Book talk with Dr. Pinky Hota

Informed by critical caste and race, and gender and sexuality approaches, Pinky Hota’s research examines right wing politics in conversation with contemporary capitalism. Her first book entitled The Violence of Recognition: Adivasi Indigeneity and Anti-Dalitness in India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) speaks to the global rise of right-wing ethnonationalist politics in response to gains made by minorities amidst widespread economic uncertainty. The book locates violence between two minority groups—one classified as indigenous (adivasi) and the other as a marginalized caste category, Dalit—in the long durée of caste capitalism by showing how adivasi indigeneity operates as a fulcrum of caste capitalism that facilitates the legal, political and ultimately, economic exclusion, of Dalits in India. Doing so, it shows how emergent forms of right wing politics must be understood with recourse to long standing relationships between religion and political economy, caste and race, and hierarchies of racial capitalism.

Sponsored by the UC Collective for Caste Abolition. Cosponsored by the UCR Center for Ideas and Society and the Decolonizing Humanism(?) initiative.