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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface: Encountering Saviorism
- Premise One: Global Shadows
- Premise Two: Nervous Ethnography
- Introduction: Brown Saviorism
- I: Theorizing Saviorism
- 1. Global Help Economies and Racial Capitalism
- 2. The Racial Politics of the Savarna Hindu (or the Would-Be Savior)
- II: Neocolonial Saviorism
- 3. Poverty’s Motivational Double Bind (or Neo-Malthusian Visions)
- 4. Fatal Pragmatism (or the Politics of “Going There”)
- 5. The Caste of Liberal Intervention
- 6. Hindu Feminist Rising and Falling
- 7. Gatekeepers (or the Anti-Muslim Politics of Help)
- III: Urban Saviorism
- 8. The Road to Accumulation
- 9. Urban Altruism/Urban Corruption
- 10. A Global Death
- 11. The Insult of Precarity (or “I Don’t Give a Damn”)
- 12. AC Cars and the Hyperreal Village
- IV: Digital Saviorism
- 13. Digital Saviors
- 14. Digital Time (and Its Others)
- 15. Digital Audit Culture (or Metadata)
- 16. Digital Scaling (or Abnormalities)
- 17. Digital Dustbins
- Conclusion: Against Saviorism
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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