Abstract: This conversation marks the launch of Race and Caste: Hierarchy and Universality, a special issue of Critical Times that examines the intertwined histories and contemporary realities of racialized and caste-oppressed lives across South Asia, southern and East Africa, and the Caribbean. Extending the work of the Other Universals Collective, essays in the special issue examine how race and caste have shaped one another across time and space from sixteenth- and seventeenth century Americas to twenty-first century India and Africa. The panellists will especially attend to the themes of Aryan race theory and the politics of mimesis, as well as the possibilities and limits of antiracist, anti-caste and feminist struggles in crafting more just futures beyond the constraints of the postcolonial present.
Speakers:A/Prof. Ruchi Chaturvedi, Dept. of Sociology, University of Cape Town; Prof. Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), Columbia University; Prof. Amrita Pande, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town.
Interlocutor:Prof. Kelly Gillespie, Department of Anthropology, University of the Western Cape.
A/Prof. Ruchi Chaturvedi's Bio: A/Prof. Ruchi Chaturvedi is Associate Professor of Sociology at UCT. Her research and teaching focus on cultures of democracy, popular politics, and political violence in India and postcolonial Africa. Histories of transcontinental dialogues against racial thinking and caste are her other ongoing areas of inquiry. Her recent key publications include Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India (Duke University Press, 2023); the co-edited book on Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (Wits University Press, 2023) and the co-edited volume on "Race and Caste: Hierarchy and Universality" (Critical Times special issue 2025).
Prof. Victoria Collis-Buthelezi's Bio: Prof. Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi is a scholar of Global Black thought. She is co-editor of The Caribbean Race Reader (2024), the first collection of primary and secondary sources on race-making and the Caribbean. She was inaugural director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at the University of Johannesburg (2020 - 2024) and directed the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (2024 - 2026). She is a research associate at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Her entry on "solidarity" appears in Thinking from Black: A Lexicon (2026). Her forthcoming book, Black Liberation under Late Empire: The Plantation, the Mine, and Global Blackness (2026), theorizes different entry points into Blackness toward a more global field of the Black political.
Prof. Amrita Pande's Bio: Prof. Amrita Pande is Professor of Sociology and Fellow at the University of Cape Town. Her work examines reproductive-genetic justice, and multimodal ethnographies. She has authored and co-authored five books, including the field-defining Wombs in Labor: Transnational Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press, 2014), later adapted into Made in India: Notes from a Baby Farm, a multimedia performance she presents internationally. Her research on fertility industries connecting Asia and Africa will be published as Designing Desires, Deleting Futures (MIT Press, 2027). In 2022, she founded South Africa's After Eight Sistahood, a feminist movement that seeks to normalize women's presence in public spaces at night and insert feminist joy into violent cities.
Prof. Kelly Gillespie (Interlocutor)'s Bio: Prof. Kelly Gillespie teaches in the Anthropology Department at the University of the Western Cape and is a member of the History Workshop at Wits University. She is an abolitionist, with a long-term research interest in how criminal legal processes perpetuate apartheid relations in South Africa. Her current research works towards resisting the criminalisation of land and building occupations. She was a co-founder of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, a decade-long project in rethinking critical theory from Johannesburg. Kelly has been active in many social movements in Southern Africa, including Johannesburg People's Pride, the C19 People's Coalition, the Anti-Repression Collective and the reengagement of civic structures in Cape Town.
