Podcast Summary: “Transnational Solidarities with Nico Slate”

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Ajantha Subramanian
Guest: Nico Slate (Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon University)
Date: April 13, 2026
Episode Theme: An in-depth conversation about transnational solidarities, focusing on race, caste, anti-racist, and anti-caste movements, and the intellectual and political analogies linking the U.S. and India.

Episode Overview

This episode explores how transnational solidarities are forged, focusing on the intertwined histories of struggles against racism in the United States and against casteism in India. Historian Nico Slate discusses how analogies—especially between race, caste, and colonialism—have powered both political and scholarly movements, and how these analogies have helped and hindered solidarity. He and host Ajantha Subramanian reflect on the dangers of over-generalization, the dialectics of political coalition-building, and the risks and rewards of crossing national and conceptual borders.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nico Slate’s Academic and Personal Journey

• Roots of Interest (03:36):
  • Slate’s engagement began “randomly,” tracing back to a college trip to Tuskegee Institute and an exhibit on Gandhi and George Washington Carver.
  • Despite initial plans to study American intellectual history, “the African American piece, the piece about US struggles against racism, does have a strong connection to my history… The India piece was not. But a lot of the people I was studying were people who were rooted in one particular struggle, but were still deeply committed to struggles in very different parts of the world.” [06:22]
  • Personal influences: his brother’s mixed-race identity and experiences with racism, and his mother’s activism.

2. The Value and Caution of the Transnational Lens

• Transnational Borders: Benefits & Pitfalls (08:49):
  • Early romanticization of border-crossing challenged by the reality that “lots of bad things cross national borders too. You know, viruses, armies… racism, casteism, these things also cross.”
  • Importance of transnational study: “At a moment like now, it’s especially important… to reflect back on just how much our histories have been shaped by these kinds of transnational border crossings.” [10:36]
  • Call for less nationalistic, more globally-aware scholarship.

3. Language, Translation, and Political Struggle

• Language and Power (13:16):
  • Language never neutral; it is entwined with histories of power.
  • Political actors creatively repurpose words to fight injustice and forge solidarities (e.g., “colored” and “people of color”).
  • “Language can connect, but it can also hide. And sometimes it does that both at the exact same time.” [17:28]
  • Example: South Asian adaptation of “color” as transnational solidarity, yet selective blindness on caste.

4. Analogy as Tool and Trap: Race-Colony vs. Race-Caste

• Competing Analogies (18:14):
  • Race-Colony: Links African Americans with Indian nationalists under imperialism’s yoke; India imagined as a single colony oppressed like Black people under white supremacy.
  • Race-Caste: Connects anti-racist and anti-caste activism, but often simplifies or essentializes both systems.
  • Ambedkar and Lajpat Rai used analogies to different ends—sometimes even opposite (“Ambedkar will flip that analogy and say, in fact, caste was worse than chattel slavery ever was…” [24:23]).

5. The Necessity—and Dangers—of Abstraction

• From Particularity to Generality (27:30):
  • Political coalition requires moving from specificity to generality but risks subsuming marginalized voices.
  • Quote: “My ideal… would be to find some kind of middle ground where people are able to come together and say, look, for right now, let’s not worry about all these messy particularities. Let’s start by finding our common ground…but let’s also talk about these other kinds of inequities, so that they don’t get lost entirely.” [29:35]
  • The process is inherently dialectical: movements consolidate, some are excluded, those push for recognition, and the coalition evolves.

6. When Analogy Harms: Entrenching Inequality

• Analogies Used Defensively (33:27):
  • Analogies are sometimes deployed to shield injustice: “Often it’s a question of defensiveness versus… trying to make things better.”
  • Example: South African apartheid designers looked to the American South’s racial framework.
  • Gandhi’s evolving, but ultimately secondary, commitment to anti-casteism often led to sidelining Dalit struggles within broader transnational solidarities.

7. Agency, Vanguardism, and Representation

• Who Leads? (40:02):
  • Transnational platforms can amplify or silence subaltern voices: “When is joining this larger transnational struggle empowering and when is it silencing? And maybe sometimes it’s both.” [42:12]
  • Reference: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess as an exploration of coalition leadership and representation.

8. Scale-Jumping and Subaltern Strategies

• Durban 2001 UN Conference Example (43:12):

  • Dalits leveraged the transnational stage to challenge national silencing: “Should a convention that’s focused on issues of race and racism address issues of caste? 100% yes.” [44:08]
  • Official Indian delegation’s refusal to recognize caste in international anti-racism forums seen as unjustified national defensiveness.

• Contemporary U.S. (47:20):

  • Debates over recognizing caste as a protected category in U.S. anti-discrimination law reflect similar defensive strategies.

9. Scholarship and the Waxing and Waning of Race-Caste Analogies

• Historical Shifts (51:42):
  • Race-caste comparison flourished in 1930s–50s U.S. sociology (e.g., caste school of race relations), declined post-1960s, and is reviving today.
  • Possible reasons: decolonization, rise of methodological nationalism in academia, and changing contexts of diaspora.

10. The Limits and Capacities of Identity Categories

• Race, Color, and Coalitional Politics (58:27):
  • Slate distinguishes between “racial diplomacy” (unitary identity blocs) and “colored cosmopolitanism” (pluralistic, flexible coalitions).
  • Emphasizes that race as a category has also unified and empowered, not merely divided, anti-racist coalitions:

    “The concept of race has been used to oppress people, but has also been used again and again…to fight against injustice.” [61:00]

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the dialectic of solidarity:
  “Movements consolidate, some are excluded, those push for recognition, and the coalition evolves.” [31:53]

• On analogy’s double edge:
  “Language can connect, but it can also hide. Sometimes it does that both at the exact same time.” —Nico Slate [17:28]

• On the burdens and hopes of solidarity:
  “Things can get worse and they often do … but the patient labor of preparing the ground for these kinds of solidarities to flourish is something that needs to happen and that we can all contribute to in our own ways.” —Nico Slate [63:46]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Nico’s Academic Journey: 03:36–07:45
• Transnational Scale & Cautions: 08:49–11:38
• Language and Political Imagination: 12:07–18:14
• Race-Colony vs. Race-Caste Analogy: 18:14–26:14
• Abstraction and Coalition Building: 27:30–32:17
• Defensive Uses of Analogy, Gandhi, and Dalit Agency: 33:27–43:12
• Durban UN Conference Discussion: 43:12–47:20
• Caste in U.S. Law, Current Debates: 47:20–49:34
• Scholarship & Shifting Focus on Race/Caste: 49:34–57:06
• Racial Diplomacy vs. Cosmopolitanism: 57:06–63:25
• Concluding Reflections (Hope, Spadework): 63:26–65:22

Tone and Flow

• Nuanced, Reflective, and Historically Grounded: Both host and guest carefully weigh complexities, avoiding overgeneralization and facile analogies.
• Self-reflexive and Cautious: Slate often notes his own and the field’s temptations to romanticize both solidarity and transnationalism, cautioning listeners to attend to who is empowered or silenced in each coalition or analogy.
• Engaged and Hopeful: While critical, both speakers end on a note of hope—emphasizing that coalition-building is slow “spade work” but remains vital.

Concluding Insight

Nico Slate’s historical explorations remind us that forging solidarities across borders—whether national or conceptual—always involves hard choices, creative translation, and ongoing critical reflection. The episode provides a deep, nuanced look into how analogies between race, caste, and colonialism have both advanced and impeded emancipatory projects, urging listeners to keep sight of complexity, agency, and hope.