Caste-ing Academia: The Global Rise of (Critical) Caste Studies
North American academia in the last few decades has been forced to confront Caste as a crucial analytic in the study of the local and the global through various disciplinary perspectives. With groundbreaking work such as Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit (2019), Divya Cherian’s Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (2022) and so on, Caste has become, rightly so, an avoidable part of the global-postcolonial-neocolonial world of scholarship. Recent work by scholars like Nico Slate and Isabel Wilkerson seeks to compare and connect modern racial structures in the US and Europe to the ancient system of Caste in India.