Brown Saviors and Their Others.

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

Join us for a conversation between Malini Raganathan and Arjun Shankar about his path-breaking ethnography that provides "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.’” Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, Northwestern University

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.

Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University, and a political ecologist and geographer by training. She is a faculty affiliate of three university centers, and is also a fellow at the progressive climate policy think tank, the Climate and Community Institute.

Manu Samriti Chander is the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell, 2017), the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP, 2024), and the co-editor, with Tricia A. Matthew, of the Oxford University Press book series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. His second monograph, Browntology (SUNY Press, under contract) considers the philosophical groundings of brownness in Enlightenment European thought in order to show how the figure of the model minority haunts foundational efforts to define the human

Arjun Shankar is an assistant professor in Culture and Politics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. His work falls into three broad areas. He is concerned with the politics of help and its role in upholding systems of racial and caste capitalism.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Creative Grounds DC, 1822 North Capitol Street Northwest, Washington, United States