Description:
Over the last few decades, my work has been animated by the fundamental question, how can we make strange the universalist claims or assumptions of the epistemologies with which we work in order to reveal their cultural specificity? It is a question that also emerges in connection with modes of racialization. Thus, one should not simply compare types of racialization, as though they were commensurable, but ask what one can do to show the work these concepts perform in relation to specific histories and languages. My own familiar methods of articulating processes of racialization became thoroughly destabilized on a recent visit to India, where the functions of caste appeared to trump questions of racialization in critical discussions. But before entering this minefield of complexities and contradictions, let me summarize the previous work with which I've been associated.