Social Abstraction, Historical Comparison: Thinking Caste, Race, and Gender in the Time Capital

Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Acting Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She has written widely on colonialism and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. Her book The Caste Question theorized caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation. She is currently working on a book on the political thought of B. R. Ambedkar; and on a project titled “Dalit Bombay,” which explores the relationship of caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay. Her most recent publication was the edited volume Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality.
The annual Franke Lectures in the Humanities provide up to four public lectures a year, organized in conjunction with an upper-level undergraduate humanities seminar. The lectures are made possible by the generosity of Richard and Barbara Franke, and are intended to present important topics in the Humanities to a wide and general audience.
The spring 2019 Franke Lectures have been organized in conjunction with the Yale College seminar “Race & Caste” taught by Hazel Carby and Inderpal Grewal.