Deprovincializing Anticaste Thought: A Genealogy of Ambedkar’s Dalit

Abstract

This essay focuses on the inherent globality of anticaste thought, and underscores the significance of historical comparison (race, class, minority) in the writings of key thinkers who predicated radical equality on the annihilation of caste. The essay argues against culturalizing caste, which has been the dominant mode for apprehending its social specificity, and instead argues that efforts at political commensuration offer key instances for understanding heterodox histories and practices of subject formation. By placing anticaste thought within a global field of concern about historic dispossession and human emancipation, the essay also addresses the politics of the twentieth century through a genealogy of the exceptional subject, e.g., the Dalit [outcaste] or the remainder, and argues that this offers rich possibilities for enlarging the conceptual matrix of “politics” and political subjectivity.