ABSTRACT
This essay takes up W. E. B. Du Bois’s theorization of internationalism, focusing on his representation of India as racial kin and anti-colonial herald, especially his suggestion of an analogy between race and caste, by reading him alongside Nobel Prize-winning poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore. I juxtapose Du Bois and Tagore to recover a submerged history of a sustained dialogue between India and the United States over whether race and caste can be thought of as analogies, and what such efforts reveal about transnational method: the politics of comparison outside a core-periphery model, the tangled relations among modernity, race, and caste, and ultimately, the conditions of possibility of the Global South.
