Description
Recent attention to the urgency of economic and political cooperation between the Indian government and African states – often termed south-south globalization – suggests that the time has come for more critical histories of “Afro-Asian solidarity” than are presently available. That term, which gained currency at the famous meeting of over two dozen Third World representatives in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, refers to the story of affinities and exchanges between people of African and South Asian descent from ancient times to the present. More recently, it has enjoyed popularity as a metaphor for the fraternal connections between ex-colonial people in the wake of decolonization, when Africans and Indians (and others) joined forces to create a non-aligned movement in the Cold War world dominated by the USA and the USSR.
This book tracks the racial hierarchies that were often at work in the lived experience and the geopolitical imaginaries of men and women for whom the ideals of Afro-Asian solidarity posed a genuine challenge. It also takes gender and sexuality as indispensable categories in the history of postcolonial India in/and the world. Drawing on the writings of the Ansuyah R. Singh, Frank Moraes, Chanakya Sen and Phyllis Naidoo, ‘Brown over Black’ reframes post-1947 Indian history in a set of Afro-Asian contexts, asking what the ideological and material work of race has been in shaping both geopolitical alliances and diasporic Indian histories.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Citing/Siting Africa in the Indian Postcolonial Imagination
Chapter 1
“Every Secret Thing”? Racial Politics in Ansuyah R. Singh’s Behold the Earth Mourns (1960)
Chapter 2
Race and the Politics of Position: Above and Below in Frank Moraes’ The Importance of Being Black (1965)
Chapter 3
Fictions of Postcolonial Development: Race, Intimacy and Afro-Asian Solidarity in Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After (1973)
Chapter 4
Hands and Feet: Phyllis Naidoo’s Impressions of Anti-apartheid History (2002–2006)
Epilogue
Cover photo: Alexandre Duret-Lutz
Antoinette Burton
Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her most recent books are The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (2007) and Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (2011). She teaches courses on Britain and empire, imperialism, gender and colonialism and world history. She is currently at work on a project called ‘Empire from Below: Resistance to British Imperialism from the Afghan Wars through Mau Mau’.
