On transnational analogy: Thinking race and caste with W. E. B. Du Bois and Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay takes up W. E. B. Du Bois’s theorization of internationalism, focusing on his representation of India as racial kin and anti-colonial herald, especially his suggestion of an analogy between race and caste, by reading him alongside Nobel Prize-winning poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore. I juxtapose Du Bois and Tagore to recover a submerged history of a sustained dialogue between India and the United States over whether race and caste can be thought of as analogies, and what such efforts reveal about transnational method: the politics of comparison outside a core-periphery model, the tangled relations among modernity, race, and caste, and ultimately, the conditions of possibility of the Global South.