Theorizing racialization through India’s “Mongolian Fringe”

Gergan, Mabel Denzin; Smith, Sara

doi:10.1080/01419870.2021.1925319

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Instead, as David Zou argues, territorial sovereignty was grafted onto spaces that had fluid conceptions of boundaries (Zou & Kumar, 2011). Frontier governance also imbued the Himalayas with ethno-racial epistemic connotations, as a belt from Ladakh all the way to present-day Arunachal Pradesh was imagined as the ‘Mongolian Fringe’, whose inhabitants were distinct from those of ‘India proper’ (Gergan & Smith, 2021; Wouters & Subba, 2013). In this colonial imagination, the fringe drew connections between phenotype and space to carve a cultural geography of primitiveness.…”

Section: Exploration Expeditions and The Mapping Of Primitive/periphe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflections on Multidisciplinary Scholarship in the Study of Himalayan Borders and Borderlands

George

2023

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs

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Early mapping of Himalayan frontiers, were intimately tied to the imperial conquest of space. Polycentric contestations of the British, Russian, Qing and even Tibetan expansionist imaginaries dominated such territorial endeavours. In the mid-twentieth century, in the switch from empire to nation, scholarship on borders and borderlands reinforced methodological nationalism in spaces with multiple sovereignty and overlapping treaties. While early post-colonial scholarship critiqued the colonial construction of borders, there have been efforts to tease out newer ways of narrating borders that take cognisance of the continuing heterarchies of violence in the modern nation. Such scholarly ‘decolonial’ endeavours have challenged the overwhelming emphasis on state and territoriality in colonial and later national accounts on borders. By imagining the Himalayan transregional frontier as central, rather than peripheral to state making, these notes challenge the cultivation of the Himalayas as culturally, even civilisationally ‘primitive’. Conceptualising the borderland as an epistemic category, these survey notes synthesise more recent decolonial scholarship on Himalayan borders and borderlands to sketch out emerging geographies of (im)mobility, militarisation and violence.

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Section: Exploration Expeditions and The Mapping Of Primitive/periphe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflections on Multidisciplinary Scholarship in the Study of Himalayan Borders and Borderlands

George

2023

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs

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“…Yet it also fractures a simple reading of the Somali refugee community, revealing the complex ways they are rendered (and render themselves) Black, or for others, somewhere in‐between Brown and Black, to remix cultural historian Antoinette Burton's (2016) theorization of Afro‐Asian colonial and postcolonial racial politics that have persistently placed Indians above Africans—or Brown over Black—through discourses of civilizational superiority. Attending to the spatialized processes of differentiation in Delhi's urban villages, then, offers a way to explore how racialization is deeply entangled with top‐down mechanisms of seeing, as recent theorizations of race in relation to caste and the help industry in India (Shankar 2022) or the colonial visual‐geographic imaginary of the “Mongolian fringe” (Gergan and Smith 2021) have demonstrated. However, Abdul's portrait as a networked image‐event on social media also offers an opportunity to critically analyze how seeing (and being seen) as racialized (and stateless) subjects shifts and changes depending on perspective and proximity.…”

Section: Spatializing Impossibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impossible Portrait

Dattatreyan¹

2023

Visual Anthropology Review

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This article focuses on a portrait of a young Somali man living in Delhi, India. The portrait depicts him in a park in South Delhi wearing a cap distributed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) during their insurgent 2012‐2013 campaign to establish themselves as an alternative political force. I argue this parodic portrait and the text it accrues in its circulations on Facebook functions as a networked image‐event that evinces the impossible contradictions that Somalis face in India. Tracing this networked image event reveals how a surging antiblackness linked to the rise of the AAP Party in Delhi punctuates the in‐betweenness that Somalis experience while they wait for life elsewhere.

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“…Such vernacular practices speak to the persistence and translocation of caste hierarchies, as well as, importantly, anti-caste societies amongst Caribbean diasporas that are erased in being labelled simply "Indian" and "Hindu". We believe the analytic of racialization helps us attend more carefully to how India's oppressive hierarchies, organized along the lines of religion, caste, and tribe, form the basis for the commodification of land and labour in global capitalism, revealing not only how exclusion occurs, but where disruption through transnational analytics and strategic comparisons may be possible and even necessary (Natrajan and Greenough 2009;Dhanda 2015;Manoharan 2019; see also Gergan and Smith 2021;Ranganathan 2021;Yengde 2021).…”

Section: Critical Re-examinations: Racialization and Global Racial Ca...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization

Cháirez-Garza

Gergan

Ranganathan

et al. 2021

Ethnic and Racial Studies

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The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this special issue attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India.

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Theorizing racialization through India’s “Mongolian Fringe”

Cited by 14 publications

References 47 publications

Reflections on Multidisciplinary Scholarship in the Study of Himalayan Borders and Borderlands

Reflections on Multidisciplinary Scholarship in the Study of Himalayan Borders and Borderlands

The Impossible Portrait

Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization

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