Join us for a reading and discussion with Arjun Shankar, author of Brown Saviors and Their Others (Duke 2023).
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 is assistant professor in the Culture and Politics Program at Georgetown University. He is concerned with the politics of help and its role in upholding systems of racial and caste capitalism. In his monograph, Brown Saviors and Their Others (2023), he takes India's burgeoning help economy, specifically the education NGO sector, as a site from which to interrogate these ideas. He shows how the intersections of race, caste, and labor undergird how transnational and digitized NGO work is done in India today.
Mimi Mondal (she/they) was born and raised in Kolkata, India. Her fiction has been nominated twice for the Nebula Award, with the novelette “His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light” and the ancient-Bengal-inspired setting Shankhabhumi in the Dungeons & Dragons anthology Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. As the co-editor of the nonfiction anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, Mimi has also received the Locus Award and nominations for the Hugo and British Fantasy Awards.