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A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States . By Gyanendra Pandey . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2013. 285 pp. $85.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper); $24.00 (e-book).
Book Reviews--South Asia
As the title indicates, Gyanendra Pandey, a founding member of the subaltern studies project, sets himself an enormous task in this book--to write a history of prejudice, "of social and political distancing that is a central part of the history of African Americans and Dalits" (p. 1). Distinguishing between what he calls vernacular or visible prejudices, such racism and casteism, which are easily condemned, and universal prejudices, which are part of the common sense of modern society, Pandey demonstrates how the two intersect. Vernacular prejudices are sustained by the universal and by the very façade of the universal not being vernacular.
Drawing on well-known intellectual inheritances, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. from Gandhi and Gandhi's reading of Thoreau, Pandey argues in chapter 1 that both African Americans and Dalits fought against a form of internal colonialism, faced forms of spatial segregation, and continue to suffer disproportionately from poverty and forms of social and psychological violence needed to maintain a universal order. Both groups have also mounted powerful challenges to existing power structures and both continue to be hyphenated rather than unmarked citizens. However, unlike African Americans, Dalits until recently did not have a bourgeoisie and remain in a worse position than African Americans.
Drawing broad strokes to explain how African Americans and Dalits have been seen as "different" and how these groups in turn have used this difference to articulate their identity, Pandey points...