Mar 11. (10am) Shobana Shankar (Stony Brook), An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst Publishers, 2021) This groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians make and unmake their differences. Drawing on archival and oral sources from seven countries, it traces how economic tensions surrounding the Indian diaspora in East and Southern Africa collided with widening Indian networks in West Africa and the Black Atlantic, forcing a racial reckoning over the course of the twentieth century. Through cultural movements, including Pan-Africanism and popular devotionalism, Africans and Indians made race consciousness, alongside economic cooperation, a moral priority. Yet rising wealth and nationalist amnesia now threaten this postcolonial ethos. (Afro-Asia Interactions) Discussants: Renu Modi, Neelima Jeyachandran, and Meera Venkatachalam. In collaboration with the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD).
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Shobana Shankar is a Professor of African and Global History at Stony Brook University. In addition to An Uneasy Embrace, she is author/co-editor of three other books: Religions on the Move: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World, with Afe Adogame (Brill, 2013); Who Shall Enter Paradise: Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1975 (Ohio University, 2014); and Transforming Religious Landscapes in Africa: The Sudan Interior Mission, Past and Present (Africa World Press, 2018). Her most recent publications focus on Ghanaian Hinduism and intimacy in African-Indian photography. She is founder and co-editor of the new book series, “African Religions, Social Realities” (Ohio University Press).
Dr. Renu Modi is Professor and Director at the Centre for African Studies, University of Mumbai for over two decades. She was educated at the Lady Shree Ram College for Women (Political Science; Hons.) and read for her M.Phil and Ph.D., at the Centre for African Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has held research fellowships at The Centre for Refugees Studies (University of Oxford), International Women’s University (University of Hannover, DAAD) and the Nordic Africa Institute (Uppsala, Sweden). Dr. Modi was the recipient of the Shastri Faculty Training and Internationalisation Grant (SFTIG), 2017- 2018, at the Centre for Global Studies (CFGS), University of Victoria, Canada, awarded jointly by the governments of India and Canada.
Neelima Jeychandran is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the African Studies Program at The Pennsylvania State University. She works on visual cultures, material heritage, performances, architectures of memory, and spatial (re)fabulation of legacies of slavery and more general trade in West and East Africa and South Asia. She is the co-convenor of the research group Indian Oceanologies, a multi-campus working group that explores contemporary lives, spaces, and relational practices in the Indian Ocean. She is co-editor of the book Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020) and co-editor of the Verge: Studies in Global Asias journal issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, African-Asian Affinities” (2022), and series co-editor for the Routledge Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia book series. She is finishing her book Textured Pasts: Material Heritage and Traces of African-Asian Relations in the Oceanic South in which she brings together the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean worlds into relational consideration by looking at material and immaterial circuits of exchanges.
Meera Venkatachalam is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for African Studies, University of Mumbai. Her research is focused on the transregional circulation of religion, people and capital across the Global South, between India and Africa in particular. She is the author of Slavery, memory, and religion in Southeastern Ghana, c. 1850-present, (Cambridge University Press 2015). She is co-editor of India-Africa partnerships for food security and capacity building: South-South cooperation (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), with Kenneth King; India’s Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), with Renu Modi; and Common Threads: Cloth Made in India for Africa (ASCL, 2020), with Renu Modi and Johann Salazar.