Transnational Solidarities

On December 16, 2016, the activist and scholar Angela Davis delivered a lecture in Mumbai titled “Black Lives, Dalit Lives: Histories and Solidarities.” While cautioning against the temptation of reducing one to the other, Davis pointed out that “there are many insights to be gleaned by thinking together about two different peoples and two different modes of subjugation.” In September 2020, the protests in the aftermath of the rape and murder of a Dalit woman in Hathras, UP, made explicit reference to forging global connections. The scholar Roja Singh said, “We, as a human community are capable of finding solidarity in this increasing pandemic of racist and casteist sexual violence. We raise our collective voice – Dalit Lives Matter! […] We rise from their ashes as a regenerative international solidarity group – a global movement – a cry for restorative justice and human dignity justice for all.” Davis’s lecture and Singh’s statement are recent additions to a transnational dialogue between the struggles against race and caste that goes back nearly 150 years. This conversation has included WEB Du Bois’s theorization of the global “color line,” BR Ambedkar’s anti-caste vision rooted in universals of equality and humanity, ML King’s engagements with Gandhian thought, the Dalit Panthers finding inspiration and example in the Black Panthers, TM Yesudasan’s formulation of the Dalit “double consciousness” after Du Bois, and more recently, the explicit internationalist visions of Shailaja Paik, Suraj Yengde, Yashica Dutt, Nico Slate, and Isabel Wilkerson. Taking inspiration from these ongoing dialogues, this course examines the importance of transnational solidarities in struggles against race and caste. By analyzing the encounters, borrowings, and (mis)recognitions that characterize this transnational dialogue, we will identify shared thematics and chart their evolving relationships of sympathy and solidarity. This graduate seminar will discuss a range of material—archival sources, theoretical writing, drama, poetry, fiction, life writing, film, and music—to chart this exchange across historical archives and repertoires of embodied experience.