Description
Book SynopsisAntoinette Burton challenges nostalgic narratives of the Afro-Asian solidarity that emerged from the 1955 Bandung conference by showing how postcolonial Indian identity was based on the subordination of Africans and blackness.
Trade Review"A highly stimulating study of the (dis)continuities of colonial discourses of race and gender into the framework of transnational solidarity inspired by the Bandung spirit. . . . Burton’s book offers a major contribution to our understanding of how India imagined Africa (and, consequently, itself as an independent nation state) and raises the important challenge of re-thinking and complicating the postcolonial histories of Afro-Asian connections." -- Luca Raimondi * African Studies Quarterly *
"[Burton's] work implores scholars to locate new archives and tell more nuanced interpretations of the global south. She also encourages readers to reconsider the significance of race and gender in challenging and at times undermining the rhetorical and material projects developed under the banner of Afro-Asianism. Burton’s work will certainly stimulate a robust and welcome debate." -- Michele Louro * Canadian Journal of History *
"The book makes powerful theoretical contributions by desegregating Indian and African histories across the postcolonial Indian Ocean region, infusing their study with feminist historical methods, and writing race into geopolitics." -- Ned Bertz * Journal of African History *
"Ambitious and theoretically rigorous. . . . Burton engages with an impressive range of scholarship as she complicates our understanding of Indian-African interactions and raises larger issues dealing with the legacy of imperialism and the development of the postcolonial state." -- Timothy Nicholson * Ufahamu *
“Antoinette Burton is a master historian, who has proven her skill and craft time and again. In this volume, she presents four individual essays with thoughtful nuance, highlighting the presence of complex relationships of race, gender, and politics between different groups of disenfranchised people.” -- Jyoti Mohan * H-Empire, H-Net Reviews *
Table of ContentsForeword / Isabel Hofmeyr viii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. Citing/Siting Africa in the Indian Postcolonial Imagination 1
1. "Every Secret Thing"? Racial Politics in Ansuyah R. Singh's
Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) 27
2. Race and the Politics of Position: Above and Below in Frank Moraes'
The Importance of Being Black (1965) 57
3. Fictions of Postcolonial Development: Race, Intimacy and Afro-Asian Solidarity in Chanakya Sen's
The Morning After (1973) 89
4. Hands and Feed: Phyllis Naidoo's Impressions of Anti-apartheid History (2002-2006) 123
Epilogue 167
Index 173
