TY - JOUR
AU1 - Agathocleous,, Tanya
AU2 - Neary,, Janet
AB - Abstract This essay analyzes the rhetorical and political connections between African American and South Asian critiques of race and empire in the century leading up to the Bandung conference in 1955. Specifically, we trace the way “caste” emerges as a key rhetorical term in the mid-to-late nineteenth century for linking the oppressions of race, slavery, and its aftermath in the United States to those of caste and empire in India. Building on work by Nico Slate and Antoinette Burton, we identify a strategic citational practice we call Afro-Asian cross-referencing, which the writers under consideration use to advance anti-racism in sometimes very local contexts. Focusing on the dynamic periodical culture of the period, our study analyzes anti-caste sentiment as an expression of cross-racial solidarity uniting anti-colonial movements in India with racial uplift movements in the United States. Because the concept of “Afro-Asian solidarity” first took hold at the Bandung conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement that it helped to originate, the phenomenon itself remains most visible in relation to this later period and the Cold War context. By shifting focus to an earlier moment in the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, we illuminate the work that the idea of caste did in defining strategic transnational connections—as well as missed opportunities for connection—later in the century. On the occasion of his 2010 visit to India, U.S. President Barack Obama was presented with a copy of Jyotirao Phule’s anti-caste pamphlet “Slavery.” A reformer who campaigned for the rights of women and lower castes, Phule first published “Slavery” in 1873. Considered a foundational text of the Dalit movement, “Slavery” argues that the caste system, far from reflecting the natural order of things, is a system of subjugation designed by Brahmins when they first migrated to India to establish and maintain power; it is also notable for being an early example of Afro-Asian comparison, drawing connections between caste in the Indian context, British colonialism, and American slavery. The full title of Phule’s pamphlet, “Slavery (in the Civilised British Government under the Cloak of Brahminism),” connects caste to colonial exploitation, while a dedication on the title page makes the further connection to racial slavery in America, celebrating the Union triumph in the recent Civil War and suggesting the potential of that victory for India: “To the good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self-sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thralldom.”1 The politician who presented Obama with Phule’s publication, Chhagan Bhujbal, was a minister of public works for the state of Maharashtra at the time, as well as an activist in the Dalit movement. His act was one of the more direct appeals to the U.S. president made in Phule’s name during his Indian visit, but there were less direct ones as well. A Facebook page named “Mahatma Jyotirao Phule hardcore fans,” for example, posted an open letter to Obama, asking him to give a biography of Lincoln to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a preemptive response to Modi’s habit of bestowing the Bhagavad Gita upon visiting dignitaries. Labeling themselves victims of the Hindu religious text, historically used as a rationale for caste hierarchies, the authors of the open letter call upon Obama to enlighten Modi by referencing Lincoln and to look upon both the Bhagavad Gita and Modi’s politics with suspicion.2 While Obama might seem an unexpected addressee for a local group of Dalit activists in India, their gambit in posting the open letter makes sense in light of the historical import of Phule’s pamphlet. Though separated in time by almost a century and a half, Phule’s work and the Phule fans' Facebook page operate similarly and signal the long history of rhetorical connections between caste and race—made by a broad range of anti-racist and anti-colonial writers in different national contexts—that represented these categories as colluding or parallel systems of exploitation. Both Phule and his twenty-first century fans address the United States in order to “jump scale” from the national to the international stage, thus embarrassing local leadership and drawing wider attention to the inequities of India’s caste system.3 Both denaturalize the caste system by associating it with racial injustice in a different national context while creating a narrative of progress in which this injustice might be defeated: the North’s victory in the American Civil War and Obama’s victory over American racism as the first black president are implicitly invoked as signs that the United States could serve as a model for overcoming structural inequities in India. In these examples, transnational comparison and rhetorical gestures of racial solidarity are used both to suggest strategic forms of alliance and to undermine essentialist understandings of race and caste. Yet the comparative move relies on an oversimplification and idealization of one national and historical context in order to advocate for change in another (U.S. racism post–Civil War to the present is overlooked by the Indian writers). This dynamic, we will show, is characteristic of the rhetoric of Afro-Asian comparison from the moment of its early deployments in the mid-nineteenth century in the works of reformers like Phule, to its uses in the latter part of the twentieth century in Afro-Asian alliances such as those forged at the Bandung Conference of 1955. Bandung is often cited as a crucial event in the history of Afro-Asian solidarity and hailed as the crucible in which political alliances such as the Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization, and cultural conventions such as the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference, were formed. But critics have also pointed to the imbalance between African and Asian countries at the event and in other evocations of Afro-Asian solidarity; the “Bandung myth,” these critics argue, has become a convenient shorthand for a utopian version of anti-colonial and anti-racist transnational organizing that never existed in practice.4 The kinds of problems and possibilities associated with Afro-Asian alliances from mid-century onward, we contend, can be traced to a much earlier moment and are discernible in a different Afro-Asian context. In this essay, we examine the connections drawn between “caste” and “race” by African American activist writers and by anti-racist and anti-colonial intellectuals located across the British Empire from as early as the 1840s to WWI, identifying a strategic citational practice we call Afro-Asian cross-referencing: an international vocabulary of anti-racism and anti-colonialism that could be applied to local contexts but that often smuggled in problematic hierarchies and occlusions alongside its progressive aims as it mediated between different national and structural contexts. Rather than using one context as a standard by which to elucidate the other (as many of the primary texts we address here do), we trace the diverse practices and varied goals of cross-referencing to capture how these simultaneous references across national and political contexts elaborate, affirm, or verify points of argumentation across distinctly bounded print cultures, as well as how they remain crossed, in the sense of crossed wires, often signaling connection or parallels without actual contact with or awareness of conditions on the ground for the group referenced. In addition to operating as a rhetorical lever of anti-racism in a local context, the construction of this intricate intertextual web was the basis for later political movements (such as Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement, and other forms of Third Worldist organizing), as well as for the problems that mitigated their radical potential. In what follows, we argue that these instances in which writers reach across national borders to describe or mobilize anti-racist principles represent an important moment of international anti-racist organizing; offer a window onto an aspect of comparative racialization that has been largely overlooked; and are foundational to understanding the prehistory of what became known as Afro-Asian solidarity, as well as its pitfalls. As the following genealogy will show, “caste” and “anti-caste” emerge as key terms for linking the oppressions of race, slavery, and its aftermath in the United States to those of caste and empire in India. Thus far, only a few critics have investigated the way the language of race and caste circulated and intersected transnationally, and most of this work has focused on the mid-twentieth century.5 Yet, as Ania Loomba notes, a comparative critique of race and caste across space and time helps us to “understand the connections between what are often treated as divergent histories of colonialism” and to undo the assumptions about biology and culture that have helped to keep race and caste distinct.6 Although one essay on “racial caste” cites W. E. B. DuBois’s 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk as the first instance of caste being used to interpret race relations in the United States, the term has a longer transnational history.7 From the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth, “caste” was used comparatively by writers in the United States and throughout the British Empire who sought to connect the dots between hierarchies of race, class, empire, and religion and to resignify these hierarchies as the work of power rather than innate difference. While “caste” came to signify a broad range of social hierarchies, and thus served as a riposte to essentialist explanations for both race and caste inequities that circulated in the period, its deployment also tended to neglect historical, material, and national specificity. Afro-Asian cross-referencing designates a field of engagement with varying levels of mutual awareness, where references often operate as rhetorical expedients that flattened or misunderstood the material circumstances of the group referenced, borrowed from, or gestured toward. In one of the more comprehensive works on this subject, Colored Cosmopolitanism, and a related essay on race and caste, Nico Slate traces how people, texts, and discourses connected across different anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles in the United States and India from the nineteenth century until the 1960s. His work has influenced ours in elucidating the tensions that emerged within race/caste analogies: in his analysis, this comparison at once “contributed to the development of a [progressive] colored cosmopolitanism that aimed to liberate the world’s oppressed ‘colored’ peoples” and was wielded conservatively “in order to shield the local or national status quo from the pressure of international opinion.”8 Another useful text on the race-caste comparison, Deepa Reddy’s “The Ethnicity of Caste,” looks at the way the language of caste in the Indian context has historically been “redefined and politicized by being drawn into wider discourses about race.”9 In order to address international audiences and stake claims that might have traction in global political forums such as the UN, Dalit organizers in contemporary India gain access to the language of human rights and its legal clout by aligning caste with race, even as they also define their “native” identities in the kind of essentialist terms now decried by anthropologists. At the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, for example, Dalits fought to have caste recognized as a form of racial injustice. As a result, caste and race are now more broadly understood by human rights organizations as colluding systems, Reddy contends. A closer look at the way the term “caste” circulated internationally from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century in newspapers, periodicals, case law, novels, and speeches illuminates how the groundwork for this recognition was established early on. Like Slate and Reddy, we are interested in the paradoxes that surround the intertwining of caste and race discourses, but our work also provides a distinctive genealogy of the word “caste” as a transnational comparative term. Focusing on nodes of print culture central to transnational organizing, we trace a narrative genealogy of the uses of caste and draw attention to how texts and writers cited traveled across these contexts and were often directly or indirectly in conversation with each other. We also look at the way these conversations came into direct contact at the Universal Races Congress of 1911 (URC), an understudied but crucial forerunner to events like Bandung, in which leaders and thinkers from all over the world met in London to interrogate contemporary discourses about race. Drawing together key figures in Afro-Asian cross-referencing—such as W. E. B. DuBois and Gandhi—and contributing to the terms in which race would be discussed for the rest of the century, the URC was a pivotal event in the history of comparative racialization that we outline here. Cross-referencing in African American Rights Discourse Two early examples of the use of “caste” in African American rights discourse illustrate writers’ analogical use of the term—likening U.S. institutions’ discriminatory laws and policies to caste in “heathen India”—demonstrating the deployment of the term to connect slavery and structural inequity in India, to shame American institutions for their failure to live up to their egalitarian and republican values, and to establish caste as a term designating specifically legal disenfranchisement. In June 1839, the Board of Trustees of the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church denied Alexander Crummell admission on the basis of his color, despite the church’s statute that all qualified candidates would be “received as . . . student[s] of the seminary.”10 In protest, in 1843, white antislavery activist William Jay published Caste and Slavery in the American Church, a pamphlet in which he condemns the trustees’ decision and exposes racial discrimination as the cause of Crummell’s rejection, a fact that had been concealed in the board’s official minutes: Nothing could be clearer than that the Trustees, [in rejecting Crummell], not only exceeded their powers and violated the trust reposed in them, but deliberately established a system of Caste in the Church— . . . Caste as palpable as that which separates, in heathen India, the Brahmin from the Soodra. They establish a principle which would justify us in regarding the coloured man as an inferior being, intended to occupy a lower sphere in the scale of creation; which designates him as one whose constitutional privileges we may innocently annul.11 In order to advance a progressive agenda of inclusion, Jay uses a comparison with India to position racial discrimination as backward and unchristian; he demonstrates an awareness of the Indian context only insofar as it operates as a foil for American and Christian values. Using a similar rhetorical strategy in 1855, Frederick Douglass’ Paper invoked caste to denounce the violation of James W. C. Pennington’s civil rights when he was ejected from a public car in New York. The paper appeals to America’s Christian and democratic ideals via an unfavorable comparison with an “uncivilized” nation by identifying racial prejudice in the United States as an intrusion of “the spirit of caste”: Boasting and ranting about Freedom and Equality, the American people, as a whole, are the most inconsistent, and the most tyrannical people, the sunlight ever revealed to the gaze of men, or of devils. Caste is the god the nation delights to honor. Caste is in their preaching, their singing, and their praying. They talk about the caste of the Hindoo, while they out-Hindoo, in the development of this insatiate and malignant spirit, every nation under heaven. . . . The spirit of caste reflects anything but credit upon the character of the American people.—It makes those who possess it, a hissing and a by-word among all civilized nation [sic].12 On the surface, the charge that Americans have “out-Hindoo-ed the Hindoos” appears to operationalize a logic similar to the one visible in Jay’s pamphlet, advancing American exceptionalism and the sense of non-Christian countries as “backward.” However, by framing the analogy in terms of those who “talk about the caste of the Hindoo,” the paper indicts the very American exceptionalism on which the comparison depends, identifying those who hypocritically deny African Americans civil rights at home as the same people that decry “uncivilized” behavior abroad. While the connection between African American disenfranchisement and the Indian context is largely rhetorical in Douglass’s paper and for Jay, African American abolitionists began to articulate antislavery and anti-colonialism as adjunct projects in the 1850s. A simultaneously illustrative and challenging example of this is provided by Henry Box Brown’s performances in England during this period. In the early 1850s, Brown, a fugitive from slavery in the United States who got his nickname from his method of escape (shipping himself from Virginia to antislavery offices in Philadelphia), traveled the country with his famous panorama, Mirror of Slavery, commissioned from Josiah Wolcott in 1849. Brown exhibited this panorama to rapt audiences, occasionally adding new features, and, in 1852, ultimately retitled it the Grand Original Panorama of African and American Slavery. Although only ekphrastic descriptions of what the panorama depicted remain, Suzette Spencer convincingly argues that it contained an “anti-colonial dialectic in tension with the wealth and industry of imperial nations such as Britain, Spain, North America and implicitly Africa, for the African slave trade is the inaugural scene, the primal event, that opens Brown’s Mirror of Slavery.”13 Consequently, it is that much more confounding that at the end of the decade Brown incorporated into his public appearances and performances a panorama that depicted the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, which, in the estimation of his biographer Jeffrey Ruggles, “undoubtedly . . . presented the British side of the Indian Mutiny, for it would have been commercial suicide to exhibit in England from any other perspective.”14 Ruggles also contends that “such a point of view put his two panoramas at odds. Where the panorama of slavery spoke to the aspirations for freedom of an oppressed people, the panorama of the mutiny would have celebrated the restoration of imperial dominion.”15 Similarly, Audrey Fisch notes that “[t]he juxtaposition of abolitionism with the Indian Mutiny . . . forms a paradoxical inclusion. The Indian Mutiny was replayed in England with ‘a general racist and political hysteria’ in numerous essays, sermons, novels, poems, and plays. . . . By presenting panoramas depicting African and American Slavery, together with scenes of the Indian Mutiny, ‘Box’ Brown can only have played into English fears about non-white Others (himself included).”16 Fisch makes clear that Brown’s reception—and the reception of black American abolitionists generally in this period—was parlayed in the British press into celebratory nationalist rhetoric, arguing that American abolition . . . provided an ideologically contested territory on which “native” anxieties about culture, class, and British identity could be recast, in different ways, into a larger drama of national competition between England and the United States. Thus the parade of American abolitionism before Victorian spectators worked to fuse the unlikely combination of abolitionist sympathies with nationalism.17 As these critics’ work shows, the historical evidence we have of the reception of Brown’s Indian Mutiny panorama certainly suggests that it posed no serious challenge to—and perhaps worked to buttress—British imperial rhetoric. At the very least, though, Brown’s parallel panoramas demonstrate that abolition and empire (particularly British empire in India) were mutual considerations for anti slavery lecturers during this period. Despite how these panoramas might have been received by the British public, Brown’s presentation juxtaposed the logics of oppression in slavery and colonialism in tantalizing and potentially disruptive ways. At roughly the same time, beginning in the 1840s, the term “caste” was used by abolitionists and African American writers independent of the Indian context as a way of describing discrimination against African Americans exceeding the bounds of slavery. In January 1846, prominent white abolitionist, lawyer, and future senator Charles Sumner declined an invitation to speak at the New Bedford Lyceum in Massachusetts in response to its recent refusal to admit a black man as a member. Writing an open letter published in the National Anti-slavery Standard, Sumner characterizes the act as a mark against New Bedford’s “liberal spirit”—a reference to the town’s reputation as a haven for fugitives from enslavement—and denounces the Lyceum’s decision as one that introduces “a distinction of caste which had not been there recognized before.”18Frederick Douglass’ Paper’s 1855 articulation of the segregation of public transportation as an infiltration of “the spirit of caste” may well be traceable to this moment. Although Douglass had already left New Bedford by 1846 for a lecture tour in the United Kingdom, he signals his awareness of the Lyceum incident and the surrounding debate it sparked in a January 1, 1846, letter to William Lloyd Garrison. Cataloguing the discrimination he faced in the United States (which he opposes to his experience in the UK), he writes of his own encounter with the New Bedford Lyceum: “Soon after my arrival in New-Bedford from the South, I had a strong desire to attend the Lyceum, but was told, ‘We don’t allow n——s in here’!”19 Both Sumner and Douglass use caste to emphasize the stark operations of racial discrimination in a supposedly free state. Writing from another nominally free state—California—newspaper editor Philip Alexander Bell deploys caste to denote the construction and maintenance of a punitive race-based economic hierarchy.20 Referencing the Indian context in the same manner as Douglass and Jay, as a rhetorical gesture to signal antidemocratic, arcane political systems that the United States should distinguish itself from, Bell calls on the law and the press to eliminate racial inequality, asserting natural equality and making a distinction between caste—which he understands as a system of social stratification based on race and heredity—and class—which he understands as a system of economic stratification in which anyone who works hard can move up in status. In the May 5, 1865, issue of the Elevator, an African American weekly newspaper published in San Francisco, Bell, the paper’s editor and founder, penned a short editorial explaining the paper’s name and motto, “Equality before the Law.” In it, Bell indicates that racial discrimination is both a reason for and a consequence of political and legal barriers to black economic success. In a series of rhetorical feints, Bell cuts through the distinction between political and social equality that hamstrung debates about black civil rights in California (and elsewhere) by introducing caste as the term for ideologically retrograde racial hierarchies; he proclaims modern legal equality as the primary goal, identifying white citizens’ fear of black economic competition as the primary obstacle to it. He writes, “We claim full ‘Equality before the Law,’ we desire nothing more, we will be satisfied with nothing less. Social equality is a bug-bear, a hideous phantom raised by necromancers to frighten people from their duty.”21 Designating the paper’s mission as “to place all mankind on a level,” Bell hastens to add that, as the paper’s name suggests, this is a matter of elevating the oppressed, rather than lowering the standard of rights, protections, and status enjoyed by the privileged: “We are levelers, not to level down, but to level up. We would abolish caste, not class, we would teach the serf that he is, by nature, created equal to his lord, the slave to his master, the Pariah to the Bramin; but we would also teach them that something more than natural equality is required to elevate them to a conventional equality with the ruling classes.”22 Bell articulates the tension between legal and social equality through a series of temporal figures: legal equality is cast as the province of the future, while the fear of social equality is cast as the province of the past, an illusory specter, backward and uncivilized, doggedly haunting rational political debate. He associates economic mobility with rational democracy and racial discrimination with oppressive, uncivilized, antiquated socioeconomic political systems. The paper does not challenge class hierarchy as such but rather works to remove what DuBois would later call the “civic disabilities” that prevent African Americans from improving their class status, moving into positions in its upper echelons, a circumstance that he contends will rearrange economic, and thereby social, relations.23 Caste enters as a way to distinguish an antidemocratic economic system from what Bell understands to be a free market meritocracy. However, as Katharine Adams argues, “Blackness both enables and destabilizes capitalist ideology, value, and subjectivity,” complicating Bell’s assertion of an economic solution to racial inequity.24 One of the contributors to the Elevator’s poetry column was James Monroe Whitfield, a prominent poet in the East who emigrated to California in 1861 or 1862, around the same time as Bell.25 In a poem dedicated to Bell, written on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and quoting the Elevator’s motto, the speaker repeatedly calls for a rededication to the laws that protect African American rights and an abandonment of oppressive, tyrannical laws that result in “moral death,” which he associates with the barbarity of caste.26 The poem concludes with a stirring rallying cry: Then let the people in their might Arise, and send the fiat forth, That every man shall have the right To rank according to his worth; That north and south, and west and east, All, from the greatest to the least, Who rally to the nation’s cause Shall have the shield of equal laws, Wipe out the errors of the past Nursed by the barbarous pride of caste, And o’er the nation’s wide domain, Where once was heard the clanking chain, And timorous bondmen crouched in fear, Before the brutal overseer, Proclaim the truth that equal laws Can best sustain the righteous cause; And let the nation henceforth be In truth the country of the free.27 In this excerpt, Whitfield uses caste to signal the temporality of racial prejudice as backward—“barbarous,” associated with the past—while a burgeoning legal equality is aligned with economic meritocracy characteristic of his vision of the future: “history’s dawning rays [which] begin to permeate tradition’s shade.”28 For Whitfield and Bell, caste is a fixed, ideologically overburdened structure associated with old political systems distinguishable from class, which we are to understand as progressive and associated with the possibility of upward mobility. These writers use the notion of caste to critique U.S. race-based economic discrimination in the postbellum period, defining U.S. democratic potential against arcane caste-based societies, reinscribing India as unchanging, retrograde, premodern, and recalcitrant. African American writer Julia C. Collins also used caste as a way of capturing the operations of racism in the postbellum period. Her newly recovered novel, The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865), is considered the first novel written by an African American woman. In the words of its editors, it “focuses on the lives of a beautiful mixed-race mother and daughter whose opportunities for fulfillment through love and marriage are threatened by slavery and caste prejudice.”29 Published serially by Collins in the African American weekly paper the Christian Recorder at the close of the Civil War, the novel bears no trace of a connection to India but demonstrates how the social phenomenon that Sumner calls “the distinction of caste” and Douglass calls “the spirit of caste” becomes the denigration of a particular racial identity thought to be located in the body—“the curse of caste”—after slavery is abolished. More than a plot device, Collins identifies what she calls caste discrimination as central to her own experience of prejudice. In her 1864 essay “Intelligent Women,” published in the Christian Recorder shortly before the serialization of her novel, Collins urges young women of color to exercise their minds and improve themselves morally and intellectually, exhorting readers to “Listen to the advice of one who is closely allied with you by caste and misfortune.”30 Although she speaks of racial discrimination in terms of caste prejudice, Collins is comparatively optimistic about the future of African American civil rights, at least for men, writing in “Intelligent Women” that “the black man will have only to assert his equality with the white, to have it fully and cordially awarded to him.”31 Ten years later, in the congressional debates leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, black representatives Alonzo J. Ransier (Republican, South Carolina) and James T. Rapier (Republican, Alabama) are less sanguine, demonstrating how a proliferation of segregation laws in public transportation and schools have resulted in an anti-republican caste system. In his remarks in favor of the Civil Rights bill, Ransier cites a Tennessee state convention that passed a resolution calling for increased legal protections: “[W]e call the attention of the Congress of the United States to the fact that the public institutions of Tennessee are defective in point of principle and practice, are anti-republican and proscriptive, and their tendency is to breed discord between citizens and stimulate the spirit of caste and hate.”32 Rapier makes a similar argument, explicitly likening the institution of segregation laws to the class system of Europe and the caste system of India: “Sir, this whole thing grows out of a desire to establish a system of ‘caste,’ an anti-republican principle, in our free country. In Europe they have princes, dukes, lords, &c., in contradistinction to the middle classes and peasants. Further East they have the brahmans or priests, who rank above the sudras or laborers. In those countries distinctions are based upon blood and position. Our distinction is color and our lines are much broader than anything they know of.”33 Justice John Marshall Harlan recalls the language of caste and color lines in his sole dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that upheld state segregation statutes and established the “separate but equal” doctrine. Holding that “all citizens are equal before the law,” Harlan contextualizes his dissent by highlighting the rights and protections recently guaranteed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. He argues that “[t]hese notable additions to the fundamental law were welcomed by the friends of liberty throughout the world. They removed the race line from our governmental systems.” He goes on to argue that, “in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Despite this ideal—and the slippage between race, caste, and class—he determines that “according to the principles this day announced,” the Court’s decision amounts to the evacuation of these recent constitutional amendments.34 It is notable that Harlan’s dissent was not the first use of “caste” in legal jurisprudence and that caste was not always deployed to advance African American civil rights.35 The first use of the word in relation to racial discrimination in case law appears in an 1849 school segregation challenge decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which—perhaps not coincidently—Charles Sumner had a hand in. In 1848, Sumner represented Sarah Roberts and her father Benjamin Roberts in Roberts v. City of Boston, a case challenging the racial segregation of Boston schools. Ruling against the plaintiffs and upholding school segregation, Justice Lemuel Shaw wrote, It is urged that this maintenance of separate schools tends to deepen and perpetuate the odious distinction of caste, founded in a deep-rooted prejudice in public opinion. This prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law, and cannot be changed by law. Whether this distinction and prejudice, existing in the opinions and feelings of the community, would not be as effectually fostered by compelling colored and white children to associate together, may well be doubted. Answering those, such as Sumner, that denounce the “odious distinction of caste” and argue—as Justice Harlan would at the end of the century—that such legislation foments racial prejudice, Shaw contends that racial prejudice is a matter of public opinion rather than law (and suggests, in what amounts to a racist aside, that prejudice might just as easily be stoked by integration as by segregation). Shaw’s decision is quoted in Ex Parte Plessy, the Louisiana State Supreme Court decision of 1892 that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson upheld four years later. Thus, by the time DuBois invoked “caste” in his remarks at the Universal Races Congress in London as a way of highlighting the failure of American democratic ideals, there had already been a long history of its use to address racism in the American context, which built on abolitionists’ articulation of colonialism and empire (as in the case of Henry Box Brown). Speaking about the initial successes of Reconstruction, which had established “a more democratic form of government, free public schools, and the beginnings of new social legislation,” DuBois used his platform at the conference to lament that, “despite this, the South was determined to deprive Negroes of political power and force them to occupy the position of a laboring caste.”36 Echoing Frederick Douglass’ Paper’s 1855 invocation of “caste” in order to talk about the malignant racism driving systemic and institutional exclusions, DuBois’s formulation overturns received notions of who is and is not “civilized.” Writing back to those who excuse discrimination against African Americans on the grounds of their supposed inferiority, DuBois asserts that “While the mass is still poor and unlettered, it is admitted by all to-day that the Negro is rapidly developing a larger and larger class of intelligent property-holding men of Negro descent; notwithstanding this more and more race lines are being drawn which involve the treatment of civilised men in an uncivilised manner.”37 Recalling writing by Ida B. Wells and Representative Rapier, DuBois makes clear that the proliferation of “race lines” is a direct result of African Americans’ rise in social status, rather than attributable to the inferiority or criminality they are charged with by lynch mobs and “those who uphold this discrimination.”38 Although DuBois makes no explicit reference to India in his speech and his use of caste is not a direct analogy to Indian social structures, his political ideology is deeply informed by his understanding of and engagement with Indian anti-colonial struggles. As Bill Mullen contends, “DuBois’s lifelong advocacy for the liberation and independence of Asian countries is both the least appreciated aspect of his political career and the one perhaps most central to its leftist trajectory. . . . DuBois’s attention to and support for radical Indian political movements near the turn of the century was likewise his first serious intellectual identification with Marxian politics.”39 In the early 1900s, DuBois’s advocacy for a global anti-racist solidarity movement was increasingly articulated in anti-colonial, Marxian terms. For example, Mullen notes that in a 1907 column for the Horizon, “DuBois cited a militant speech at the Indian National Congress as marking Asian uprising as a model for Pan-African and other colored rebellions: ‘The dark world awakens to life and articulate speech. Courage, comrades!’”40 Cross-referencing in the British Imperial Context In the South Asian context in this period, caste was necessarily loaded with local meaning and thus less often used as a transnational comparative term, even as many Indian writers sought to expand its connotations. A number of critics have analyzed the complexities of caste’s connotations in the colonial context, for the British presence in India reified, transformed, and provided opportunities for contesting what caste meant and how it worked in India.41 Nicholas Dirks, for example, argues influentially that caste was refigured as a single term and a strictly religious concept by the British, who used it as a way of “organizing and above all ‘systematizing’ India’s diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization.”42 It is no doubt partly because of this collusion between colonialism and Indian hierarchies that Indian activists such as Phule sought to broaden the meaning of the term so that it might travel beyond India. Using it in this way, as Phule did in his aforementioned work “Slavery,” allowed writers and activists to subject both the caste system and British colonialism to international scrutiny, as well as to forge ties with reformers and radicals engaged in similar struggles abroad. Phule’s was one of the most influential publications to connect British colonialism, Indian caste systems, and race in the American context. By comparing American slavery, colonialism, and caste in its subtitle and dedication, “Slavery” was constructed as purely analogical, for it positioned the Brahmins as the original colonizers of India—invaders and oppressors of its indigenous inhabitants, the Sudras—who used religious texts to perpetuate their power and create a system of “perpetual bondage and slavery.” The British colonial government, in Phule’s view, is thus merely an extension of the Indian caste system, for the labor of Sudra classes was exploited in new ways by imperialism, while all colonial benefits to Indians, such as education and government positions, accrued to those at the top of the caste hierarchy.43 In the years after Phule published “Slavery,” the idea of the British in India functioning as a governing caste, both overriding and reinforcing the hierarchies of religious caste, became a journalistic trope, cropping up again and again in the Indian and British press. For example, in 1888, the Pall Mall Gazette ran an editorial, following the infamous incident in which Lord Salisbury said of Dadhabai Naoroji, upon his bid to represent India in the British House of Commons, that Britain was not yet ready to elect a “black man”: “Caste, exorcised by Reform Acts from English politics, reappears in the shape of color arrogance in India, and we are afforded an example in the speech of Lord Salisbury of the way in which it darkens the mind and blunts the finer sensibilities of the soul.”44 Here caste stands for both the British class system and colonial racism and, like the evocation of the “darkened” mind, subverts colonial discourse about Indian backwardness. Yet, as was often the case in the invocation of caste, its use to indict one system relies on the downplaying of its effects in the comparative case—in this instance, class in Britain. Some of the most capacious and effective uses of caste as a term of comparative critique in this period were those that appeared in Catherine Impey’s Anti-Caste, the first British-based anti-racist journal. Published between 1888 and 1893, Impey’s periodical used the language of caste/anti-caste to connect anti-racist struggles in the United States with anti-colonial struggles throughout the world and to avoid the biological suppositions connoted by “race.” Taking on the “colour line” increasingly visible within the empire between the white settler colonies and the “darker races,” as well as that in the United States, the journal challenged “conventional interpretations of international race relations.”45 Impey used the journal not only as an editorial outlet to articulate her evolving political ideology but also to draw together—through its contributors and circulation—the most prominent anti-racist activists and scholars in the United States, including Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, with those fighting economic exploitation in colonial contexts. Even a partial list of subscribers to Anti-Caste suggests the breadth of the journal’s coalition-building efforts: “the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the Aborigines Protection Society, the Negroes’ Friend Society, the Indian National Congress Movement, the Anglo-Indian Temperance Association, the Afro-American League, the National Citizen’s Rights Association, the Central Anti-Lynching Association, the Women’s Loyal Union, the Richmond Planet, the Maloga Mission, Dr. Patton, a worker against the coolie Labor Traffic, and Miss H. E. Colenso, and other friends of the Africans.”46 Reflecting on Impey’s title choice in her indispensable work on the journal, Caroline Bressey writes that Impey’s decision to draw an active community together under the banner of “Anti-Caste” rather than “Anti-Race” or “Anti-Racism” lay in [her] determination to undermine constructions of race in her activism and in her writing. . . . [She] employed “caste” as a title and as a means of elaborating and deconstructing racial prejudice.47 Arguing that “caste is an organized tyranny of human construction,” Impey advocated “the brotherhood of man irrespective of colour or descent.”48 In her analysis of Anti-Caste, Bressey makes clear that anti-caste as an organizing principle is both the extension of the rhetorical appropriation of notions of Indian caste in civil rights and racial uplift struggles of the United States, and representative of contemporary anti-colonial struggles in India. She also notes, however, that “caste as an internal structure of Indian society did not draw much attention. Anti-Caste’s focus fell on the oppressive relationships between British colonial governors, white settlers, and people of colour in colonies across the Empire.”49 As in other deployments of “caste” outside India, then, the term lost much of its thickness of signification even as it was used to connect injustices in India to those in other parts of the world. As the term moved across different spaces in the imperial public sphere, it took on different nuances, sometimes referring to the Indian caste system, sometimes serving as a historicizing synonym for race, and sometimes carrying both connotations. In 1911, in the months leading up to and following the URC, M. K. Gandhi’s South African-based newspaper Indian Opinion took anthropologists to task for lending the “most constant and active support to the false doctrine of caste and race.”50Indian Opinion ran from 1903 to 1922. Published out of Phoenix, the cooperative community Gandhi established close to Durban, it aimed to transmit information about the Indian diaspora to India, as well as to critique the treatment of Indians in South Africa and racial disparities more broadly.51 An editorial, therefore, argued that much anthropological work on race had been discredited by French journalist Jean Finot’s 1905 work Race Prejudice, which was critical of racial science and its use as a rationale for imperial violence and exploitation.52 After the URC, the journal published again on the subject, suggesting that science, philosophy, and religion had come to an “agreement” about race; “the leading anthropologists of the World have united to declare that the word ‘Race’ has lost all ordinary significance,” the editorial claimed.53 The role the URC played in developing a transnational language of anti-racism was significant but also vexed. Once again, Finot, who attended the URC and whose work was cited there, was used to bolster Indian Opinion’s argument that race is purely a scientific construct, and this follow-up article was more politically pointed than the one published prior to the conference in its linking of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and the prospect of decolonization. The British government, the editorial argued, “did not officially recognise the Congress” because, if it “formally accepted the conclusions which it was known the Congress would be called upon to formulate, the whole fabric of modern Imperialism and all that it connotes would be rent asunder.”54 While Gandhi’s periodical, like many that commented on the URC at the time, pays lip service to the cosmopolitan ideals of the “brotherhood of man” that the conference supposedly incarnated, it highlights the instrumental value of those ideals for colonial subjects by stating that they were a necessary precursor to a time when “the dominant people would get off the backs of the dominated.”55 Thus the language of universal humanity and that of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle were uneasily intertwined in the journal, as they were at the conference itself. Indian Opinion also made connections between racism in the United States and colonial racism by citing an interview with DuBois in the Manchester Guardian: The American people find a justification for their treatment of the Negro in the attitude of England and Germany to the dark races in their Colonies. They quote England as holding the opinion that the dark races must be kept in a condition of eternal tutelage, and they point to the political subservience of the Indian races under your government.56 Saint Nihal Singh, writing in the Indian journal the Modern Review in 1908 about the “colour line” in the United States, made similar connections between racism and colonialism using the idea of caste, in ways that might have influenced DuBois at the URC. Singh spoke against the “baneful castes of ruler and ruled” in India but also stated that “the white man metes out the same treatment to coloured people in India and out of India. It makes little difference whether the coloured man is an Indian, a Chinese, a Japanese, or an Afro-American.”57 In the cases of both the Modern Review and Indian Opinion, the Indian caste system is less important than the critique of white racism. A 1911 editorial in the Indian periodical East and West, however, connected Indian caste and colonial exploitation through a materialist analysis: “occupational caste in India is essentially a protective system,” the writer argued, just as “white men in their colonies adopted a caste system for self-protection. They have no ill-will against Asiatics as such but charity must begin at home.” In this case, Indian caste is addressed directly, but race—in the American context and otherwise—falls out of the picture. As was so often the case in Afro-Asian cross-referencing, these Indian writers either focused on certain meanings of “caste” at the expense of others in order to bolster particular arguments or found it hard to juggle the term’s multiple meanings in ways that might allow it to forge the strongest possible links between each context. The URC demonstrated the degree to which race had emerged as a momentously influential and deeply problematic category of knowledge by the turn of the century, for it set out to explore how racial determinism had become entrenched across a range of anthropological, sociological, and political discourses and to rebut and counter the rise of transnational racisms. Global networks of white settler colonists, projects of Anglo-Saxon unity, and imperial agendas such as that of “Greater Britain,” each of which was intertwined to different degrees with ideologies of white supremacy, were all gathering momentum at the turn of the century and taking advantage of the faster circulation and wider reach of print culture.58 In seeking to interrogate these ideologies, the URC generated considerable interest as the first international event of its kind: two thousand representatives from all over the world participated, including such disparate figures as DuBois, Annie Besant, Franz Boas, Sister Nivedita, and Ferdinand Tönnies. But the URC—like other forms of cross-referencing in this period—epitomized the tenacity of ideas of racist essentialism even as many participants in the event claimed to be invested in debunking them. The conference followed on the heels of a moment in late nineteenth-century racial discourse when “a diverse group of ethnologists and other ‘race experts’ juxtaposed race and caste as timeless, natural, and often beneficial social institutions.”59 Thus, many of the papers presented at the conference took to task one particular contemporary notion of racial difference only to erect another one in its place, just as caste/race cross-referencing often did. The Austrian anthropologist Felix von Luschan, for instance, wrote in favor of monogenesis and against the idea of “civilized” as opposed to “savage” races. However, he also argued that “racial barriers will never cease to exist, and . . . it will certainly be better to preserve than to obliterate them” because of what he saw as the overriding drive of the struggle for survival and its tendency to coalesce around nation and race.60 Franz Boas wrote of the plasticity of race and the tendency of physical and cultural racial characteristics to change over time under the influence of different environments but used this position to argue for the benefit of admitting “degenerate” Italians into the United States in order to accelerate their racial advancement.61 The British colonial administrator Harry Johnston argued against aesthetic hierarchies based on racial difference while declaring himself in favor of polygenesis and the impossibility of a common ancestor.62 Many papers at the conference, then, ended up freshly essentializing race at the very moment it was supposedly being discredited. Nonetheless, there was an important strain of anti-essentialism at the Congress as well, visible at those moments when participants, perhaps most notably DuBois, sought in their speeches and comments to historicize race and subject it to materialist and rhetorical analysis. Rev. M. D. Israel, a Tamil Christian and the only attending member who identified himself with the lower castes of India, took particular issue with the rhetoric of anthropological racism, citing “the bad feeling [created] when Europeans use the [word] ‘native’ to represent any nation or race who are not ‘white.’”63 The word “caste” had a particular use-value in these critiques, for it allowed participants to escape the loaded and intrinsically inaccurate understanding of race as biological and replace it with a term that had, by 1911, come to signify socially constructed systems of injustice and exploitation as well. DuBois’s use of the language of caste at the URC was in this way exemplary. Sloughing off its strictly religious connotations (often mobilized in the West to demonstrate anti-Christian sentiment or to criticize “backward” or “barbarous” Indians), “caste” becomes a kind of political shorthand for institutional racism and other forms of social injustice. DuBois describes caste in his URC speech as “public discourtesy, civic disability, injustice in the courts, and economic restriction.”64 More specifically, his use of the word “caste” becomes a key rhetorical strategy to shift the conversation about racial discrimination from its reliance on “race,” burdened with the notion of innate qualities and limitations, toward an acknowledgment of “civic disability.” He states that The argument of those who uphold this discrimination is based primarily on race. They claim that the inherent characteristics of the Negro race show its essential inferiority and the impossibility of incorporating its descendants into the American nation . . . They say that amalgamation of the races would be fatal to civilisation and they advocate therefore a strict caste system for Negroes, segregating them by occupations and privileges, and to some extent by dwelling-place, to the end that they (a) submit permanently to an inferior position, or (b) die out, or (c) migrate.65 In these remarks, DuBois extends one of the central rhetorical strategies of abolition—shifting the stigma of slavery from the enslaved to the institution of slavery—into the postbellum and post-Reconstruction eras’ treatment of race. DuBois shows how the effects of discrimination have been wrongly attributed to those who have been discriminated against: “The Negroes claim, therefore, that a discrimination which was originally based on certain social conditions is rapidly becoming a persecution based simply on race prejudice, and that no republic built on caste can survive.”66 Reference to caste becomes a way to indict ideologically fixed understandings of race in the United States associated with antidemocratic principles and economic discrimination. A focus on caste shifts the object of analysis from the racialized individual or group to the system of racial discrimination and concomitant limitations of the minds of those who perpetuate racial discrimination, motivated by the “spirit of caste.” As well as serving as a flashpoint for Afro-Asian cross-referencing and critical discussions of race, the URC inspired the launch of another metropolitan anti-racist periodical that, like Anti-Caste, sought to articulate the connections among racism, imperialism, and other hierarchical systems of oppression. Unlike Impey’s journal, though, the African Times and Orient Review was the “first political journal produced by and for black people ever published in Britain.”67 Founded in 1912 by Dusé Mohamed Ali, an Egyptian-Sudanese writer and activist, the periodical called itself “A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Interests of the Coloured Races of the World” in the first issue and “A Unique Journal Devoted to the Higher Interests of the Darker Races” in a later one. It took this mission seriously: the famous black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor wrote (in response to a questionnaire about the journal’s prospects that Ali sent to a number of luminaries), “it is imperative that this venture be heartily supported by the coloured people themselves, so that it shall be absolutely independent of the whites as regards circulation.”68 This issue also stated that the URC had brought to light the need for a “Pan-Oriental, Pan-African journal at the seat of the British Empire which would lay the aims, desire, and intentions of the Black, Brown, and Yellow Races—within and without the Empire—at the throne of Caesar.”69 In this goal the African Times and Orient Review was at least moderately successful. It circulated on and off between 1912 and 1920 and, according to Peter Fryer, had an impressive reach: “It built up an international circulation; it was read by black intellectuals in Africa, North America, and the West Indies; it preached Afro-Asian solidarity.”70 It was also effective in drawing attention to colonial abuses, such as the public flogging of two African railway clerks in Zaria, Nigeria, in 1912; thanks to the journal, the Zaria incident, ignored by the mainstream press, was taken up by a Labour MP in Parliament and became part of the national debate about empire. As a result of this and similar reporting, Fryer notes, the African Times and Orient Review was on the radar of the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, and the India Office.71 The journal’s quest to establish an anti-racist, anti-imperialist coalition across “the darker races” took the shape of an intricate web of cross-referencing, and each issue of the journal covered a dazzling array of geographical and political contexts. As well as reporting from sites across the empire, it devoted considerable space to race in the American context. Among its many contributions by African American writers, it featured important articles by Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, and published photos and statistics of lynchings across the United States. But national focuses such as these were always connected by the journal to other ones, for many of its articles brought different racial and imperial contexts together in a vision of transnational “darker races” solidarity designed to counter the global rise of white supremacy. For example, an article on “The Need for Inter-racial Unity” by William H. Seed demonstrated how the characterization of people of color in different parts of the world served as justification for the exploitation of their labor and argued that “racial superiority is pushed to such lengths that it has become a world policy—almost a world philosophy . . . Its avowed object is to make the whites a permanent governing caste, and to keep the non-whites in subjection.”72 Here, as in many of the earlier examples cited, “caste” refers to race—but in a global rather than local context that recognizes the particular complicities of racism, imperialism, and capitalism in this moment. Another piece that sought to draw attention to white supremacy as a global phenomenon did so in the form of a satirical poem entitled “If Kipling Were a Negro.” The poem, by the African American writer Charles White, appears to be a direct response to “The White Man’s Burden” and its address to the United States: Now, if Kipling were a Negro, living on this Continent He would sing a song much different from the one  which forth he sent; For the treatment they would give him would compel  him to remark That the lighter of the species is much baser than  the dark. Note the disenfranchisement, lynchings, “Jim Crow”  laws and prejudice; Even in their “Christian” churches, devils offer sacrifice; They’re for ever pouring water on the Negro’s brilliant  spark— So the lighter of the species must be baser than the dark.73 This extract from the poem gives a sense of how its use of the subjunctive sets up a comical but effective comparison between Kipling’s racist imperialism and the specificities of racism in the U.S. context, while using both these phenomena as the rationale for reversing Kipling’s prejudice in the pointed refrain that ends every verse: “the lighter of the species is much baser than the dark.” As both Seed’s article and the poem suggest, the African Times and Orient Review was not focused exclusively on Afro-Asian comparison, as its title implied, but instead posited and exemplified a larger “darker races” solidarity made imperative by the global scale and destructive potential of white supremacy that it carefully chronicled. *** So far, our sketch of the interrelated and dialogic uses of “caste” gives a sense of how the term helped to forge rhetorical connections and potential political alliances across disparate geographical contexts and enabled crucial historical and structural analyses of the ways power circulated therein. Yet from a contemporary vantage point, its usage was rife with problems. “Caste” as a transnational category could not adequately address the differences contained within the terms “race” and “caste” while also translating between them, as Slate has pointed out, due to “the thickness of their local significance.”74 In addition, as many of our examples demonstrate, the term often reified one context in order to critique another; being “anti-caste” or having caste stand for that which is politically and socially retrograde played on racist discourses about India, as we see in Jay’s and Frederick Douglass’ Paper’s usages, while sidelining its complex meanings there and compromising their political urgency. In its use in Phule’s work on “Slavery,” on the other hand, the post-Emancipation racism of the United States was ignored so that African American liberation could serve as inspiration for critiques of caste in India. Similarly, those using the term “anti-caste” in relation to the American context, Bressey notes, were often tacitly or explicitly endorsing the “conservative view of economic change maintained by anticaste liberal campaigners who took on the laissez-faire ideology of the Republican Party.”75 When moderate Indian elite reformers used caste as a broad term to indict imperialism, they, too, often chose to overlook caste at home. For example, G. K. Gokhale, who represented India at the URC, criticized the British for forming a “governing caste” despite their promises to bring progress to India. On the other hand, he focused on appropriating the Congress’s language of East and West to underscore broad-based solidarities such as Indian nationalism and pan-Asianism (citing, for example, “a new faith in the destiny of Eastern peoples”) rather than critiquing Indian caste and British colonialism together, as Phule had.76 The “caste” debate also failed to address the problem DuBois, in Dark Princess, labeled “the color line within the color line,” whereby pre-Bandung Afro-Asian cross-referencing was encumbered by the attempts of many Indian writers—including, at various points, Gandhi and Saint Nihal Singh—to stake claims for Indian nationhood on affinities with Europe rather than with blackness: an assertion of “brown over black” that Antoinette Burton sees as taking shape within and in response to this very moment of “darker races” cosmopolitanism.77 After the URC, DuBois maintained his connections with Indian intellectuals and activists, strengthening the connections between anti-racist and anti-colonial movements both expressed and forged at the conference. For example, in 1922, he responded to a letter from H. C. E. Zacharias expressing his support for a races congress to be held in India, while noting the resistance such a project would encounter from the British government: I think a race congress in India would be a very excellent thing and I should be very glad to say so in The Crisis. Of course, unless it could get tremendous influence backing of it the English government would object and other governments withhold passports. I should be very glad to do anything I could to further such a movement.78 A second congress in India failed to materialize, and, after Bandung, as Burton, Christopher J. Lee, and others have shown, Afro-Asian solidarity—despite DuBois’s efforts—was marred by political struggles between the attending nations, which began at the conference itself, and by the infelicitous forms of cultural comparison that prevailed afterward.79 In Burton’s account of Afro-Asian citation post-Bandung, for example, “people of South Asian descent in a variety of locations used Africa and Africans as referent points for imagining and consolidating a distinctively Indian identity in a Cold War context,” often at the expense of solidarity.80 Nevertheless, the anti-caste moment at the dawn of the twentieth century shimmered with heterotopic possibility. As Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson elucidate in their collection on the politics of comparative racialization, Strange Affinities, heterotopias are “not exclusively literal spaces (as in Foucault’s famous examples of the cemetery, the mental hospital, etc.) but spatial imaginaries that mark epistemological or discursive failure, disjuncture, or dissonance. They emerge at the moment when the epistemological certainties that are required for comparison are undermined.”81 The masthead of Anti-Caste is one site in which the ambivalent register of this heterotopia is made starkly visible. The word Anti-Caste at the top of the paper always featured a double-hyphen: a notably idiosyncratic typographical move that made the title appear to read “Anti=Caste.” In this way, the masthead makes “caste” equivalent to “anti,” that which is against, always in a state of antagonism. The journal is against caste but caste is just “against,” for the equal sign here makes it defined by its negativity and divisiveness as a category. By contrast, the journal defines itself around positive community: the slogan below the title paid homage to “the brotherhood of mankind irrespective of colour or descent.” The ambivalence created by the play between the title and the slogan, we argue, may be seen as emblematic. To be in the position of the double negative—to be against that which is categorically against while attempting to forge a new and radically democratic universal—is to be in a precarious, even impossible, position. Over the course of the twentieth century, Afro-Asian solidarity would become more visible and substantial than in the earlier period we trace here, but it would also become increasingly fraught, caught up in Cold War politics and postcolonial nationalisms that undermined ideals of non-alignment and anti-colonial community. The period of Afro-Asian cross-referencing was no less vexed in its utopian strivings, and we have sought to illuminate some of the ways its weaker promises and ineradicable contradictions laid the groundwork for the problems of later iterations of Afro-Asian alliance. Yet it is also important to take stock of the potential of this earlier moment’s rhetorical maneuvers: in the transnational dialogue that was Afro-Asian cross-referencing, the words “caste” and “anti-caste” were used inconsistently and sometimes tendentiously, but they were provocatively destabilizing, signaling a refusal to isolate or indemnify a single system of oppression—or to name what might come after. We wish to thank Ian Fletcher and Hala Youssef for their thoughtful engagements with this essay. We would also like to thank Marcella Kocolatos, Maha Haroun, Ruponthi Sheikh, and Julia Bannon for their excellent research assistance on this project. Footnotes 1 Jotirao Phule, “Slavery,” reprinted in G. P. Deshpande, ed., Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule (Delhi, 2002), 25. In the original pamphlet the name appeared as “Fule.” 2 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=604902749582245&story_fbid=796515553754296. 3 The idea of “jumping scale” is taken from Neil Smith’s essay, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographic Scale,” Social Text 33 (1992): 54–81. Smith defines “jumping scale” as the practice of dissolving “spatial boundaries that are largely imposed from above and that contain rather than facilitate (the) production and reproduction of everyday life” (60). We are grateful to Stéphane Robolin for drawing our attention to the usefulness of the term for describing the interventions of colonial subjects at events like the Universal Races Congress (discussed at more length later in the essay) through his analysis of John Tengo Jabavu’s work there in a paper given at the Universal Races Congress of 1911 Symposium at Rutgers University in 2015. 4 See, for example, “Introduction” in Bandung, Global History, and International Law, ed. Luis Eslave, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah (London, 2017): 12–13 and Antoinette Burton, Brown over Black: The Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Gurgaon, India, 2012). 5 Works that focus specifically on race and caste include Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United State and India (Boston, 2012) and a related article “Translating Race and Caste,” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 1 (March 2011): 62–79; Deepa S. Reddy, “The Ethnicity of Caste,” Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 543–84; Anderson et al., “The Legacy of Racial Caste: An Exploratory Ethnography”; and Anthony de Reuck and Julie Knight, eds. Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches (London, 1967). Works on Afro-Asian solidarity more broadly include Vijay Prasad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007); Dohra Ahmad, Landscapes of Hope: Anticolonial Utopianism in America (New York, 2009); and Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia, PA, 2009). 6 Ania Loomba, “Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique,” New Literary History 40 (2019): 501–522, 508. 7 See Elijah Anderson et al., “The Legacy of Racial Caste: An Exploratory Ethnography,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 642 (July 2012): 25–42, 40, n. 1. 8 Slate, “Translating Race and Caste,” 64. 9 Reddy, “The Ethnicity of Caste,” 544. 10 Cited in William Jay, Caste and Slavery in the American Church (New York, 1843): 7. 11 Jay, 8. 12 “The Case of Rev. Dr. Pennington,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Rochester, June 8, 1855. 13 Suzette A. Spencer, “An International Fugitive: Henry Box Brown, Anti-imperialism, Resistance, and Slavery,” Social Identities 12, no. 2 (March 2006): 227–48, 11. 14 Jeffrey Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown (Richmond, VA, 2003), 154. 15 Ruggles, 154. 16 Audrey Fisch, “‘Negrophilism’ and British Nationalism: The Spectacle of the Black American Abolitionist,” Victorian Review 19, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 20–47, 31–32. 17 Fisch, 37. 18 New Bedford Lyceum, National Anti-slavery Standard, January 22, 1846, 1–2, reprinted from Mercury, quoted in Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Boston, 2001), 179. Like the incident with James W. C. Pennington that Douglass would comment on in 1855, this incident was the product of a strategic move to challenge the practice of segregation. In her history of fugitives in New Bedford, Grover determines that “it appears that white abolitionists deliberately staged the confrontation after people of color had asked for tickets to a certain lecture and had been refused,” (176). 19 Frederick Douglass, Letter, Victoria Hotel, Belfast, January 1, 1846, to William Lloyd Garrison, in Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip Foner (New York, 1950), I: 125. 20 Bell, identified by Robert Levine and Ivy Wilson as “one of the most prominent newspaper figures of the nineteenth century” in their book The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings By a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet, ed. Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), was at the center of African American print culture in California during Reconstruction. Born to free parents in New York in 1808 and educated at the African Free School, he was well connected and active in the convention and abolitionist movements in the East from the 1830s. Like many African American writers and publishers in the mid-nineteenth-century West, he received his early journalism training in the robust abolitionist and free black activist print culture of the East before moving to California in 1860. 21 The Elevator, May 5, 1865. 22 The Elevator, May 5, 1865. 23 W. E. B. DuBois, “The Negro Race in the United States of America,” in Papers on Inter-racial Problems: A Record of the Proceedings of the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26 to 29, 1911 (London, 1911), 362. 24 Katherine Adams, “‘This Is Especially Our Crop’: Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton,” in African American Literature in Transition, 1750–2005, vol. 4, 1865–1880, ed. Eric Gardner (forthcoming, Cambridge). 25 For the most complete collection and analysis of Whitfield’s work and biography, see Levine and Wilson. 26 Levine and Wilson, 228. 27 Levine and Wilson, 227–28. 28 Levine and Wilson, 231. 29 John Ernest and Mitch Kachun, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Julia C. Collins, The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel (New York, 2006), xiv. While Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) is often considered the first novel written by an African American Woman, scholars have complicated that generic designation by demonstrating that the narrative draws heavily from Wilson’s own life and thus might be considered “sociopolitical allegory” or a “narrative about autobiography,” whereas Collins’s text seems entirely an imaginative production. See Our Nig, ed. P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts (New York, 2005). 30 Collins, 126. 31 Collins, 125. 32 Representatives James T. Rapier and Alonzo J. Ransier, responding on June 9, 1874, to Representative Lamar’s argument that the bill was unnecessary because black people already had equal civil rights. Speeches of African-American Representatives Addressing the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/RansierJune091874.pdf. 33 Ransier, Speeches. 34 It is important to note that Justice Harlan’s decision fits the paradigm we have described in which a progressive stance on race relations in one area often relies on or erects a new racial essentialism in its place. Making the case that all citizens should be treated equally before the law, Harlan argued that “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the State and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.” While it is possible that Harlan is being sarcastic in this passage—he employs clear sarcasm later in his dissent—his argument relies on assumptions of Chinese difference to make its case. 35 The earliest use of “caste” in U.S. case law we found was People v. Melvin (New York, 1810), adjudicating a labor dispute, which refers to the Indian context in that it likens British laws against artisans to “Hindoo castes” but makes no connection with racial discrimination in the United States. In the context of racial divisions and discrimination in the period under consideration, “caste” appears in the following cases, listed in chronological order: Roberts v. Boston (1849, Supreme Court of Massachusetts), Van Camp v. Board of Education of Incorporated Village of Logan (1853, Supreme Court of Ohio), Jaremillo v. Romero (1857, Supreme Court of the Territory of New Mexico), Bailey v. Barnelly (1857, Supreme Court of Georgia), Mitchell v. Wells (1859, High Court of Errors and Appeals Mississippi), Cato v. State (1860, Supreme Court of Florida), Evans v. State (1861, Supreme Court of Georgia), State v. Davidson (1865, Supreme Court of Tennessee), People v. Dean (1866, Supreme Court of Michigan), State v. Henderson (1867, Supreme Court of North Carolina,), West Chester & P.R. Co. v. Miles (1867, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania), State v. Gibson (1871, Supreme Court of Indiana), State v. Duffy (1872, Supreme Court of Nevada), Ward v. Flood (1874, Supreme Court of California), Houghton v. Austin (1874, Supreme Court of California), Dunlap v. State (1884, Supreme Court of Alabama), Hunter v. State (1892, Supreme Court of Florida), Ex Parte Plessy (1892, Supreme Court of Louisiana), Reynolds v. Board of Education of City of Topeka (1903, Supreme Court of Kansas), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896, Supreme Court of the U.S.), State v. American Sugar Refining Co. (1902, Supreme Court of Louisiana), and Wolfe v. Georgia Ry. & Electric Co. (1907, Court of Appeals Georgia). 36 W. E. B. DuBois, “The Negro Race in the United States of America,” Papers on Inter-racial Problems: A Record of the Proceedings of the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26 to 29, 1911 (London, 1911): 354. 37 DuBois, “The Negro Race,” 362. 38 DuBois, “The Negro Race,” 362; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). For recent scholarship on African American aesthetic responses to racial violence at the turn of the century, see Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Chicago, 2012); Mitchell analyzes African American theatrical responses to racial violence, showing how lynching plays of the period reveal lynching to be an attack on the growing black middle class. 39 Bill V. Mullen, “DuBois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 217–239, 218. 40 Mullen, “DuBois,” 219. 41 On caste and colonialism in India, see, for example, Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ, 2001); Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999); Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley, CA, 2009); Debjani Ganguly, Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (New York, 2005); Padmanabh Samarendra, “Census in Colonial India and the Birth of Caste,” Economic and Political Weekly, August 13, 2011; and Toral Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (New York, 2012). 42 Dirks, 5. 43 Phule, 27. The Sudra caste is considered the lowest of the four varnas and, as a result, has traditionally been assigned the most undesirable labor, as well as that considered “unclean” (hence the subcategory of “untouchables” within the caste). 44 Caroline Bressey, Empire, Race, and the Politics of Anti-Caste (London, 2013), 64. 45 Bressey, Empire, Race, and the Politics, 23. 46 G. R. Simpson, “Notes,” The Journal of Negro History 10, no. 1 (January 1925): 104–6. 47 Bressey, Empire, 51. 48 Cited in Bressey, Empire, 206–7, 212. 49 Bressey, Empire, 51. 50 “Race Prejudice,” Indian Opinion, Aug 28, 1909, 378. 51 Significantly, given the ambivalent usages of anti-racism we have chronicled here, Gandhi has been critiqued in recent years for leveraging antiblack racism in his efforts to secure rights for Indians in South Africa. See, for example, Ashwin Desai and Goolem Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Palo Alto, 2015). 52 “Race Prejudice,” Indian Opinion, Aug 28, 1909, 378. 53 A. Chessel Piquet “The First Universal Races Congress,” Indian Opinion, Sept 2, 1911, 340. 54 Piquet, 340. 55 Piquet, 340. 56 “Dr. DuBois on Race Prejudice,” Indian Opinion, Aug 26, 1911, 330. 57 Saint Nihal Singh, “Colour Line in the United States of America and How the Negro Is Uplifting Himself,” Modern Review, November 1908, 368. 58 Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 8–9. 59 Slate, “Translating Race and Caste,” 73. 60 Felix Luschan, “Anthropological View of Race” in Papers on Inter-racial Problems, ed. Gustav Spiller (London, 1911), 23. 61 Franz Boas, “Instability of Human Types,” in Spiller, Papers on Inter-racial, 99–104. 62 Harry H. Johnston, “The World-Position of the Negro and the Negroid,” in Spiller, Papers on Inter-racial, 328–36. 63 Record of the Proceedings of the Universal Races Congress (London, 1911), 41. 64 DuBois, “The Negro Race,” 362. 65 DuBois, 362. 66 DuBois, 363. 67 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), 288. 68 Samuel Coleridge Taylor, The African Times and Orient Review, July 12, 1912, 16. 69 Dusé Mohamed Ali, “Foreword,” The African Times and Orient Review, July 12, 1912, iii. 70 Fryer, Staying Power, 289. 71 Fryer, 289. 72 William H. Seed, “The Need for Interracial Unity,” The African Times and Orient Review, November 1912, 154. 73 Charles White, “If Kipling Were a Negro,” The African Times and Orient Review, November 1912, 152. 74 Slate, “Translating Race and Caste,” 63. 75 Bressey, Empire, 56. 76 G. K. Gokhale, “East and West in India,” in Spiller, Papers on Inter-racial, 161. 77 See Burton, Brown over Black. 78 Letter from W. E. B. DuBois's to H. J. E. Zacharias, February 17, 1922. DuBois’ concerns about passports were well founded. Gerald Horne notes that “To make sure that the colonized were quarantined from the putatively seditious messages carried by African Americans, London made it difficult for African Americans to visit India . . . Such barriers were strewn in the path of potential Black visitors to South Asia not least because there were so many parallels between African Americans and Indians.” Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 10. 79 Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH, 2010). 80 Burton, Brown over Black, 5. 81 Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, Ed. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson (Durham, NC, 2011), 5. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Before Bandung: Afro-Asian Cross-referencing and Comparative Racialization
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shz109
DA - 2003-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/before-bandung-afro-asian-cross-referencing-and-comparative-05aCWpBO8Y
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -