The entwined histories of Blacks and Indians defy easy explanation. From Black Lives Matter protests against Gandhi statues to Kamala Harris's historic election, this relationship--notwithstanding moments of common struggle--seethes with conflicts that reveal important lessons about race in the modern world. Shobana Shankar's groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians see their differences. Drawing on archival and oral sources from seven countries, she traces how economic tensions surrounding the Indian diaspora in East and Southern Africa collided with the twentieth century's widening Indian networks in West Africa and the Black Atlantic. Decolonisation brought a reckoning with Euro-American racial hierarchies, as well as discord over caste, religion, sex and skin colour, simmering beneath the rhetoric of Afro-Indian solidarity. This book illuminates how postcolonial peoples remade race by reinvigorating cultural movements, from Pan-Africanism to popular devotionalism, in Africa, India and the United States. This new race consciousness was meant as a redemption from the moral dangers of economic rivalry. Yet rising wealth and nationalist amnesia now threaten this postcolonial ethos. Calls to dismantle statues, from Accra to Washington DC, are not merely symbolic. They seek to preserve dissenting histories, and the possibility of alternative futures.
Shobana Shankar is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1975; and co-editor of Religions on the Move! and Transforming Africa's Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past and Present.
Title: An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race
Author: Shankar, Shobana
ISBN: 9781787385696
Binding:
Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
Publication Date: 2021-08-26
Number of Pages: 256
Weight: 0.5051 kg
'Shobana Shankar is a first-rate academic and this book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on the Indian Ocean world. Thought-provoking, properly researched and well written, An Uneasy Embrace pushes the academic boundaries.' -- Goolam Vahed, Professor of History, University of KwaZulu Natal, and author of 'History of the Present: A Biography of Indian South Africans, 1994-2019'
' An Uneasy Embrace is an ingenious narrative and a meticulously researched account of the unexplored cultural, political and racial conversations between Indians and West Africans. Unique in its interdisciplinary methodology and subject matter, it will have an appeal across disciplines.' -- Renu Modi, Professor and Director, Centre for African Studies, University of Mumbai
'In this original, rich and captivating book, Shobana Shankar brilliantly illuminates the complex and multilayered cultural economy and circulations between India and Africa, the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean, and African and Indian diasporas.' -- Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Vice Chancellor, United States International University-Africa
'This brave book is a welcome addition to the growing intellectual exploration of race-caste theories. Original in scope and informed by passionate research, it will become one of the most sought-after works on African-Indian studies.' -- Suraj Yengde, Harvard University, author of 'Caste Matters'