The Caste Contract
The Caste Contract explores how dominant-caste supremacy pervades Indian society, protected by contemporary government, education, and culture. In his groundbreaking book The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills argued that the social contract celebrated by moral philosophers exists at the direct expense and exploitation of non-whites. Here, Da Costa brings Mills’s framework into conversation with Dalit leader Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to examine caste, a 2500-year-old system of dehumanization.
Rather than accidental or exceptional, Da Costa argues that dominant-caste ignorance is purposefully organized to ensure complicity. Seeing caste ignorance as a material structure of the state, Da Costa challenges the caste-neutral ideologies that travel with the diaspora into every corner of the planet, including Canada and the US, where caste is made illegible to mainstream, multicultural society.
With intimate personal narrative and rigorous academic research, Da Costa explains how caste, brahminical supremacy, and willful ignorance continue to shape the world today.
Dia Da Costa is a brahmin settler on Treaty Six territory working as a professor of social justice and international studies in education at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger called Theatre (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and Development Dramas: Reimagining Rural Political Action in Eastern India (Routledge, 2009). She has introduced and translated from Bengali to English a book of community-produced plays entitled Where We Stand: Five Plays from the Repertoire of Jana Sanskriti (2009). She is also editor of a volume that collects essays by internationally renowned theatre activists and agricultural worker theatre artists from Bengal entitled Scripting Power: Jana Sanskriti On and Offstage (2010).
- ISBN-13
- 9781773638867
- Publisher
- Fernwood Publishing
- Imprint
- Fernwood Publishing
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 256
- Dimensions
- 229 x 152 mm
- Language
- English