Imagined Intimacies: Black and Dalit Women Writing in the Global South
Creators: name: Jadhav, Shalmali
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Transnational Feminist Solidarity
subject: Négritude and Anti-Caste Movements
subject: Marathi Dalit and Black Francophone Women’s Writing
subject: Critical Race Theory and Dalit Studies
subject: Comparative Race and Caste Studies
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: Focusing on 20th and 21st-century cultural production by women in the contexts of Francophone anti-racist movements in the Caribbean and Africa, and Dalit literary movements in Marathi in South Asia, this dissertation rethinks the philosophical foundations of contemporary race-caste solidarities. Creating an inter-textual dialogue between, We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement by Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon (1989), Marthe Djilo Kamga’s film Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters (2017), Kumud Pawde’s autobiography Antasphot (1981), and Suzanne Césaire’s contributions to the 1940s journal Tropiques, it contributes a feminist grammar rooted in the Négritude and anti-caste movements. The analogy between race and caste dates back to 1873, when Jyotirao Phule identified the US abolitionist movement as a model for the anti-caste struggle in his book Gulamgiri/Slavery. These connections evolved in scholarly discourse in the US and India throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, with sociologists and anthropologists such as B.R. Ambedkar, Oliver Cox, André Béteille, and Dipankar Gupta debating the “caste theory of race” and the “race theory of caste/untouchability.” This scholarship often compared race and caste in the context of the oppression of Blacks in the US, frequently overlooking the contributions of women and formulations of race in the Global South. By developing an inter-textual reading method grounded in Sara Ahmed and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s conceptualizations of the paradoxical role of intimacy in transnational feminist engagements, this dissertation advances the scholarship comparing race and caste. It animates the differences between Négritude and anti-caste texts while holding their epistemes together. By disrupting the entrenched scholarly tradition that juxtaposes “race” and “caste” to compare the oppression of Blacks in the US or Dalits in India, this research offers a nuanced transnational paradigm for scholarship engaging both race and caste. The concept of “imagined intimacies” evokes the lack of historical connections between these women, even as they negotiated with Western epistemologies while developing their transnational notions of “solidarity.” Black and Dalit women did not have equal opportunities to travel, publish, and collaborate, despite the transnational scope of their visions of solidarity. This dissertation problematizes this distance through its grounding in Critical Race Theory, Dalit Studies, and post-colonial feminist theories. By animating the differences that have made their texts culturally, linguistically, and geographically distant, this work seeks to bring these texts together without erasing or conflating their unique contexts and histories.