Feb 18. (4pm) Aisha Khan (NYU), The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021). Spanning post-emancipation plantations in the West Indies and present-day England, North America, and Trinidad, this study focuses on the contested religious practices of obeah and Hosay, which have been racialized, respectively, as “African” and “Indian,” despite the diversity of their participants. Aisha Khan shows in detail how identities formed under colonialism continue to reiterate inequalities as well as reinforce demands for justice and recognition.  Discussants: Lisa Lowe, Jacqueline N. Brown, Ifeona Fulani, Shobana Shankar. In collaboration with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) (Afro-Asia in the Americas)

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Aisha Khan is a Professor of Anthropology at NYU. Her research focuses on the Atlantic world, with an emphasis on the West Indies and the US; race; diaspora; colonialism/ postcolonialism; religion; and mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. She has published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her books include Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2004), Islam and the Americas (University Press of Florida, 2016), in addition to The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021).

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and “New Questions, New Formations: Asian American Studies,” a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). 

Jacqueline Nassy Brown is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.  Her research interests center on intersections of place, race and nation. Her work treats place and other geographical phenomena as lenses through which to understand contemporary formations of race and nation. She also contributes to diaspora theory, feminist geography, and the anthropology of Black Europe. She is the author of Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool (Princeton, 2005), which deploys ethnographic research to show the inextricable relationship between racial identity, politics and subjectivity in Liverpool on the one hand, and the politics of place in Britain writ large on the other hand. It also argues for treating the local and the global not merely as spatial categories but as profoundly racialized ones, while also offering a feminist critique of the Black Atlantic paradigm. Her current project examines the relationship between political culture and everyday life in New York City and ideas about Americanness, American culture, and American identity.  

Ifeona Fulani teaches in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. Her research interests include Caribbean, African and Black British literatures and cultures and her recent publications include an edited volume of essays, Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music (University of West Indies Press, 2012) as well as scholarly articles published in Atlantic Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, Frontiers: A journal of Women’s Studies, Small Axe and Anthurium. In addition, she is a creative writer, author of a collection of short stories titled Ten Days in Jamaica, published in 2012), a novel, Seasons of Dust (1997) and stories published in the Beacon’s Best anthology series, in Small Axe, and in Black Renaissance /Renaissance Noir. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from New York University.

Shobana Shankar is a professor of African and global history at Stony Brook University.  Her most recent book, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst/Oxford, 2021) is the first history of how race and racialization have brought Africans and Indians together, yet also driven them apart. The book is based on her research in 7 countries, including Ghana, India, Nigeria, and Senegal. She is also 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).

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