Colonial-era systems of forced labor, ranging from indenture to outright slavery, were central to the development of contemporary understandings of human thermal physiology. The subaltern laborer’s body became a crucial site for understanding the effects of heat on different kinds of racialized bodies, as a means of both maximizing labor extraction and consolidating social and political regimes organized around the perceived vulnerability and susceptibility of different kinds of bodies to heat. Focusing on thermal inequality, I suggest, provides a way for rethinking subaltern studies via climate change, both historically and in the present. In a world where someone must bear the heat, divisions of both labor and laborers have become a primary means through which our collective thermal burden is unequally and unjustly allocated.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. He is also affiliated with the UCLA Center for India & South Asia, the Program in Digital Humanities, the Urban Humanities Initiative, and the Luskin Center for Innovation. His research focuses on a range of issues related to science, medicine, climate, race, and design.

His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021; Bloomsbury India, 2022), is the winner of three book awards: the RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust), the Edie Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology), and the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (from the American Institute of Indian Studies). It was also shortlisted for the British Association for South Asian Studies Book Prize and longlisted for the British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize.