The Afro-Asian Century

This title begins the task of excavating a multitude of Afro-Asian connections and collaborations in the 20th century. With few exceptions, area studies and cultural studies have largely underestimated the significance of transethnic and transnational exchanges between African and Asian peoples. By bringing instances of Afro-Asian traffic in the realms of politics, economics, and culture to the foreground, this collection sets out to map an alternative global circuit. The issue examines the non-Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism that emerged from creative encounters of racialized people in jazz-age Paris, the Harlem Renaissance, and colonial Shanghai. It re-conceptualizes the Indian Ocean as a crucial site for Afro-Asian cross-pollination, and investigates the cinematic culture of kung-fu as a global discourse of Afro-Asian anti-imperialism.