt to reflect on the worlding of the contemporary through a series of critical interrogations on the notion of universality and its various spatial manifestations. The term ‘universal’ is deployed here to denote both, the post-enlightenment humanistic values it enshrines, as well as an infinite spatiality that it evokes. There are two inter-linked ways in which the paper hopes to unpack these debates: first, through a close examination of the post-Mandal university spaces in India (which was a watershed moment for ways of thinking about the university and universality in relation to emerging politics), and second, through tracing certain historical ruptures in the universal ideal and analysing specific practices of ‘iconoclash’ emerging from the caste-subaltern sociality, which has a lived presence in contemporary social and political life in India.

More than registering these as ruptures, the paper stutters through the fringes of events, moments, and movements, both historical and contemporary—from Sant Ravidas’s Begumpura, Jyoitrao Phule’s Gulamgiri, and Sri Narayana Guru’s idol installations, to the Mahad Satyagraha of B.R. Ambedkar and the spectral presence of Rohith Vemula’s plurivocal galaxy and its multitudinal polaris—that necessitated a simultaneous reclamation and deterritorialization of the very notion of the universal. Such radical decentering of universality and the pregiven spatiality of the universals triggered by minoritarian becoming, I argue, paved the way for a new performative matrix of dispositional equality—of an incredible journey from narrative subsumption as beneficiary subjects (such as the derogatory ‘quota-students’) to becoming vital political actants.

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Shared text: I thought of a work that inspired me relatively early on in my practice, Poisoned Bread, which is a collection of Dalit literature in Marathi translated to English (poetry, short stories, prose pieces, autobiographical extracts) edited and introduced by Arjun Dangle. It was an early exposure for me to Dalit literature outside of my immediate linguistic context in Kerala, southern India - pdf

Ari Sitas is a sociologist and a creative artist across many fields. His latest multi-media works, Giraffe Humming has been staged for the Kochi Biennale and his 1973-the story of a strike has been staged in Durban this month. Tulika Press in association with Columbia University press have just published his and Sumangala Damodaran's Maps of Sorrow. He is an emeritus Prof at UCT and a Gutenberg Chair at the University of Strasbourg. For his scientific and creative work he was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe by the South African presidency.

Abstract: The Historical Emergence of Regimes of Derogation, c1600-1800

The paper explores the emergence of three core strands of derogation that emerged during European foraging, settlement and early colonisation. Just as much as forms of derogation are learnt in everyday sociality, their continuance is situated in deep histories of their construction and institutionalisation. In this paper I will trace the new currents (derogations: racial, ethnic, religious etc. pre-existed these currents but that is work for another paper) that occur in Europe's ascendance and the Rest's involution during those two crucial centuries. Religion, Juridical Thinking and Proto-Science interacted with forms of power and control to prescribe and describe Otherings and create categories of Suitability and Usage. These forms of derogation and the regimes that underpinned them (mostly racial in character) have survived despite their de-institutionalisation.  

Key here are reflections around the promulgation of the Black Code by France (alongside its civic and criminal codes) in 1685 as a response to black slave rebellions in the Caribbean which followed a trove of prior rebellions in the worlds of Tropical usage and exploitation. They attempted to curtail the “roguery” of plantation resistance on land and the “roguery” of piracy in the seas and ushered in the very definition of who was to be a “subject” of the realm and who was to be excluded. There was a third, the “expendable” and “exterminable” Other who managed to resist and survive to create the most troubling “Other-ness” for the emergence of European and Settler Nation-states. These reflections between Religious (Christian), Juridical and Proto-scientific thinking are to be explored in the Americas, Africa and South East Asia.

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Shared song: Ghosts of the Quarry, by Insurrections Ensemble - link

Ajay Skaria studied Political Science for his Bachelors and Medieval Indian History for his Masters at Maharaja Sayajirao University, during which period he also worked as a journalist for Indian Express.   He received his PhD in History from Trinity College, Cambridge, and currently teaches at the University of Minnesota. A member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective from 1995 till its dissolution, he is one of the co-editors of Subaltern Studies Vol. XII, and the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (1999) and Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (2016).  He is currently completing a collection of essays, Thinking With Gandhi and Ambedkar, and is working on two other books—Who Is My Neighbor Today?, focusing on the figure of the neighbor and political friend in twentieth century thought, and the other, Ambedkar’s Buddhism, on the work of religion in Ambedkar’s thinking.

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Shared text: Predictably, perhaps, two texts that have influenced me in a generative way (as distinct from a simply affirmative way) in thinking about these issues are M.K Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (pdf) and B.R. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste (pdf).

Makhosazana Xaba is an award winning South African anthologist and short story writer. Her most recent edited volume Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000 – 2018 was hailed as an instant classic and it won the 2021 Human Social Sciences Award. Her award winning debut collection Running and Other Stories is taught at more than five South African universities and at universities abroad. Xaba is also an essayist, poet and editor. Her fourth and most recent poetry collection is titled The Art of Waiting for Tales: Found Poetry from Grace – a novel -.  She is currently commissioned by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research to translate from English, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth into isiZulu, due out in late 2023. In 2021 she was appointed as an Associate Professor of Practice in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg, based at the Centre for Race, Gender and Class.

Abstract: Translation as a Humanising Bridge among the Oppressed and Marginalised

In 2020 I began translating Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into isiZulu. The Tricontinental, the commissioning organisation wanted me to translate the 2004 English version by Richard Philcox. A complete draft manuscript with the working title Abanhlwempu bomhlaba is currently undergoing copy editing. Abanhlwempu bomhlaba first published in 1961 in French has undergone 12 translations and Abanhlwempu bomhlaba is the first indigenous translation in Southern Africa. In this essay I use the third chapter, “Inqwebukamqondo ngobuzwe: Izilingo nezivivinyo” [The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness] to explore and discuss the role of translation in building bridges across countries and people living under oppressive regimes, thus bolstering political activism. “Colonialism of a special kind” was the characterisation of South Africa’s apartheid regime by some prominent activists. Why and how is Abanhlwempu bomhlaba relevant in a democratic South Africa, today? Fanon uses examples in Algeria and other recently independent countries to demonstrate these challenges. In this essay I explore the example of the activist organisation Abahlali basemjondolo [loose translation of this isiZulu name: The Residents of the Slums] to explore the humanising value of translation. IsiZulu has been the dominant language is South Africa for decades. The ability for the activists of Abahlali basemjondolo to read in their mother tongue about similarities of trials and tribulations of national consciousness and ensuing activism from other countries is a political necessity whose time is now.

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Shared text: I'd like to offer/share a poem of mine published in my third poetry collection that I called, The Alkalinity of Bottled Water (Botsotso, 2019) - link