Rachel Brown and Arjun Shankar examine how elites in Israel’s nursing sector and India’s development sector uphold global racial hierarchy, often under the guise of beneficence. These books represent some of the most insightful recent research on the racialization of global inequality, both published by a leading press on critical perspectives. While critical theory is not central to mainstream political science, it offers a complementary perspective to the field’s dominant variable-based analyses by describing how elites design and support formal and informal institutions to maintain control. Mainstream political science tends to study power as structural forces that shape strategic interactions among actors who optimize to maximize their exogenously given (typically material) interests. Analyses often focus on elite contests. In contrast, critical theory scholars often study elites in relation to the marginalized. They ask what projects elites foster to persuade the marginalized to perceive both structural forces and their own interests in ways that legitimize the elites’ hold on power. Such legitimation processes are ever-present but largely invisible because elites have the incentive to hide them. However, they can become visible through rich, specific, and nuanced description of the everyday. Thus, by studying migrant caregivers and NGO administrators, Brown and Shankar offer insights into power dynamics that variable-based approaches might miss. Although Brown is a critical political theorist and Shankar is a cultural anthropologist, their books should be of interest to mainstream political scientists focusing on race, migration, foreign aid, state formation, or the liberal international order.
Brown’s book examines how the everyday activity of migrants caring for Israel’s elderly Jewish population has bolstered a version of Israeli identity that presents the state as modern and Palestinians as a demographic threat. The caregivers, coming primarily from South and South East Asia, find themselves reinforcing these aspects of Israeli identity despite being exploited by their employers and subjugated by the state. Brown argues that Israel has increasingly imported labor from abroad in part due to the increased perception of Palestinian labor as a security threat and its embrace of neoliberalism. The liberalization of the economy in the 1990s created economic opportunities that discouraged intergenerational care and encouraged the growth of labor-importing firms. Meanwhile, the global embrace of neoliberalism encouraged labor export by migrant-sending states.
Brown shows us how employers often use a “kinship trope” (29) to portray caregivers as “one of the family” (102). With this trope, employers frame the migrants as affective laborers performing familial duties, which obscures their exploitation. Employers also use the “development trope” (29), through which they see themselves as contributing to the economic advancement of the Global South. Despite their exploitation, migrants resist marginalization and forge solidarity. As a whole, Unsettled Labors illuminates how migrant labor simultaneously settles and unsettles the interacting projects of racialization and neoliberalism.
Similarly, in Brown Saviors, Shankar shows us the everyday practices of Indian elites, who have positioned themselves as the rightful leaders of development efforts in India in response to the post-colonial critique that foreign aid represents White Saviorism. Shankar argues that this surface reading of identity elides how class and caste shape elites’ privilege. Shankar exposes the disconnect between these elites and the marginalized communities they aim to help. He describes elites’ initiatives as often performative and self-serving. Ultimately, Shankar concludes, elites’ ordinary discourses and practices perpetuate racial/caste inequality and exacerbate long-term poverty, the very problem they purportedly seek to address.
What specific insights do we gain and what new avenues of investigation do we open by reading these two works in tandem? The two states under study in the respective books share histories of British colonialism and partition. The British Empire’s categorization of people into distinct nations based on perceived inherent differences shaped their national trajectories, including how racial hierarchy became embedded in their social, political, and economic structures. The books’ points of departure, theoretical framings, and methodologies differ in many ways, but the two also overlap, particularly in the ways that they examine the elites who were most proximate to the British and thus remain most proximate to Whiteness.
Both authors highlight how a discourse of affinity obscures (and thus reinforces) racial inequality. Shankar argues that Indian elites claim local knowledge and position themselves as uniquely aligned with the communities they profess to serve. This creates a sense of affinity while masking their detachment and the privileges that limit their familiarity with these communities. Similarly, Brown shows that Israeli employers frame migrant caregivers as part of the family through fictive kinship, which minimizes racial distinctions by presenting the labor as familial rather than economic. However, this pseudo-affinity conceals the underlying racial hierarchy and exploitation. In both contexts, elites appear to address racial inequality but ultimately preserve the status quo.
In addition, both authors show us how elites assert power over others by becoming providers. Even though they are to some degree marginalized in the global racial hierarchy, these elites enhance their national status by positioning themselves as benefactors to the more vulnerable. However, by acting as employers of migrant care workers or as aid donors to impoverished communities of lower caste status, they assert their own place in the hierarchy. In other words, both authors show us how these elites leverage their position between Whiteness and marginalization (even if unwittingly) to maintain dominance over those they claim to help.
Finally, Brown and Shankar’s positionality as researchers who share aspects of identity with the elites they study shapes their analysis of partition, racial difference, and neoliberalism. Brown considers her positionality as a Jewish American academic and describes her interactions with the elderly and their caretakers as “continually inflected by my position as a white Ashkenazi Jewish American located in the academy” (26). Shankar reflects on his positionality “as male presenting, as brown, as savarna, as Hindu, as American, as well educated” (107) and states that “the critique of the white anthropologist…has allowed too many like me to hide our complicity” (14). He characterizes the process of coming to terms with such complicity as a researcher as “nervous ethnography” (10).
Both books are examples of “studying up.” In other words, Brown and Shankar focus on elites, and in this context, they also both share some of the privilege of those elites. As a result, they have access to elite spaces and can help us understand better how the elites see themselves and work to shape their worlds. On the one hand, both books show us how elites perpetuate social, political, and economic hierarchies. On the other hand, they do not say much about the internal contradictions or dilemmas that the elites they studied faced. This raises the question of the limits of understanding power solely through the lens of oppression. To what extent can we empathize with elites who share aspects of our identity, especially when we reject key elements of that identity? Can we empathize with elites without condoning their actions or downplaying the harm they cause? Are there nuances among the elites Brown and Shankar studied that could indicate the potential for change within elite circles while still holding them accountable?
By studying up, Brown and Shankar focus on examining how elites create projects that legitimize their own rule, but both of their books still incorporate perspectives from marginalized groups. For example, Brown dedicates two chapters to how migrant caregivers resist exploitation and build community networks. Similarly, Shankar explores how recipients of NGO aid perceive these initiatives differently from the elites administering the aid, which enables him to demonstrate that the elites’ narratives misrepresent the beneficiaries’ experiences. By leveraging their privilege to challenge global systems of racial inequality through studying groups that wield unique kinds of power within these structures, Brown and Shankar add to our understanding of how these systems operate and might be challenged.
