Brown Saviors and Their Others

Arjun Shankar is Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics at Georgetown University and coeditor of Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge.

“In this ‘nervous’ and ‘sweaty’ ethnography of an education NGO in South India, Arjun Shankar offers an original, historically and theoretically robust analysis of the global helping economy, elaborating a complex system that unites racial capitalism, technocratic solutionism, neocolonialism and development ideologies under the figure of the ‘brown savior.’” - Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, Northwestern University "A needed take on the growing neoliberalization of caste values and racialization of cultural capital in the globalized world. The color-cosmetic desires penetrate into markets of patronship and subjecthood. The analogy of the brown savior is damning the philosophy of the underclass in the colonial width. 'Brown saviors' is a befitting jargon of the neoliberal postcolonial world. Brown is colonized and therefore it is global. Its structural hangouts are cultural, and thus it thinks of itself as a savior to its people because it has become a savior in the global economy and corporate diversity. This powerful manuscript, packed with accessible ethnography, points out the obvious in the room with demanding rigor and engaging theory. A dutiful addition to the global castes." - Suraj Yengde, Harvard University "Brown Saviors and their Others will appeal to scholars and students of development studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and of critical race studies. The nervous ethnography that characterizes it is sure to enrich ongoing debates about what it would mean for ethnography to truly break from its colonial and white supremacist past and about what it would mean to address social inequality outside of a savior mentality and within a framework that seeks to undo the racial and caste hierarchies that are facilitated by our current global capitalist system." - Nell Gabiam (Ethnic and Racial Studies) "Shankar... provides a thoughtful, timely critique of the ways in which savarna (upper caste) Hindus perpetuate and reify colonial, racial, and caste hierarchies within the NGO sector in India. He does so by examining the figure of the "brown savior": global Hindu elites, including Hindu Americans, drawn to working with NGOs that aim to help the less fortunate in India. . . . This ethnography is useful for anthropologists of South Asia, those studying global NGO cultures, and those interested in critical caste studies. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." - E. Bridger Wilson (Choice) "With Shankar’s book, it is impossible to look away from that which has always been there: the ongoing, everyday entrenchment of casteist and racist exclusion in ‘the NGO world’ under the guise of do-good liberal saviourism. Brown Saviors has made me completely reassess my early work. It is a book that every researcher of development, education, and public policy must read." - Arathi Sriprakash (Society for U.S. Intellectual History) "[T]his book provides fresh perspectives on ongoing processes of global racial formations that transcend the predominant Black-White/East-West/South-North binaries, particularly within the development sector. This book, in many ways, is an important conversation starter!" - Rohini Rai (Journal of Development Studies) "This book can be useful to scholars and students of anthropology and development, South Asian studies, as well as practitioners who are keen to redefine help, in global help economies. Students of ethnography would also benefit from the book." - Indrakshi Tandon (Anthropological Notebooks)

• Preface: Encountering Saviorism  viiPremise One: Global Shadows  viiPremise Two: Nervous Ethnography  xiiIntroduction: Brown Saviorism  1I. Theorizing Saviorism1. Global Help Economics and Racial Capitalism  312. The Racial Politics of the Savarna Hindu (or the Would-Be Savior)  45II. Neocolonial Saviorism3. Poverty’s Motivational Double Bind (or Neo-Mathusian Visions)  634. Fatal Pragmatism (or the Politics of “Going There”)  755. The Case of Liberal Intervention  856. Hindu Feminist Rising and Falling  957. Gatekeepers (or the Anti-Muslim Politics of Help)  107III. Urban Saviorism8. The Road to Accumulation  1219. Urban Altruism/Urban Corruption  13310. A Global Death  14511. The Insult of Precarity (or “I Don’t Give a Damn”)  15712. AC Cars and the Hyperreal Village  167IV. Digital Saviorism13. Digital Saviors  18114. Digital Time (and Its Others)  19315. Digital Audit Culture (or Metadata)  20316. Digital Scaling (or Abnormalities)  21517. Digital Dustbins  227Conclusion: Against Saviorism  239Acknowledgments  251Notes  257Bibliography  299Index  323