Abstract: This lecture explores the structure of what WEB Du Bois calls the "color line," examining its moral logic along two vectors: an infrapolitical form that uses juridical and civic norms to make inequality hurt; and an ultrapolitical apparatus that mobilizes the archaic law of old theologies to make extreme, sacrificial violence acceptable, even bearable. Why does questioning this logic of cruelty so repeatedly hit the limit of language? Why does the unequal not have the authority (other than that which is derived from her silence) to articulate and push this limit? And as Ambedkar compels us to ask in Annihilation of Caste (using the same concept as Du Bois does earlier in the century in Darkwater), why does one "hesitate" even when cruelly disparaged for the crime of one's birth? The lecture closes with a few reflections on how, in understanding the depth of moral cruelty, we must rethink the notion of authority itself, freeing it from the banality of power.
Speaker Bio: Aishwary Kumar is Associate Professor of Intellectual History and Global Thought at California State University & Polytechnic Pomona, Los Angeles, where he holds the Shri Shantinath Endowed Chair in Ahimsa Studies and is the Director of Ahimsa Center for Political Nonviolence. He is the inaugural Director of The Democracy Institute, Pomona, and Director of Research at the Institute for New Global Politics, Stanford. Kumar is the author of Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015) and of Ambedkar among the Stars: Political Violence and the Southern Constellation (forthcoming). His third book The Neodemocratic Condition: Freedom and Violence after Neoliberalism has been adapted into the globally acclaimed podcast Mutant: Dialogues at the End of Democracy.