#anticolonialism

Anupama Rao's The Caste Question and Sharad Chari's Apartheid Remains = approach caste and race not as identity markers but as technologies of labour discipline + statecraft. The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid by Anand Teltumbde is a very, very good read on the modernisation of casteism, and goes into the institutionalisation of Naxalite-accusations as a tactic of the Indian state.

Priya Gopal's Insurgent Empire is quoted in my presentation and is a very good 'intro read' to dissent studies etc, but just a note that Gopal is writing from and to Cambridge, and that is evident in some of her positions. Vijay Prashad's The Karma of Brown Folk critiques the "model minority" myth and directly names class-caste collusions in U.S. South Asian migration patterns. Gaiutra Bahadur's Coolie Woman is an expansive intergenerational account of indentured labour migration from South Asia to the Caribbean.

Meena Kandasamy's The Gypsy Goddess is metafictional and formalistically very interesting, blends Marxist historiography and fiction, confronts the limits of literary form when narrating atrocity, tells of the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre of Dalit labourers in Tamilnadu. Kandasamy is great in general, really nice person too! No Land’s People: The Untold Story of India’s Deported Citizens by Abhishek Saha is a journalistic account of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and its brutal exclusion of Bengali Muslims from citizenship... biting read on how liberal framings of "Indian democracy" erase the violence of the country's border regime and ethno-religious nationalism.

The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present by Jini Kim Watson & Gary Wilder is a collection of essays/articles on how the postcolonial is often used to mask state violence or bourgeois aspiration + calls instead for anticolonialism reckoning with authoritarianism/environmental collapse/neocolonial relations. Being Muslim in South Asia: Diversity and Daily Life edited by Robin Jeffrey & Ronojoy Sen, particularly useful in its criticism of how liberal diasporic narratives can often treat Islamophobia as a “silly back home™️ problem", unlike US/UK racism, aka "the Real Problem™️".

Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan, another bit of fiction+non-fiction, presented in fragments, re: absurdity and brutality of South Asian labour diaspora in the UAE, really interesting when it comes to less-considered diasporic narratives. The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Forgotten War edited by Diana Yong, a collection of essays on British counterinsurgency during the Malayan Emergency, the roots of military-industrial practices exported to Vietnam later, and the racialised labour that underpinned them (if you're a British liberal/lefty, get ready to get icked the fuck out by Attlee, sorry).

Finally, The Malaysian Indians: History, Problems and Future by Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown, a political history of Indian Malaysians, many descended from indentured labourers... it challenges celebratory economic-diaspora narratives but also Malaysia+Singapore's self-conception as utopian 'melting pots' by showing the structural disenfranchisement, plantation labour exploitation + ongoing marginalisation faced by the Malaysian Tamil community to this day.