Race and Caste Crises and Histories of the Postcolonial Contemporary

This essay argues that a new postcolonial critique is necessary in the face of resurgent supremacist ideologies. In order to lay the grounds for such a critique, this article maps the overlapping histories of race and caste across South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. It posits that the ongoing cri-sis and stasis of the postcolonial contemporary calls for reckoning with the long pasts and presents of derogation that inform and precipitate quotidian and spectacular atrocities. Having convened a range of scholars of caste and race over several years, the authors lay out these scholars’ contributions to the under­stand­ing of the con­tours of racialized and caste-sub­ju­gated lives across dif­fer­ent regions. Writing from South Africa, the authors trace the career of casteization and racialization from the sixteenth-and sev­en­teenth-cen­tury Americas through twenty-first-cen­tury India and Africa to ana­lyze together concepts and prac­tices that con­tinue to enable and chal­lenge oppres­sion and hier­ar­chized dif­fer­ences after the for­mal end of colo­nial­ism and apart­heid. Refusing to impose a super­fi­cial same­ness among these dif­fer­ent geog­ra­phies, tem­po­ral­i­ties, and his­to­ries, the essay pro­poses a gram­mar for under­stand­ing the postcolonial contemporary globally.