Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation - Hardcover

Burton, Antoinette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822361485 ISBN 13: 9780822361480

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

In Africa in the Indian Imagination Antoinette Burton reframes our understanding of the postcolonial Afro-Asian solidarity that emerged from the 1955 Bandung conference. Afro-Asian solidarity is best understood, Burton contends, by using friction as a lens to expose the racial, class, gender, sexuality, caste, and political tensions throughout the postcolonial global South. Focusing on India's imagined relationship with Africa, Burton historicizes Africa's role in the emergence of a coherent postcolonial Indian identity. She shows how—despite Bandung's rhetoric of equality and brotherhood—Indian identity echoed colonial racial hierarchies in its subordination of Africans and blackness. Underscoring Indian anxiety over Africa and challenging the narratives and dearly held assumptions that presume a sentimentalized, nostalgic, and fraternal history of Afro-Asian solidarity, Burton demonstrates the continued need for anti-heroic, vexed, and fractious postcolonial critique.  

About this title

About the Author:

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has written and edited many books, including Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, and A Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Principles, all also published by Duke University Press.

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and the author of Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading.

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 2017-06-01)

"[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 signi?cance 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 2017-12-01)

"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 2018-04-09)

"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 2018-01-01)

“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 2018-06-01)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0822361485
• ISBN 13: 9780822361480
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200