Uneasy Embrace

Finalist for P. Sterling Stuckey Prize 2022A pioneering cultural and intellectual history of how race and racialisation have brought Africans and Indians together, yet also driven them apart.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.|Shortlisted for the International Studies Association's Global Development Section Book Award|'A timely, wide-ranging and compelling text that deserves wide attention and is sure to provoke debate.'|[A] must-read for all scholars interested in histories of Africa-India connections and those who seek evidence that ideas from the past continue to exist with the potential to forge pathways toward solidarity and progress in the Global South.'|'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.'|'"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.'|'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.'|'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.'