Susan Hangen Race is a highly malleable framework of identity, and it should be understood in relation to particular times, places and processes. Usually race is imposed upon marginalized groups by powerful elites, rather than initiated by those groups. Although race has typically been mobilized to justify and uphold social inequality, recently in Nepal race was used in a political movement to oppose those in power. In Nepal, race was never used by the state to understand or classify citizens. This challenges many scholars’ assumptions that race is always hegemonic. The Nepalis who identified themselves as a race were rejecting rather than replicating the dominant ways in which they had been classified. This challenges the assumption that marginalized groups are required to speak in the language of the powerful to gain recognition and change their ...
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