Talk:Anupama Rao

By Sachi Anjunkar

Anupama Rao is a Professor of History at Barnard College. She is Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; and organizer of the Ambedkar Initiative as of October 2022. According to her university profile, her research interests intersect with gender and sexuality studies, caste and race, historical anthropology, social theory, comparative urbanism, and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.

In 2021, she endorsed the "Dismantling Global Hindutva" conference and made the allegation

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

Book

1. Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and Politics in Modern India. University of California Press, 2009. Also published by Permanent Black, 2009.

Edited Volumes

1. Rao, Anupama, editor. Caste, Gender, and the Imagination of Equality. Women Unlimited, 2018.
2. Rao, Anupama, and Saurabh Dube, editors. Crime Through Time. Oxford University Press, 2013.
3. Rao, Anupama, and Steven Pierce, editors. Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2006.
4. Rao, Anupama, editor. Gender and Caste: Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism. Kali for Women, 2003. Paperback edition, 2005. Co-published internationally by Zed Books, 2005.

Journal Articles

1. Rao, Anupama. "Anticaste Thought and Conceptual De-Provincialization: A Genealogy of Ambedkar’s Dalit." In Postcolonial Horizons, edited by Gary Wilder and Jini Kim Watson, Fordham University Press, 2018.
2. Rao, Anupama. "Word and the World: Dalit Aesthetics as a Critique of Everyday Life." Journal of Postcolonial Literature, vol. 53, nos. 1-2, 2017, pp. 147-161.
3. Rao, Anupama. "State Effect and Indian Affirmative Action." In The State, edited by Gregory Anderson, John Brooke, and Julia Strauss, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 331-344.