Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Based on her CUNY FORUM essay, sociologist Prema Kurien argues that understandings of race in India continue to influence the ways in which Indians and South Asians carry the baggage of racialized colonial ideas intertwined with notions around caste hierarchy and the realities of different linguistic groups in India.
Building on a broader body of work that has critiqued liberal anti‐racisms for detracting from abolitionst struggles against racialized injustice, this presentation based on an article by Prof. Elizabeth Hanna Rubio specifically frames the limitations that “how‐to anti‐racisms” place on transgressive multiracial coalition building. Through ethnographic analysis of discourses and practices that move through various sites of contemporary Black‐Asian American activist encounters, Prof. Rubio builds on Black and radical women of color feminist theorizations of solidarity to show how “how‐tos” destabilize coalition building by overdetermining resolutions to conflict.