On caste: towards critical, non-derivative caste curriculum studies

Caste is one of the most obnoxious absences within our field’s solar system. The void of economic freedom within the struggle for the emancipation of the enslaved person would trigger “a distinct labored segregated social construction, that of caste”. Challenging the “invincibility of the American caste,” Frederik Douglass framed ‘caste’--as a racialized category--at the core of abolitionist activism. Public education was viewed as a “sacred cause to help a distressed part of the population, an endowment for the equal benefit of all, without distinction of caste”. Education was the only “cure for such hurdles”. The caste system sustains its existence based on the divisive matrix of ‘visibilities-invisibilities’--a key feature within all segregation systems that produced irreversible, abyssal lines within and beyond the Varna system. The caste struggle was also a struggle toward an ecology of knowledge, which would validate endless epistemological differences within the South, thus paving the way for a society based on liberty, equality, and fraternity.