Race and Caste; Hierarchy and Universality

21-23 February 2023

Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (map)

The Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) is thrilled to co-host this transnational colloquium, in partnership with the A. W. Mellon funded The Other Universals Consortium, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape; The Other Universals Hub, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town; and The Other Universals Hub, African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand. 

Race and Caste; Hierarchy and Universality emerges out of a longer set of explorations around the connections and divergences between race and caste, specifically in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. We are especially interested in visions and understandings of equality and affinity - in contemporary and historical contexts -  that have not been posited from an imaginary ‘nowhere.’  As such, the papers and presentations selected reflect a commitment to both the specificity of location (as lived intersections of sites, communities and histories) and the desire for a ‘universal’ solidarity that manifests in Black and Dalit antiracist and anticaste struggles and thought.

How do we begin to think from a specificity and a universality that refuses to participate in the teleologies to which they (or we) have been ascribed by Western colonial thought?

What overlaps, resonances, disjunctions and creative possibilities emerge when radical anticolonial, feminist, antiracist and anticaste struggles are put into conversation with one another?

How might universality be remade from these intersecting locations of struggle, and why is it important to do so at a time when populist nationalisms and authoritarianism continue to erode the liberatory possibilities of democracy across the globe?

Through communal reading sessions, shared papers, conversations and a film screening, Race and Caste; Hierarchy and Universality hopes to make possible this kind of generative proximity and exchange. The edited volume to follow will draw from a range of disciplines and geographies, addressing these questions of particularity and solidarity, hierarchy and universality.