Abstract 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 crisis 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.
Chaturvedi et al. (Fri,) studied this question.