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Nishant Upadhyay is an assistant professor and associate chair of graduate studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. They hold a PhD in Social and Political Thought from the York University, Toronto. Upadhyay is the author of Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity (University of Illinois Press, 2024). Their research and teaching focuses on settler colonialism and empire, intersections of race, caste, and indigeneity, queer and trans of color studies, and South Asian diaspora.

Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity (UIP 2024) unravels Indian diasporic complicity in its ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, lands, and nations in Canada. Upadhyay examines the interwoven and simultaneous areas of dominant Indian caste complicity in processes of settler colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, brahminical supremacy, Hindu nationalism, and heteropatriarchy. Resource extraction in British Columbia in the 1970s through the 1990s and in present-day Alberta offers examples of spaces that illuminate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and simultaneously reveals racialized, gendered, and casted labor formations. Upadhyay juxtaposes these extraction sites with examples of anticolonial activism and solidarities from Tkaronto. Analyzing silence on settler colonialism and brahminical supremacy, Upadhyay upends the idea of dominant caste Indian diasporas as racially victimized and shows that claiming victimhood denies a very real complicity in enforcing other power structures. Exploring stories of quotidian proximity and intimacy between Indigenous and South Asian communities, Upadhyay offers meditations on anticolonial and anti-casteist ways of knowledge production, ethical relationalities, and solidarities.

Sponsored by the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages and the Department of English with funding from the Bodas Family Endowment for South Asian Studies.