HIS 269 - Race, Caste, & Inequality

Race, Caste and Inequality is a class that demonstrates how caste and race are particularly illuminating lenses to reconstruct history with a capital H, not just histories of caste and race. Specifically, the course will help students unpack how, historically, they have been invisibilized in the narrative of history writing. The course necessarily engages social theory, not only because these narratives of erasure reveal larger, abstract structures at play but crucially because social theory until recently also failed to account for how race and caste shape modern society.

There is a very clear and direct line of reasoning that connects critical caste studies to studies of race in modern America, slavery studies and queer studies. This is precisely because racial domination and caste domination correlate so closely to white supremacy and Hindu supremacy. The course grounds students in a deeply historicized understanding of caste and the bases - not all of them productive - of its comparison to race. The ahistorical understanding of caste as an enduring, unchanging, ancient tradition that has passed on through millenia corresponds with the ahistorical understanding of race and racism as somehow innate to societies, and natural as a form of conflict, opposed to produced. Modern racialization and modern caste are systems of oppression that differ significantly from pre-modern caste for example precisely because capitalism structures and deepens these existing social forms of inequality.

Students will learn the changing historical contexts for the operation of caste in South Asia and across the global diaspora. Crucially, they will learn to denaturalize caste and to read caste as very specific modern form of structural inequality alongside race. Students will also gain familiarity with the historical conditions of production for race and caste critiques which now form the content of critical caste studies and Black studies as social critiques and social theory that are necessarily in conversation with each other.

Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.