The Making of the “Brown Savior”

The Impossible Portrait

“…Yet it also fractures a simple reading of the Somali refugee community, revealing the complex ways they are rendered (and render themselves) Black, or for others, somewhere in‐between Brown and Black, to remix cultural historian Antoinette Burton's (2016) theorization of Afro‐Asian colonial and postcolonial racial politics that have persistently placed Indians above Africans—or Brown over Black—through discourses of civilizational superiority. Attending to the spatialized processes of differentiation in Delhi's urban villages, then, offers a way to explore how racialization is deeply entangled with top‐down mechanisms of seeing, as recent theorizations of race in relation to caste and the help industry in India (Shankar 2022) or the colonial visual‐geographic imaginary of the “Mongolian fringe” (Gergan and Smith 2021) have demonstrated. However, Abdul's portrait as a networked image‐event on social media also offers an opportunity to critically analyze how seeing (and being seen) as racialized (and stateless) subjects shifts and changes depending on perspective and proximity.…”