Urban Saviorism

Part 3 focuses on the racializing processes produced as the brown savior travels along the urban-rural interface. Spatializing and territorializing this study in this way allows for a more concrete exploration of how the help economy functions as part of the contemporary workings of primitive accumulation. In Karnataka, the expansion of Bangalore has systematically led to the expropriation of rural land. As Shankar argues in chapter 8, the education NGO is a central terrain on which this dispossession is negotiated. To reveal this unfolding process, Shankar focuses on the mentors, who sought ways to use the NGO as a form of mobility even as they were racially slotted into positions that rendered them largely immobile. Each of these chapters reveals the fraught position of the mentors, who challenge the brown savior even as they may actually be reinforcing the very same values in their strategies for mobility.