Description
Book SynopsisArjun 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.
Trade Review“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.’” -- Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, Northwestern University
"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." -- Suraj Yengde, Harvard University
"
Brown Saviors and their Others will appeal to scholars and students of development studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and of critical race studies. The nervous ethnography that characterizes it is sure to enrich ongoing debates about what it would mean for ethnography to truly break from its colonial and white supremacist past and about what it would mean to address social inequality outside of a savior mentality and within a framework that seeks to undo the racial and caste hierarchies that are facilitated by our current global capitalist system." -- Nell Gabiam * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
Table of ContentsPreface: 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
