UC San Diego

This dissertation reads articulations of caste across cultural texts, focusing on 20th -21st c. South Asia and Brazil. As a Native American Indigenous Studies inquiry, this project considers how caste nuances notions of indigeneity and de/coloniality, and as a relational inquiry, this project traces caste across period and place towards complicating hegemonic U.S. formulations of race and inequity. Reading methodologies vary per chapter (organized by films, feminist texts, abolitionist writings, and mixed-genre race/caste literatures) but generally draw upon frames in Native American Indigenous Studies, Subaltern Studies, New Materialisms, and women of color feminisms. The dissertation hypothesizes caste as culture of im/material stigma as well as ontoepistemology for understanding contemporary global inequity. And it argues that the natureculture re/production of caste relies on material-discursive notions of “blood” effectively partitioning Non/Life hunger vs. commensalities along biopolitical lines of difference.