Description:

Nico Slate, Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon, will be in conversation with Daniel Immerwahr (Professor of History) and Ivy Wilson (Associate Professor of English and Director, Black Arts Consortium).

For two hundred years, social reformers in the United States and India have compared race and caste. The majority of these reformers ignored what was lost in translating complex identities and hierarchies into the words “race” and “caste” and then again translating between these words. While exploring the limitations of such a double translation, this talk will explore how race/caste analogies were used to build intersectional solidarities that aimed to bridge movements against white supremacy, caste oppression, and other forms of injustice. Key figures will include W.E.B. Du Bois, B.R. Ambedkar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Co-presented by the Kaplan Humanities Institute and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies as the Winter 2025 Kaplan Conversation in the Critical Humanities.