Race, Dispossession, and Revolution: Literatures from India and the Americas in the Twentieth Century
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This dissertation reconnects the literatures of India and Latin America, and thereby offers an account of the global dimensions of racial capitalism in the twentieth century. I reactivate prematurely stalled conversations between these areas in postcolonial studies to demonstrate that South Asian and Latin American caste systems—despite their very different historical genealogies—invigorate modern projects of racialized enclosure and shape the political subjectivities of militants involved in agrarian revolution against dispossession. This dissertation pursues ostensibly two distinct yet interrelated horizons of comparison and is thus organized into two parts of two chapters each. In Part One, I examine regionalist novels depicting agrarian crisis in mid-twentieth-century India and Peru alongside Marxist debates on dispossession as an ongoing feature of global capitalism to develop a relational method for the study of the two regions. When juxtaposed, these novels reveal a striking resonance between Indian and Peruvian caste: each is a racial construct that is shaped by, and in turn maintains, uneven class formation and patterns of forced migration engendered by dispossession. It therefore enlarges the geographic frame of reference in studies of racial capitalism beyond the North Atlantic core of the world-system to account for caste-based regimes of socioeconomic differentiation in the periphery. In Part Two, I bring this method to bear on genres of life writing in relation to histories of transnational migration, anticolonial internationalism, and radical movements challenging dispossession. I first scrutinize the idiom of solidarity that Indian revolutionaries developed in their autobiographies while living in Mexico as exiles during the interwar period to show how they reconfigured emergent conceptualizations of the global color line through the language of caste. Then, I examine the worldly affiliation of the Latin American testimonio with feminist oral history in India during the 1970s and 80s to demonstrate the ways that the racialized peasantry and other marginalized subjects interacted with, embraced, and at times critiqued communist models of guerrilla warfare in the countryside. Through a close reading of these multilingual cultural materials, this project thus elaborates a perspective that I call agrarian globality, or a mode of viewing and understanding the dynamic forces that join seemingly remote rural geographies in India and the Americas to the world at large that writers and revolutionaries from these far-flung places collectively inhabit.