No Nonviolence Without Equality

In this lecture, jointly hosted by UCI Labor Center and UCI Religious Studies, Kumar offers a counterhistory of democratic nonviolence and its limits, placing the theory and practice of civil disobedience within broader, trans-Atlantic arguments about human freedom and responsibility that transformed Civil Rights and Southern thought in the 20th century.

Putting the South first, the lecture begins with two galvanizing figures of public faith and moral institutionalism in the anticolonial South to examine a preliminary puzzle. What made Gandhi and Ambedkar so mutually reinforcing, especially in their sustained concern with political cruelty, and yet, so radically incommensurable in their thinking of equality?

For Southern thinkers of civil disobedience at large, the lecture argues, nonviolence was at best a supplement to the more fundamental striving for a politics without resentment. For resentment is that vortex of seething, majoritarian rage—or ambition—in which cruel intentions are most frequently generated. No matter how…