Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India

In Brown Saviors and Their Others Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of "brown saviors"-globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India's help economy. Shankar argues that these brown saviors actually reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have been passed down from the colonial period, while masking other operations of power behind the racial politics of global brownness. In India, these operations of power center largely on the transnational labor politics of caste. Ever attentive to moments of discomfort and complicity, Shankar develops a method of "nervous ethnography" to uncover the global racial hierarchies, graded caste stratifications, urban/rural distinctions, and digital panaceas that shape the politics of help in India. Through nervous critique, Shankar introduces a framework for the study of the global help economies that reckons with the ongoing legacies of racial and caste capitalism.

Author: Arjun Shankar
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 08/04/2023
Pages: 360
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.74d
ISBN13: 9781478025092
ISBN10: 1478025093
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | Asian Studies
- Social Science | Sociology | General

About the Author
Arjun Shankar is Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics at Georgetown University and coeditor of Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge.