Nishant Upadhyay’s Indians on Indian Lands bridges settler colonial studies and South Asian diasporic studies to examine the complex, often contradictory position of dominant-caste Indian diasporas on Indigenous lands in Canada. Rejecting reductive frameworks that cast diasporic Indians solely as settlers, Upadhyay foregrounds the entangled relationalities of caste, race, labor, and intimacy that structure Indian presence on occupied lands. Through interdisciplinary methods, including ethnography, literary analysis, and archival research, the book examines how caste and brahminism operate transnationally, shaping diasporic complicity in settler colonial projects. From critiques of dominant-caste erasures in the settler academy to analyses of labor and sexual intimacies between Indians and Indigenous peoples, Upadhyay shows how caste and hindutva ideologies reproduce colonial hierarchies abroad. Yet, the book also gestures toward decolonial futures, highlighting diasporic solidarities and anti-caste praxes that disrupt these complicities. Indians on Indian Lands offers a critical and urgent intervention into how dominant-caste South Asians occupy, negotiate, and can potentially transform their roles on stolen land.
Keyword: indigeneity
Review of Remembering Our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea by Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio (University of Minnesota Press)
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio foregrounds the intimate in aloha ʻāina, a Kanaka Maoli conception of caring for land, or that which feeds. She provides a close reading of the classic Hawaiian epic Hiʻiakaikapoliopele alongside contemporary Kanaka Maoli battles with settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. Osorio engages the uniquely Kanaka Maoli genre of moʻolelo by modulating seamlessly between the interpersonal and structural, analysis and composition, and the nineteenth century and the present day.
What is Whiteness in North Africa?
This entry sketches a matrix for conceptualizing race in/ and North Africa that takes Arabness, indigeneity, Islam, the Sahara, and slavery as orienting keywords. It suggests an approach to a geopolitically-grounded whiteness as social currency and aspiration that is both based in specific regional economic history and also reaches outward toward globally-circulating formations of racial hierarchy. Acknowledging the distinct legal, colonial, and state histories under and through which racialization has proceeded in North and Saharan Africa since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, this entry aims to draw out the ethical imaginaries through which bodies have been marked and categorized in this region. These ethical imaginaries have operated through their attendant languages, memories, and performances to enable racisms and colorisms with violent and enduring material consequences. Under the headings “Racialized Enslavement,” “Whiteness and Arabness,” “Race and the Sahara,” and “Race in North African Popular Culture,” I offer brief introductions to these discursive formations, histories, and conceptual intersections and offer suggested readings for each.