STORIES OF DALIT DIASPORA: MIGRATION, LIFE NARRATIVES, AND CASTE IN THE US

In conventional academic scholarship, "diaspora" overwhelmingly is treated as a homogenous category. It is only in recent years that intersectional analysis, by attending to internal fissures that include race, class, gender, and religion has complicated and simultaneously enriched the study of diasporic lives. This essay focuses on Dalit lives and experiences in the Indian diaspora in the US. We explore caste and casteism in the diaspora based on the life narratives of three Dalit activists in the US. The essay not only establishes the salience of using life narratives in the study of Dalit diasporic lives, it also makes a significant contribution to South Asian American scholarship in the US that has only minimally centered Dalits and Dalit lives in the US. We conclude this paper with some observations about possible future directions in the study of Dalit lives in the US.