This will be our first in-person (and Hybrid) meeting since March 2020. We must observe NYU Covid Protocols, which are here.

Dec 9. 4-7pm. Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding, Yale University Press, 2022. [Hybrid Zoom-In-person in King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC 53 Wash Sq South) auditorium] A pioneering history of inter-Asian understanding that shows the cultural constraints on the call for Asian unity.  In the nineteenth century, Europe’s empires built vast Asian transport networks to maximize the profits of trade, while Christian missionaries spread printing to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications revolution: a new public sphere that stretched from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the continent, inquisitive individuals tried to study each other’s cultures, turning the infrastructures of empire to their own exploratory ends. Whether in Japanese or Persian, Bengali or Arabic, they wrote travelogues, histories, and phrasebooks to chart the widely different regions that Europe’s geographers labeled “Asia.” But comprehension does not always keep pace with connection. Far from flowing smoothly, inter‑Asian understanding faced obstacles of many kinds, especially on a landmass with so many scripts and languages. Here is the dramatic story of cross-cultural knowledge on the world’s largest continent, showing the historical constraints on the call for Asian unity.

30-minute Book Talk RECORDING

Full-length Book Talk RECORDING

Nile Green is Professor of History at UCLA, where he holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History. Green is a historian of the multiple globalizations of Islam and Muslims. After beginning his career as a historian of India and Pakistan, he has traced Muslim networks that connect Afghanistan, Iran, the Indian Ocean, Africa, Japan, Europe and America. A former Guggenheim Fellow, his previous books include Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (Cambridge University Press, 2013) (which won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award and the Association for Asian Studies’ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Book Award); The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (Princeton University Press, 2015) (a New York Times editors’ choice); and Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020). He also hosts the podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam.

Tansen Sen is Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai, China, and Associated Professor of History at NYU. He received his MA from Peking University, China, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (‎Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013 , 2016) and India, China, and the World: A Connected History (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017). He has co-authored (with Victor H. Mair) Traditional China in Asian and World History (Columbia University Press, 2012), edited Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Cultural and Intellectual Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and co-edited (with Burkhard Schnepel) Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World (BRILL, 2019) and (with Brian Tsui) Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India 1840s–1960s (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a book entitled The History and Heritage of Zheng He, a monograph on Jawaharlal Nehru and China, and co-editing (with Engseng Ho) the Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean, volume 1.

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is a Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Arts & Science. Zvi has served as Director of the History Department’s MA program in World History, as Acting Director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and as Chair of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Specializing in Chinese and Islamic History, Zvi’s research centers on the interaction between religions in world history and cultural exchanges across space and time. He is the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford University Press, 2009); and more recently, an edited volume on Middle Eastern Jewish Thought (Brandeis University Press, 2013); an edited volume on Sovereignty (forthcoming with Columbia University Press); and a monograph entitled Crescent China: Islam and Nation after Empire (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).

Tatiana Linkhoeva is Assistant Professor of History at NYU. Her research and teaching interests center on imperial Japan, collaboration and resistance, and social/ist imaginaries. Her book, Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Cornell University Press, 2020), examined the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917 on the Japanese Left and Japan’s imperial policy. Her second project is a comparative study of Japanese and Soviet empires and their colonial policies on the Mongolian territories. She is the East Asia Editor for the Oxford University Press Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.

30-minute Book Talk RECORDING

Full-length Book Talk RECORDING

Dec 2. 10:00-12:00. [Zoom Meeting] A discussion of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia, featuring essays by Rohan D’Souza, May Joseph and Sudipta Sen. This book is a part of a new Routledge series,  Ocean and Island Studies. It is a collection of essays focused on coasts, islands, and shorelines, written by historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists. It advances our understanding of the lesser-studied lifeworlds of the South Asian littoral that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial, and inescapably both. Invoking a ‘third surface’ located in the interstice of land and water―deltas, estuaries, tidelands, beaches, swamps, sandbanks, and mudflats―Terra Aqua aims at a radical reconceptualization of coastal and shoreline terrains. It explores threatened lives, endangered habitats and emergent templates of survival against the backdrop of rising seas and the climatic upheavals, with particular focus on the Bengal and Malabar coastlines. It examines salinity and submergence, coastal erosion, subterranean degradation, and the erosion of littoral lives, livelihoods and habitats. This is a book for all students and scholars of the environment who are interested in the changing coastal ecologies and environments of Asia.

RECORDING

Rohan D’Souza is professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University. His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies (Jawaharlal Nehru University). He was elected General Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union (1989-90). He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (Oxford University Press New Delhi, 2006). His research interests include themes on environmental history and modern technology, such as hydraulic transition, modernity, colonialism, and rivers. D’Souza’s research discipline encompasses social and political philosophy, philosophy of science, and humanities and the social sciences.

May Joseph is the founder of Harmattan Theatre and professor of social science at Pratt Institute, and author of the books Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2022); Ghosts of Lumumba (Poetics Lab, 2020); Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York (Routledge, 2019); Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Duke University Press, 2013); and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Joseph is also co-editor (with Sudipta Sen) of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (Routledge, 2022) and of Performing Hybridity (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). She co-edits three book series from Routledge: Critical Climate Studies, Ocean and Island Studies, and Kaleidoscope: Ethnography, Art, Architecture and Archaeology. Joseph creates site specific performances along Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes exploring climate issues. Additional work by Joseph can be found at: www.mayjoseph.com

Sudipta Sen is professor of history and Middle East/South Asia studies, University of California, Davis. A scholar of Late Mughal and British India, British Empire, and Environment and Ecology, his early work has focused on the history of British expansion in India. He is author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002); Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2019) and a co-editor of the Routledge Ocean and Island Studies book series. A recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Award (2021-23), he was recently presented with the William Jones Memorial Medal by the Asiatic Society of India for his contribution to the fields of Asian Studies and History.  

Requirements to Visit Campus

UPDATES WILL APPEAR

AT THIS WEBSITE

As of Oct 24, these are the rule for all visitors, vendors, and affiliates must:

1. Be sponsored by an NYU student, faculty member, or employee.
   • Visitors and Vendors must be sponsored in NYU’s visitor management system by a current NYU employee, faculty member, or student. See Sponsoring Visitors and Vendors for more information.
   • Affiliates must be sponsored in NYU’s affiliate management system by a current employee or faculty member. See Sponsoring Affiliates for more information.
2. Adhere to the University’s COVID-19-related health and safety protocols;
3. Show a valid government-issued photo ID (children under 18 can provide non-government identification); and
4. Be in compliance with NYU’s COVID-19 vaccination requirements and be prepared to present proof of compliance if asked to do so (advanced upload is no longer required). All visitors, vendors, and affiliates older than one year of age must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and boosted (once eligible and by NYU’s deadline) with an FDA-authorized or WHO-listed vaccine. Note: proof of compliance with NYU’s vaccination policy is not required for minors before their first birthday.

Note: Visitors, vendors, and affiliates are no longer required to display a Violet Go pass to access campus. 

Here are some links to model websites that we can use to build our Global Asia digital platform for research and teaching.

This is the site model that might best serve as our Global Asia landing page, what we can call our Global Asia Program Site, providing space for text to explain the program and links to any number of internal Global Asia Project Sites and also to related external sites for research and teaching. This Program Site would be designed and maintained by our professional web designer, who will work closely with us to provide interactive collaboration in its development.

Here are some example sites that could serve as models for internal Global Asia Project sites, built by collaborators in the project, including content in formats they prefer. (These internal Global Asia Project Sites will include many links to relevant external sites.)

https://globalempires.hosting.nyu.edu/

https://www.battleofadwa.org/

https://afroasiannetworks.com

https://historybeyond.com

The Indo-Guyanese, or East Indians, are the largest ethnic group at 44% of the population, and they are descendants of indentured laborers from India.

LITTLE GUYANA — South Richmond Hill, QueensThirty Blocks around Liberty Ave, 104-134 stThere are approximately 140,000 Guyanese residents in New York City, most of which live in either Richmond Hill or Canarsie and Flatbush in Brooklyn. This makes the Guyanese-American community the second-largest foreign-born group of immigrants in Queens.

UNTAPPED NEW YORK

NYC MICRO NEIGHBORHOODS: ASIAN FOOD AND CULTURE IN FLUSHING, QUEENS

The racial makeup of the CANARSIE neighborhood was 81.0% (67,816) African American, 5.9% (4,928) non-Hispanic White, 0.2% (192) Native American, 2.6% (2,198) Asian, 0.0% (8) Pacific Islander, 0.4% (332) from other races, and 1.5% (1,278) from two or more races.

The Caribbean Comes to Canarsie
(c. 1900 – present)

Immigrants from the Caribbean have been coming to Canarsie since the turn of the twentieth century, a time when vast numbers of Caribbean peoples emigrated to New York and other cities along the United States’ eastern seaboard.³⁷ In the early twentieth century, a “sizeable number” of immigrants from the West Indies, namely “Bahamians, ship jumpers, and former stevedores from Barbados and Jamaica,” settled the Canarsie Meadows close to the bay, in the vicinity of Seaview Avenue and Rockaway Parkway.³⁸ Coincidentally, the small West Indian population was located directly south of Colored Colony (centered on Avenues J and K) along Rockaway Parkway—the same distance between the Canarsie and Jamaica Bay branches of Brooklyn Public Library. These early Caribbean Canarsiens did not live in a homogenous ethnic enclave, but dwelled in slums alongside many poor Irish and Italian families, as well as migrant black workers from the American south. In 1955, these slums were razed to make way for the development of the Bayview housing complex. ³⁹

New York City has always had a particular pull for Caribbean immigrants. Both before and after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (which abolished earlier quotas on the entry of West Indians into the country), roughly half of all Caribbean peoples to come to the United States chose to make New York their home.⁴⁰ By the 1990s, the opening of Canarsie’s private housing market to people of color prepared the way for a great inflow of West Indian peoples into the neighborhood, for whom home ownership has always been a core cultural value.⁴¹ Families from Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago and beyond who live, work, worship and go to school in the neighborhood make today’s Canarsie a colorful microcosm that reflects the vibrancy of the Caribbean world.

The racial makeup of the FLATBUSH neighborhood was 19.9% (21,030) White, 48.6% (51,470) African American, 0.3% (281) Native American, 9.2% (9,712) Asian, 0.0% (26) Pacific Islander, 0.5% (575) from other races, and 1.9% (2,051) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 19.5% (20,659) of the population.

CHINESE FOOD IN FLATBUSH AND CANARSIE

INDIAN FOOD IN FLATBUSH AND CANARSIE

Sept 30. (9am) [Zoom Meeting] Heather Lee (NYU-Shanghai).  

Book Discussion

Gastrodiplomacy: Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York, 1870-1949 (forthcoming).

This pathbreaking book shows that a handful of Chinese immigrant men in New York changed the way a white majoritarian society ate. At a moment of intense anti-Chinese racism, the Chinese protagonists channeled their political activism through the Chinese restaurant. They presented ideas of China in the décor, restaurant ephemera, and food to renegotiate Chinese and white interracial relations and the status of Chinese people in the United States. For Chinese immigrants, the most important dividends were the financial windfall from the popularity of Chinese food, as well as the more lenient application of Chinese Exclusion to Chinese restaurant owners. Their efforts to stay connected to China produced a transpacific circuit of people, capital, and ideas, making New York into the North American terminus of a transpacific corridor.

RECORDING: Partial Gallery View, Speaker View

Heather Ruth Lee is an Assistant Professor of History at NYU Shanghai. She uses spatial analysis, quantitative data, and archival sources to study the movement of people and capital from Asia after the American Civil War, and how the migration of racialized peoples of Asian descent shaped hierarchies of power in the United States. At NYU Shanghai, Professor Lee teaches courses on the History of New York, Chinese Diaspora, Asian American History, and U.S. History Since 1877. She also leads Humanities Research Lab, where humanities and STEM students converge to answer historical research questions through digital methods (for sample projects see https://historybeyond.com/).

Jeffrey M. Pilcher is a professor of History and Food Studies at the University of Toronto. His books include ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (University of New Mexico Press, 1998), Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Food in World History, 2d ed. (Routledge, 2017). He is a co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Global Food History. He has published special issues developing innovative concepts such as Culinary Infrastructure and Migrant Marketplaces. Oxford University Press will publish his global history of beer in the spring of 2023.

Madeline Y. Hsu is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies eight years (2006-2014).  She was president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and is presently representative-at-large for the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas. She received her undergraduate degrees in History from Pomona College and PhD from Yale University. Her most recent monograph, The Good Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2015), received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Association for Asian American Studies.

Tyler Anbinder is an emeritus professor of history at George Washington University, where he taught courses on the history of American immigration and the American Civil War era. He is the author of three award-winning books: Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford University Press, 1992); Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (Simon and Schuster, 2001); and City of Dreams: The 400- Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). Anbinder has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and served as the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Distinguished professor of History at the University of Utrecht. He is currently finishing a book entitled This Plentiful Country, a history of the Great Irish Famine refugees in New York City and beyond.

Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.  

Global Asian Americas 

We will sponsor and generate a number of projects to open up the field of Asian-American Studies to embrace all varieties of Asian mobility, habitation, interaction, and connectivity in all the Americas, as well as embracing connected Asian spaces shaped by America’s global mobility, beginning with nineteenth century missionaries and gun ships and including twentieth century wars and capitalism. Asian America would thus include Asian territories shaped by United States (notably the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine), and Asian spaces of US war-induced refugee migration (where Afghans now top 2.6 million).

All kinds of Asian mobility in the Americas are possible subjects for this project — see also New York Migrant City — so that Asian-America also includes  Asian investors in the Americas and mobile Asian cultural influence, from food and fashion to Anime, K-pop, marital arts, religion, and cinema, which, along with supply chains for commodities and pandemics, travel out of Asia from the sixteenth century. Last but not least, numerous transnational political networks, loyalties, affiliations, commodity chains, and activists in the Americas influence culture, economies, and politics all across Asia, and in turn, those Asian connections shape American institutions, including academic Asian Studies.

Here is a ruling to separate Asian American groups in State of New York data. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-york-state-disaggregate-data-asian-american-groups-rcna10237

Oct 21. 12pm. [Zoom Meeting] Dilip Menon, Renisa Mawani, and Isabel Hofmeyr. “Oceanic Methodologies: A Conversation.” Based on the recent anthology, Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime, edited by Dilip Menon, Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra, and Saarah Jappie (Routledge, India, April 2022) — here are page proofs — this panel will focus on Chapter One, Dilip Menon, “Oceanic Histories: from the Terrestrial to the Maritime,” to explore its argument that the ocean presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and social sciences in our fraught era of global warming and climate uncertainty. The panel will consider how such an ocean-centric approach might offer new perspectives and engagements challenging long-standing paradigms of world history and environmental studies. Dilip will open the conversation; Renisa and Isabel will respond; and Sudipta Sen and May Joseph will moderate. (This meeting launches our Port City Environments project, Anthropocene Ecologies, and Climate Futures)

RECORDING: Speaker View. Gallery View.

Dilip Menon is Professor of History, Department of International Relations and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand. Dilip does research in World Literatures, Cultural History and Cultural Anthropology. He works on oceanic histories and knowledge from the global south. His current project is on thinking about historical imagination in South Asia. His recent book is Introduction to Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is a global history of capitalisms from the 10th to the 18th century covering themes like silver, slavery and a geography extending from China, India and SE Asia to the Ottoman, Safavid and Russian empires. 

Renisa Mawani is Associate Professor of Sociology and Founding Chair of the Law and Society Minor Program at the University of British Columbia. She works on the conjoined histories of Indigeneity, Asian migration, and settler colonialism and has published widely on law and coloniality and legal geography. Her research coalesces at the juncture of critical theory and British colonial legal history. Her research interests include historical/comparative sociologies of empire, sociologies of modernity, law and nature, postcolonial theory, biopolitics and racisms, cosmopolitanism, affect, law and society in South Asia. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009), Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), and a series of articles, which have been published in Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and elsewhere.

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU. She has worked extensively on the Indian Ocean world and oceanic themes more generally. Her most recent book is Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Duke University Press, 2022). Over the last two decades, she has pioneered research on global, oceanic and transnational forms of literary and cultural history that seek to understand Africa’s place in the world. With Charne Lavery, she runs a project Oceanic Humanities for the Global South with partners from Mozambique, India, Jamaica and Barbados.

May Joseph is the founder of Harmattan Theatre and professor of social science at Pratt Institute, and author of the books Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2022); Ghosts of Lumumba (Poetics Lab, 2020); Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York (Routledge, 2019); Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Duke University Press, 2013); and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Joseph is also co-editor (with Sudipta Sen) of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (Routledge, 2022) and of Performing Hybridity (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). She co-edits three book series from Routledge: Critical Climate Studies, Ocean and Island Studies, and Kaleidoscope: Ethnography, Art, Architecture and Archaeology. Joseph creates site specific performances along Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes exploring climate issues. Additional work by Joseph can be found at: www.mayjoseph.com

Sudipta Sen is professor of history and Middle East/South Asia studies, University of California, Davis. A scholar of Late Mughal and British India, British Empire, and Environment and Ecology, his early work has focused on the history of British expansion in India. He is author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002); Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2019) and a co-editor of the Routledge Ocean and Island Studies book series. A recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Award (2021-23), he was recently (2021) presented with the William Jones Memorial Medal by the Asiatic Society of India for his contribution to the fields of Asian Studies and History.

REGISTER HERE.

“GLOBAL AFRICA MEETS GLOBAL ASIA” Our first project workshop at NYUAD Jan 21-22, 2023

SUBSCRIBE to the dedicated Mailchimp list for this project HERE.

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).

PROJECT EVENTS 2021 April 15, 25. The Chinese Community in Jamaica. “Show Me a Mountain: Jamaican Writers & Visual Artists of Chinese Descent.” Organized by Jacqueline Bishop, an award-winning photographer, painter and writer born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives and works in New York City. 

With the coming of Emancipation in 1834 to the island of Jamaica, the formerly enslaved sought to leave the site of the plantation in droves. Faced with a shortage of labor on the plantations, the white elite of the island and the imperial powers of Britain turned to countries such as China to fill these labor shortages in an indentureship scheme that would see mainly Hakka Chinese immigrants arriving in Jamaica starting in 1840, though there is evidence of a Chinese presence on the island from as far back as the 1700s.  This growing community would see Chinese cemeteries being built on the island, Buddhists temples, and today an area of downtown Kingston has been recognized as the first China Town on the island. “Show Me a Mountain” sheds a spotlight on this dynamic community by having two panel discussions with writers and visual artists who are Chinese of Jamaican descent. This event was sponsored by NYU Liberal Studies.

2022  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 brilliant 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. Cosponsored by Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). LINK TO MEETING…………. RECORDING.

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. Discussants: Renu Modi, Neelima Jeyachandran, and Meera Venkatachalam. In collaboration with the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora. LINK TO MEETING.  LINK TO RECORDING … YOUTUBE LINK.

Apr 15. (12pm) Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State) A discussion of Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8.1 (Feb-Mar 2022), a special issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, Afro-Asian Affinities,” co-edited by Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois (Penn State) & Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State).  This special issue investigates how creative works and aesthetic expressions represent African-Asian affinities in several parts of the Indian Ocean world. Contributions featured in this issue engage with a wide array of objects and practices—including music and dance, poetry and novels, paintings and architectural designs—and consider how they simultaneously capture and shape the imaginary of the Indian Ocean as a space that generates complex definitions of transcultural, translocal, and transnational contacts. Discussants: Prita Meier and Dilip Menon)  LINK TO MEETING…RECORDING

Apr 22. (12pm) Awam Amkpa  and Gunja Sengupta, Sojourners, Sultans and ‘Slaves’: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press, forthcoming). In the 19th century, capitalism and empire networked the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds into a global public sphere of contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. This book mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of U.S. mercantile projects, “free labor” experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. It profiles transnational human rights campaigns, shows how discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, and reveals the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with Whiggish contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire-builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a “cotton queen” and courtesans, and fugitive slaves and concubines offers windows to competing knowledge productions about “slavery in the East,” and prompts reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency. (Afro-Asian Interactions) Discussants:  Sarah Khan and Ahmad Sikainga. LINK TO MEETING.  RECORDING

RESOURCES

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.

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.

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.  

“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.

A RESOURCE PAGE on The World of Afro-Asian Foods, from Krishnendu Ray. (including bibliography and links)

and Bibliography/Resource Site by Cassie Washington. 

Edited by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano 

by Crystal S. Anderson

CHINESE FOOD IN CROWN HEIGHTS