Anti-casteism as Praxis
Blegen Hall 235
In a recently published article The Concurrence of Anti-racism and Anti-casteism (The Political Quarterly, 2022) I argued that from our position in the diaspora, the concurrence of anti-racism and anti-casteism lies in the realm of praxis. South Asian populations experience the relative intensity of racism and casteism in different ways. Their personal and community responses are calibrated to suit larger battles over the ‘image’ of caste and how its ‘unethical’ elements are perceived at a global level. Personal rivalries, historical scars, and the sedimentation of the past in memory, affect the ways in which these oppositional stances are prioritised and made coherent. In this talk, I want to come to grips with the challenges faced by anti-casteism as praxis. Whilst the space for critical enquiry is increasingly under attack, the voices challenging casteism have multiplied. It seems opportune to reflect on conceptualising collective action against ‘graded inequality’. We are divided by caste and class, even whilst we aim to break down the barriers of caste and class. Can these divisions be transcended in praxis? How can we build long-term solidarities in anti-caste struggles? How can we avoid falling back into the inertia of caste, class, gender, and/or racial privilege?
About the Speaker
Dr Meena Dhanda is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton. Born, brought up and educated in the Indian Punjab, she did her doctorate at Oxford University as a Commonwealth Scholar. She is an advocate of socially engaged philosophy, and has conducted transdisciplinary research linking caste, class, race, and gender in projects funded by The Leverhulme Trust and the European Commission’s EU Horizon2020 research programme. She is the author of The Negotiation of Personal Identity, editor of Reservations for Women, and special issues of journals J-Caste and Religions. She led a cross-disciplinary consortium of experts in the research project ‘Caste in Britain’ for the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission and produced two reports. Currently, she is a beneficiary of an EU Horizon2020 Innovative Training Network project FEINART (2021-24), supervising Early-Stage Researchers working on socially engaged art. Her journey as an anti-caste academic activist is recounted in an interview, ‘Confronting Denials of Casteism’ (in South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, SAMAJ, 2021). She is consolidating her recent published papers on anti-casteism and misplaced nativism, philosophical foundations of anti-casteism, the power of counter-rituals, the simulation of caste-blindness, and the concurrence of anti-racism and anti-casteism, into a monograph.