Global South Asian and Black Relationships

#BlackLivesMatter: A hashtag that catalyzed a long-due reckoning on racism. Yet, race relations in the United States, configured across a black-white binary, often erase South/Asian complicity in and resistance to perpetuating anti-Blackness. The racism against South/Asians, manifested most visibly as xenophobia, is also often unregistered. As scholars of South Asia, we are responsible for interrogating anti-Blackness and anti-Asian bigotry in our field of study. This Provocations sequence was curated to participate in the widespread confrontation with systemic racism and white supremacy initiated by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, and the increasing influence of the Black Lives Matter movement. In particular, this series of short essays interrogates the relationships between South Asian and Black communities across the Anglophone postcolonial world to highlight the friction and often-forgotten solidarities that emerged under a shared history of colonialism, migration, and segregation. The sequence challenges racial dichotomies to understand the different ways in which South Asian groups have interacted with Black communities in and outside of the United States.

Our contributors are leading historians, filmmakers, editors, and literary critics of South Asia and its diasporas. Over their long careers, Susheila Nasta, Antoinette Burton, Annie Paul, and Vivek Bald have explored the complex histories of South Asian and Black interaction in their work. Their essays here provide an interconnected glimpse at racial relationships across postcolonial South Asian diasporas: the UK, South Africa, Jamaica, and the US. The geographic range of their contributions reflects and affirms the truly global framework in which South Asian-Black relationships unfold. Equally importantly, the sequence frames the US not as a state of exception or as a paradigm – as is still so often the case – but as part of an international dynamic of white supremacy and racial capitalism against which nonwhite collaboration and resistance are made, unmade, and remade. This global outlook–emphasizing the looking out aspect of the word–shows how British and American imperialism sutures the relationships between South Asian and Black communities. The creation of plantation economies, migration from one part of the empire to another, systems of racial segregation, shared experiences of racism, and pressures of assimilation–these form cascading waves shaping the relationship of South Asians with other racial and ethnic groups across the globe. Moreover, many of the essays here demonstrate the urgency of including gender in this international framework, and underscore that the Black Lives Matter movement, highly grounded in intersectional Black feminism and the lived experience of anti-Black racism in the US, is itself deeply informed by the legacies of colonialism and imperialism.¹

All the essays in this series explore the links – sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure – between the history of domestic racism and imperialism and their contemporary manifestations. Implicitly or explicitly set against global systems and events, each piece lives and breathes in the specific local context about which it is written: Britain in the wake of immigration from South Asia and the Caribbean, Indian resistance to the apartheid regime in South Africa, indentureship and the Indian cultural presence in Jamaica, and the reconsideration of South Asian assimilative nationalism in the US. Our contributors excel at illuminating the contours of individual lives and specific moments within this broad geographical and conceptual terrain. From there, they diverge in method or content: by using linear or fragmentary structures; by focusing on a particular figure or a series of aesthetic and political movements; by juxtaposing conflicts with collaborations; by broaching difficult questions, or by issuing imperatives. Most of the essays here are autobiographical, demonstrating the deeply personal stakes of this inquiry into South Asian-Black dynamics; all suggest that turning to the cautionary tales and forgotten narratives of the past might clarify the complexity and urgency of the present.

Recognizing the importance of British imperialism in shaping South Asian/Black relationships, our sequence begins in the United Kingdom. Writer, editor, and publisher Susheila Nasta’s piece moves across the constantly shifting discourses of race in Britain from the 1960s to the present. Working autobiographically through her long experience in political and literary activism, Nasta uses what she calls a “snapshot” format to illuminate distinctive moments in anti-racist organizing. She reflects primarily on the formation of political blackness and her founding of the journal Wasafiri. While riven with tensions and negotiations, these two projects organized people and imagined futures across racialized group identities – including Black and Asian – and challenged racist structures and dominant narratives of Britishness and modernity. Nasta sounds a warning in her comparison between the present and the 1980s of Wasafiri’s founding and encourages the rich historicization of racialized terms to reshape fixed notions of community.

Historian Antoinette Burton’s contribution focuses on political blackness as well but extrapolates through a singular individual and a singular text: Waiting to Die in Pretoria (1990) by Phyllis Naidoo, an Indian South African activist, lawyer, and writer who advocated transcending the lines of racial difference. In Burton’s analysis, Naidoo’s use of text and image in Waiting to Die is a powerful reminder of the historical continuities of racist systems of incarceration and execution, as well as techniques of protest and remembrance. Naidoo leads her readers through a compressed burst of time in the life of an incarcerated Black activist as he awaits his execution and creates, as Burton shows, “an ethnography of the march toward the silence of Black death in a South African prison.” The image of the noose is printed on the top corner of every page in Naidoo’s book, its visual repetition searing into our minds a chilling symbol of state-sanctioned death. As Burton reminds us, Indian activists such as Naidoo were steadfastly opposed to the “necropolitics” of the apartheid government. Waiting to Die is a clarion call to unsparingly examine “the ultimate political destination” of those who resisted the apartheid regime. Moreover, Naidoo’s memoir underscores the vital need for solidarity between Black and Indian South Africans in moments of political crisis and beyond.

Cultural critic and editor Annie Paul also focuses on South Asians outside of the imperial metropoles in her reflection on the longstanding economic conflict and cultural tensions between South Asian and Black communities in the Caribbean in general, and in Jamaica in particular. Like Burton, Paul uses one text to reflect on broader concerns. Like Nasta, she draws from autobiography, reflecting on the surprise of her son’s adolescent poem on Afro-Jamaica’s cultural superiority over India. Her encounter with this poem launches a series of observations on racialized divides, ranging across current events, history, literature, and popular culture. Paul considers the origins of these conflicts in the fracturing function of the plantation economy – rendering indentured Indians as “strikebreakers or ‘scabs’” – and its echoes across the years. However, Paul also excavates the less-recognized intertwinement of cultural traditions, seen especially in the Indo-Jamaican national dish of curry goat and the popularity of Indian TV serials in Jamaica.

The last essay in the sequence, by media scholar and filmmaker Vivek Bald, takes up Paul’s challenge to resist dominant race-based nationalist discourse, specifically American myths of inclusion and assimilation. Here, Bald revisits his landmark book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), which uncovers the history of South Asian migrants living with and alongside African Americans and Puerto Ricans in various American cities. Bald then turns to 1936, when W.E.B. Du Bois powerfully investigated the failed efforts of Reconstruction to transform racist US institutions and warned Indian Americans against the false promises of assimilative inclusion if they allied with whiteness and white supremacy. Tracing these twin observations to our urgent present, Bald points to Indigenous critique and the contemporary abolitionist movement as inheritors of Du Bois’s trenchant analysis and as conduits to those lost histories of South Asian communities that went beyond dreams of only national inclusion.

In the spirit of Provocations, and indeed as a synecdoche of South Asian Black relationships globally, this sequence is inevitably partial and incomplete, restricted in its coverage, and arriving at no definitive conclusions. The sense of contingency that emerges in each piece is generative and challenging, especially within the present moment of reconsideration and reform. There is no deterministic notion of alignment between South Asians and Black people in any of the essays; instead, each piece reveals opportunity and possibility–as well as missed opportunity and possibility–and an appreciation of the intricate, necessary, and, in Nasta’s word, “messy” work of solidarity and affiliation against complacency and complicity.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liam O’Loughlin

Liam O’Loughlin is an Assistant Professor of English at Capital University in central Ohio. His writing on postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, and anticolonial film has been published in numerous places, including Ariel, Comparative American Studies, Interventions, and Postcolonial Studies. He is currently co-editing, with Pallavi Rastogi, a special issue of South Asian Review on South Asian disasters. He can be reached at [email protected].

Pallavi Rastogi

Pallavi Rastogi is a Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her most recent book, Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. She has published many articles on South African, South Asian, and South Asian diasporic literature and multiethnic British and American literature in various journals and anthologies. She can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1 This is most often revealed as opposition towards the Israeli occupation of Palestine (Ransby 2018, 36–37).