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Book Cover
E-book
Author Shankar, Arjun, 1984- author.

Title Brown saviors and their others : race, caste, labor, and the global politics of help in India / Arjun Shankar
Published Durham : Duke University Press, 2023

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Description 1 online resource (xx, 336 pages) : illustrations
Contents Global help economies and racial capitalism -- The racial politics of the Savarna Hindu (or the would-be savior) -- Poverty's motivational double bind (Or neo-Malthusian visions) -- Fatal pragmatism (or the politics of "going there") -- The caste of liberal intervention -- Hindu feminist rising and falling -- Gatekeepers (or the anti-Muslim politics of help) -- The road to accumulation -- Urban altruism/urban corruption -- A global death -- The insult of precarity or "I don't give a damn" -- AC cars and the hyperreal village -- Digital saviors -- Digital time -- Digital audit culture (or app worlds) -- Digital scaling -- Digital dustbins
Summary "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"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on print version record
Subject Altruism -- Political aspects -- India
Altruism -- Economic aspects -- India
Public welfare -- Moral and ethical aspects -- India
Social stratification -- Economic aspects -- India
Marginality, Social -- Economic aspects -- India
Capitalism -- Social aspects -- India
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social.
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / General.
Altruism -- Economic aspects
Capitalism -- Social aspects
Marginality, Social -- Economic aspects
Public welfare -- Moral and ethical aspects
Social policy
SUBJECT India -- Social policy
Subject India
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2022048894
ISBN 1478027118
9781478027119