Black and Brown Intimacies across Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean

“European exploitation desires the black slave, the Chinese coolie, and the Indian laborer for the same ends and the same purposes.”

W. E. B. Du Bois “The Clash of Color: Indians and American Negroes.” The Aryan Path 1936 (2005).

“The rights of a coolie in California, in Peru, in Jamaica, in Trinidad, and on board the vessels bearing them to these countries are scarcely more guarded than were those of the Negro slaves brought to our shores a century ago.”

Frederick Douglass, “Cheap Labor.” Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, Reconstruction and After, ed. Philip Foner (New York: International, 1955).

From pre-colonial Indian Ocean trade relations to postcolonial formations such as the Non-Aligned movement (Nkrumah, Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno being key figures), from intimacies forged through the related colonial displacements of enslavement and indenture to contemporary mercantile migrations as part of neoliberal globalized orders, Africa and Asia have never been far apart. In their relation, multiple global narratives unfold. Reading Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia alongside each other reveals polycentric and multivalent histories.

Through an engagement with histories of colonialism, enslavement, indenture, and mercantile migration, shared movements and imaginations of decolonization, this colloquy examines how studying Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean alongside each other brings to the fore understandings and grapplings with race and ethnicity that are not always commensurate with or addressed by Euro-US frameworks. Through the work of scholars and artists who engage with Afro-Asian relations through political, religious, performance, linguistic, culinary and other forms, the colloquy draws our attention to the specificities of region, to structuring hierarchies of ethnic, linguistic, and caste affiliations, and invites us to engage with more granular histories of cross-ethnic and cross-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of connections and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities.  

Caribbean studies and Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies have developed nuanced and complex frameworks to study the dense racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural encounters and mixing in locations across the Francophone, Anglophone, and Dutch Caribbean as well as along the Swahili coast, and islands such as Mauritius, Madagascar, Zanzibar, and Réunion, among many others. Given disciplinary boundaries and silos, it is unfortunately rare for these frameworks to be studied together, so we might appreciate the rich encounters between a range of creole cultures without flattening continents and regions or only considering nation-state histories and trajectories.

In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe recommends we focus on “the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity,” and, in an essay titled, “History Hesitant,” she calls for “retir[ing] the convention of comparison” to think differently “about the important asymmetries of contact, encounter, convergence, and solidarity.” Édouard Glissant sees collisions between cultures as productive of Relation, where in the multiplicity and diversity of beings in Relation, “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” Our colloquy attends to histories of inter-ethnic and -racial conflict, and political and economic dominance and marginalization, which alert us to the fractious realities of these relations, and equally to political, artistic and other collaborations that attest to coalitional solidarity and sensuous intimacies.

By engaging with work that demonstrates historical depth, theoretical rigor, aesthetic experimentation, and radical political imaginations, this colloquy showcases studies of cross-racial intimacies, conceived as complex entanglements of the many affects generated by proximity. Transoceanic Black and Brown intimacy is under-researched and under-represented in scholarship on race and ethnicity. Our colloquy features work firmly grounded and invested in the people, ecologies, and histories that oceanic routes brought into contact, and the enduring legacies of those encounters.