Afro-Asian Interactions
Program directors: Gabriel Dattatreyan and Rashmi Devi Sawhney
This project combines African, Asian, Middle East, and American Studies to explore global mobilities of Afro-Asian interaction in multi-disciplinary, multi-media perspectives. We trace seaborne mobility around the Indian Ocean that formed influential Afro-Asian spaces of economic, political, and cultural life from ancient times.
After 1500, seaborne and airborne globalization of Africa and Asia territories and their many intersecting diasporas produced diverse Afro-Asian cultural environments. In the twentieth century, anti-imperial struggles produced influential Afro-Asian alliances in the Third World, Europe, and America. In twenty-first century age of Black Lives Matter, Americans of African and Asian descent engaged complex relationships, struggles, and cultural projects, framed by white supremacy. At the same time, India and China are investing heavily in Africa: Global Asia is displacing The West in Africa, remaking Afro-Asia as space of transnational territorial political economy, which has become the subject of Foreign Policy concern and academic study (African East-Asian Affairs).
Resources
“Coexisting and Competing with China in Africa: Indian Perspectives in Ghana”
Atlantic Council South Asia Center and Afro-Sino Center for International Research (Accra), “Coexisting and Competing with China in Africa: Indian Perspectives in Ghana,” Virtual Panel Discussion 12 Dec 2022, Full Report: “Global China in Africa: Documenting Indian perspectives from Ghana,” By Veda Vaidyanathan and Arhin Acheampong.
Phyllis Ressler, “The Kanga, A Cloth That Reveals- Co-production of Culture in Africa and the Indian Ocean Region,”
University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Digital Commons. Textile Society of America Symposium. Proceedings Textile Society of America.
Suzuki, H. “Kanga made in Japan: The flow of cloth from the eastern to the western end of the Indian Ocean world.”
In P. Machado, S. Fee, & G. Campbell (Eds.), Textile trades, consumer cultures, and the material worlds of the Indian Ocean: An ocean of cloth, Cham, SUI: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp.105-131.
African jurists in Asia: premodern Afro-Asian interactions Mahmood Kooria
IIAS Newsletter, Spring 2017
Afro-Asian Sociocultural Interactions in Cultural Production by or About Asian Latin Americans
by Dr. Ignacio López-Calvo Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South Maghan Keita, “Africans and Asians: Historiography and the Long View of Global Interaction,” Journal of World History, 16, 1, 2005, 1-30 (in project Muse) (downloaded PDF)
Your Attention Please
an Afro-Chinese legacy film by Tao Leigh Goffe, and her essay, “Chop Suey Surplus: Chinese Food, Sex, and the Political Economy of Afro-Asia,” in September 3, 2020 issue of Women and Performance.
The World of Afro-Asian Foods
from Krishnendu Ray
Bibliography and links
Africa and the Gulf Region: Blurred Boundaries and Shifting Ties
edited by Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf and Dale F. Eickelman (2015)
A collaboration of historians, political scientists, development planners, and a biomedical engineer, exploring Arabian-African relationships in their many overlapping dimensions.
Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean
by Luisa Marcela Ossa (Contributions by), Debbie Lee-DiStefano (Contributions by), Dania Abreu-Torres (Contributions by)
This volume explores the connections between people of Asian and African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing specifically on how they negotiated shared social spaces and experiences to develop what in many cases would become a fusion of cultures.
Beyond the Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production
by Crystal S Anderson
From Bruce Lee to Samurai Champloo , how Asian fictions fuse with African American creative sensibilities
Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937
by Julia H. Lee
Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? This book attempts to answer this question, arguing that scenes depicting Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of American identity.
Mapping Afro-Asian Interactions
- All
- Ghana’s Hindu Monastery
- The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam
- African Pentecostalism in India
- Afro-Dravidian Studies
- African-Indian Alliance