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Brown Saviors and Their Others

Brown Saviors and Their Others

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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. Arjun Shankar draws from his long-term ethnographic work with an educational NGO in India to critique the role of the “brown savior”—the group of globally mobile, upper-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who dominate India’s contemporary help economy. Arjun Shankar is Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics at Georgetown University and coeditor of Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge. Preface: Encountering Saviorism  vii
Premise One: Global Shadows
Premise Two: Nervous Ethnography
Introduction: Brown Saviorism  1
I. Theorizing Saviorism
1. Global Help Economics and Racial Capitalism  31
2. The Racial Politics of the Savarna Hindu (or the Would-Be Savior)  45
II. Neocolonial Saviorism
3. Poverty’s Motivational Double Bind (or Neo-Mathusian Visions)  63
4. Fatal Pragmatism (or the Politics of “Going There”)  75
5. The Case of Liberal Intervention  85
6. Hindu Feminist Rising and Falling  95
7. Gatekeepers (or the Anti-Muslim Politics of Help)  107
III. Urban Saviorism
8. The Road to Accumulation  121
9. Urban Altruism/Urban Corruption  133
10. A Global Death  145
11. The Insult of Precarity (or “I Don’t Give a Damn”)  157
12. AC Cars and the Hyperreal Village  167
IV. Digital Saviorism
13. Digital Saviors  181
14. Digital Time (and Its Others)  193
15. Digital Audi Culture (or Metadata)  203
16. Digital Scaling (or Abnormalities)  215
17. Digital Dustbins  227
Conclusion Against Saviorism  239
Acknowledgments  251
Notes  257
Bibliography  299
Index

“In this ‘nervous’ and ‘sweaty’ ethnography of an education NGO in South India, Arjun Shankar offers an original, historically and theoretically robust analysis of the global helping economy, elaborating a complex system that unites racial capitalism, technocratic solutionism, neocolonialism and development ideologies under the figure of the ‘brown savior.’”
"A needed take on the growing neoliberalization of caste values and racialization of cultural capital in the globalized world. The color-cosmetic desires penetrate into markets of patronship and subjecthood. The analogy of the brown savior is damning the philosophy of the underclass in the colonial width. 'Brown saviors' is a befitting jargon of the neoliberal postcolonial world. Brown is colonized and therefore it is global. Its structural hangouts are cultural, and thus it thinks of itself as a savior to its people because it has become a savior in the global economy and corporate diversity. This powerful manuscript, packed with accessible ethnography, points out the obvious in the room with demanding rigor and engaging theory. A dutiful addition to the global castes."

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Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in