LAIS Tertulia | “Race and Caste in Latin America, India, and the USA: A Global Conversation”

Latin American and Iberian Studies invites you to a Tertulia in the Time of COVID, 2020-2021! Two History Department faculty members will speak at this exciting event.

In her widely acclaimed book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson complicates the category of race, as it is commonly understood in the US, by bringing caste to the fore. She discusses the “caste” historical experience of the US in light of those in Nazi Germany and India. Insofar as the term “caste” was first introduced in India by the Portuguese at a time when the Spanish and Portuguese empires had a global colonial reach, Wilkerson’s book provides a perfect pretext for the Program in Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIS) to launch a global conversation. In this roundtable, UCSB faculty from Black Studies, History, and LAIS specialized in the US, India, and Latin America discuss their take on caste, race, and Isabel Wilkerson.

Speakers (UC Santa Barbara)
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in the history of modern South Asia, British imperialism, and agrarian commodities in global markets. His essays have appeared in A Cultural History of Western Empires, the South African Historical Journal, Historical Reflections, English Language Notes, and the edited volume Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times. He is currently working on a monograph on cannabis and empire in British India.

Cecilia Méndez is a Peruvian historian specialized in the social and political history of the Andean region. She is the director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara and an Associated Professor in History. Her work calls the attention on the importance of late eighteenth-century, and nineteenth-century political developments in shaping modern conceptions nationhood, citizenship, and “race.”

Terrance Wooten is an Assistant Professor in Black Studies. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, “Lurking in the Shadows of Home: Homelessness, Carcerality, and the Figure of the Sex Offender,” which examines how those who have been designated “sex offenders” and are homeless in the Maryland/DC area are managed and regulated through social policies, sex offender registries, and urban and architectural design. His scholarly interests are located at the intersections of Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, studies of poverty and homelessness, and carceral studies.

Join the Zoom meeting here: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84061612112.