Full Description
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.
Contents
Preface: Encountering Saviorism vii
Premise One: Global Shadows vii
Premise Two: Nervous Ethnography xii
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 Audit 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 323
