Historical barriers still inhibit comparative frameworks to map and challenge two of the most odious forms of discrimination―racism and casteism.  Both justify themselves on a principle of biological descent; they enable stigma as if it were a natural fact, refusing to see it as deleterious social exclusion.

 

Against Stigma carries fifteen essays that build upon the energies generated in scholarship as a result of the landmark 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance at Durban, South Africa.  The contributors, who represent a multiplicity of disciplines and intellectual orientations, explore comparative aspects of caste and race including conundrums of a globalized discourse and national problematics of racism and casteism.  The editors’ Introduction locates this comparative project around descent-based discrimination in a wide context; the editors suggest that globalization itself holds out the promise of more generalized practices of resistance and emancipation by oppressed national minorities.  A critical bibliography on race and caste is a bonus to students and teachers of Human Rights, Race Relations, Caste Studies and Politics of Socio-economic Exclusion. 

 

At a time when democratic movements are sweeping across the globe, Against Stigma presents a fresh selection of authoritative scholarship and instructive debates centred on race and caste, two of the most potent and divisive concepts in the histories of humanity, sociology and human governance.