Book Discussion with Joel Lee (Williams College)
Book Discussion, Deceptive Majority
With author Joel Lee (Williams College) in conversation with Anupama Rao (History/MESAAS) and Ashish Koul (Northwestern)
Organized by the Ambedkar Initiative at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Co-sponsored by the South Asia Institute, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Department of African-American and African Diaspora Studies, and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.
Registration is on the ICLS website at https://icls.columbia.edu/events/discussion-with-joel-lee-author-of-deceptive-majority/
Joel Lee is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at William College, and teaches and conducts research on religion, language, caste and the state in South Asia. In particular his work concerns the ways in which Dalits – those communities historically stigmatized as ‘untouchable’ – combat structural deprivation, navigate the politics of religious majoritarianism, and contend with the sensory and environmental entailments of sanitation labor in colonial and postcolonial India. His research and teaching interests also include linguistic anthropology, semiotics, popular Hinduism and Islam, and Urdu and Hindi literature. He earned an MA and PhD at Columbia University. He is the author of Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (2021).