Afrasia: Contours, Crossings, Connections

Afrasia: Contours, Crossings, Connections

Afrasia: Contours, Crossings, Connections takes Afrasia as the conceptual and contingent space—historical and contemporary; sociocultural, political economic, and ideological; interpersonal, collective, and mass-mediated, among others—through which African and Asian peoples, as well as peoples of African and Asian descent, have engaged each other on and between their respective continents, across and through oceanic regions, and around the world. It establishes a framework through which to understand the various interactions and enmeshments that took and take place between and across African and Asian actors—interactions that are neither stable nor unchanging but rather defined by their complexity, richness, mutability, and depth.

The series will invite monographs and edited volumes from new and experienced scholars that examine how African and Asian peoples have encountered each other across diverse geographical and cultural contexts, in the past and present, with a focus on the frictions and solidarities of these encounters as catalyzed by contemporary trends in global migration, movement, and interrelation. Welcoming interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the myriad dimensions of these exchanges, the series traces the contours of Afrasia to encompass West, Central, South, Southeast, and East Asia; Sub-Saharan and North Africa; and diasporic zones worldwide, including the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

Acquiring Editor: William Masami Hammell

Editorial Board:

  • Lina Benabdallah (Wake Forest University)
  • Robeson Taj Frazier (University of Southern California)
  • Gerald Horne (University of Houston)
  • Madhumita Lahiri (University of Michigan)
  • Dilip M. Menon (University of the Witwatersrand)
  • Mark Kwaku Mensah Obeng (University of Ghana)
  • Yuichiro Onishi (University of Minnesota)
  • Shobana Shankar (Stony Brook University)
  • Ruth Simbao (Rhodes University)
  • Nico Slate (Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Jodie Yuzhou Sun (Fudan University)

Series Editors

Marvin D. SterlingIndiana University

Marvin D. Sterling is associate professor of cultural anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. His research interests revolve around cultural transnationalism, performance theory, ethnographic writing, race and global Blackness, Afro-Asia, and human rights. He is author of Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan and coeditor of Who is the Asianist? The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies.

Marvin D. Sterling

Pedro MachadoIndiana University

Pedro Machado is associate professor of history and director of the Dhar India Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington. He is a global and Indian Ocean historian with interests in commodity histories; enslavement and unfree labor and migratory movements; and the social, cultural, environmental, and commercial trajectories of objects. He is author of Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants and Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1850 and coeditor of Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth and Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds.

Pedro Machado