Workshop | Thursday 20th November 2025 | University of York
Is all Fair & Lovely?: Colourism and Discrimination across South Asia Cultures
Call for Papers, deadline – 11th July 2025
Colourism, also known as pigmentocracy when systemically hierarchised, is discrimination that privileges light‐skinned people of colour over their darker-skinned counterparts. Sociologists of colourism have demonstrated how light skin, as a form of social capital, can be transformed into racial, educational, and economic capital used for ‘learning, earning and marrying more’ (Hunter 2005; Jha 2016). Scholars studying North America and the Black transatlantic world have been at the forefront of interrogating the politics of skin tone stratification (Tate 2009; Thomas 2020). Across South Asia, though the spectre of colourism and contemporary practices of skin-lightening loom large in academic and public discourse, the region and its diasporic communities have not been afforded a similar historical and theoretical scrutiny. Likewise, several sociologists have taken the social and cultural production and processes of colourism and skin-lightening as a medical issue seriously (Glenn 2009; Hall 2014). However, sociological perspectives on South Asia and elsewhere have predominantly focused on mid-twentieth to contemporary experiences of colourism, eliding deeper investigations into longer-term historical attitudes, practices, and processes of coloniality and capitalism. Notably, this also includes how pigmentocracy politics impacts exclusionary attitudes of anti-blackness and ethno-nationalism across South Asian cultures.
This 1-day workshop aims to bring together historians, art historians, sociologists of media, gender, and migration, literary scholars, and activists to explore the pernicious role of colourism in South Asian communities which continues to give rise to perpetuating forms of skin-lightening and caste privilege as well as to ‘model minority’ politics in diaspora communities. It will address the intertwined colonial and postcolonial legacies of racism and colourism in South Asia and its diasporic communities in Britain and North America. The workshop invites researchers to present and workshop their scholarship with a view to publishing an interdisciplinary edited volume (with interest from Manchester University Press).
The workshop will be structured around pre-circulated papers. Selected contributors will present a 2-3 minutes elevator pitch of their pre-circulated paper. Each panel will have a discussant who will speak to the panel’s common themes and threads. Discussants include Professor Radhika Parameswaran (Indiana), Professor Henrice Atlink (York), Dr Rochelle Rowe (Edinburgh), and Dr Purba Hossain (York). This will be a hybrid event with an option to participate online.
Abstracts are invited from researchers and activists working on themes related, but not limited, to:
- Colourism and its inferences in Medieval and Early Modern periods
- Intergenerational Experiences of Colourism and Racism
- Pigmentocracy Politics
- Colonialism and Race
- Migration Narratives
- Colourism and ‘Model Minority’ Politics
- Colourism and Conjugality
- Ethno-Nationalisms
- Black and Asian Solidarities
- Forms of Anti-Blackness
- Resistance and Activism against Colour-based Discrimination
- Caste Politics
- Media and Creative Responses to Colourism
- Visual and Literary Representations of Colourism
- Aesthetic Medicine and Reproductive Technologies
- Advertising and Skin-Lightening Technologies
- Skin-Lightening and Public Health
- Impacts of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence
Send a 300 word abstract and brief bio to Dr Mobeen Hussain, University of York, mobeen.hussain@york.ac.uk.
Timeline:
- Deadline for abstracts: 11th July 2025.
- Successful participants notified by the end of July 2025.
- Pre-circulated papers of 5000-6000 words (excluding notes) to be submitted: 17th October 2025.
Funding:
This event is funded by the Wellcome Trust. Selected participants can apply for upto £150 for travel expenses and accommodation with preference given to early career researchers. Please note air travel cannot be covered or subsidised due to limited funds and in line with funders’ climate policies.
Image: Wiki Commons – CC 4.0