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 out in chapter 2 how these groups have sought to minimize their internal differences. Pandey then juxtaposes the articulation of difference as political maneuver in Ambedkar's move for Dalit conversion to Buddhism and W. E. B. Du Bois's works, and as a rescripting of the body in Baby Kamble's Dalit autobiography Prisons We Broke and Viola Andrews's unpublished autobiography.
Chapter 3 focuses on Ambedkar's particular strategies for Dalits’ enfranchisement—strategies of sameness and difference—in post-independence India, ranging from his advocacy of separate electorates for Dalits to his arguments for Dalit conversion to Buddhism on secular grounds. The stark differences between Ambedkar and Gandhi on separate electorates for Dalits; on the value of village life, which Gandhi valorized, as opposed to modernity, which Ambedkar embraced as progressive; and the value of conversion from Hinduism serve to demonstrate the rift between minority and Gandhian Hindu. At the same time, Pandey argues that Dalit activists did not adequately recognize gender oppression or class distinctions among their own communities.
Chapters 4 and 5 turn to African Americans, with chapter 4 focusing on African American attempts at inclusion into right-bearing citizenship by serving in the military in World War II and the continuity of prejudice despite this service. Chapter 5 moves from the public to the personal and analyzes the unpublished autobiography of Viola Andrews, a mother, seamstress, and sharecropper, in order to highlight what Pandey calls the “inner life” of race and caste conflict (p. 134) and examine the intimate aspects of racial and sexual subordination.
Chapter 6 discusses the Dalit counterparts of Viola Andrews—Baby Kamble's life story, Jina amcha (Our lives), published in 1983, and Narendra Jadhav's compilation, Aamcha baap aan aambi (Our father and us), first published in Marathi in 1986, then rewritten and translated by the author in English in 2003. Pandey argues that the two works represent divergent possibilities of rescripting the subaltern body. While the rational and self-sufficient Dalit body is an ideal in Kamble's life-story, the later versions of the Jadhav family memoir present us with an autonomous, self-generated, liberal Enlightenment subject.
Pandey wraps up his study with a chapter commenting on the continuity of prejudice against African Americans and Dalits in the twenty-first century as well as the challenges posed to both groups with the emergence of a significant middle class “passing” into the mainstream.
Pandey is to be commended for his recovery work, such as with Viola Andrews's unpublished autobiography, and for his analyses of Dalit life stories. Pandey refuses to homogenize major differences among Dalit life stories and pays attention to the class contradictions within them. His analysis of parliamentary debates about the Hindu Code Bill between Ambedkar and other legislators in order to draw attention to the “trifling slights and incidents” (p. 81) often ignored in discussions of prejudice is an excellent example of what used to be a methodology of subaltern studies, focusing on what might be dismissed as trivial.
A History of Prejudice does not, however, advance a different understanding of African Americans and Dalits in light of the comparative study. The instances of everyday prejudice against African Americans that Pandey mentions, such as “driving while Black” or being profiled as criminal (as in the case of Henry Louis Gates) or fundamentally unfit for high office (the Birthers and Obama), are well known, and Pandey's presentation of them does not invite us to rethink these instances.
Comparative studies of African Americans and Asians, and African Americans and Asian Americans, have been significant enough in the last decade to constitute what one might call a subfield. A few titles in this area are Vijay Prashad's Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Heike Raphael-Hernandez's AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Fred Ho and Bill Mullen's Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); and Bill Mullen's Afro Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). None of these books are mentioned by Pandey, despite the fact that some deal specifically with the authors he mentions; for instance, Mullen's Afro Orientalism devotes a chapter to Du Bois. Surprisingly there is also no reference to S. D. Kapoor's Dalits and African Americans: A Study in Comparison (Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2004). For good reason, Pandey would probably critique the Afro-Dalit project of Runoko Rashidi, but it would warrant being mentioned in a study such as this. A similar lack of grounding in scholarship is evident in discussions of the Double V campaign where Pandey bemoans an “inadequately stressed aspect of the American experience . . . the unusually strong link between masculinism, militarism and citizenship in this history” (p. 99). But scholars in American Studies, such as Richard Drinnon, Richard Slotkin, and Susan Jeffords, have been discussing these links for years.
A History of Prejudice is an interesting attempt at comparative minority studies and demonstrates the challenges of undertaking a wide-ranging study such as this.
