Narrating Africa in South Asia

Narrating Africa in South Asia
Author: Mahmood Kooria
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2023-05-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000907058

The coastal belts and hinterlands of East Africa and South Asia have historically shared a number of cultural traits, commodities and cosmologies circulated on the wings of the monsoon winds. The forced and voluntary migrations of Asians and Africans across the Indian Ocean littoral over several centuries have reverberated in the memories, literatures, travelogues and religious, architectural, and socio-political imaginations of both the regions. And, they continue to do so in various forms and platforms. This book explores nuances of various narratives on these long-term transcultural exchanges with a special focus on India. It explores the ways in which Africa and Africans have been narrated in South Asian history and culture in order to unravel the nuanced layers of reflexive, rhetorical, stereotypical, populist, racialist, racist and casteist frameworks that informed diverse narratives in vernacular texts, songs, films and newspaper reports. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary approaches of narratology, Afro-Asian studies, and Indian Ocean studies, the contributors enunciate how the African lives in South Asia have been selectively remembered or systematically forgotten. Through multi-sited ethnographies, multilingual archival researches and interdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter provides theoretical engagements on the basis of empirical research in such regions as Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai as well as in Sri Lanka. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Regions of Memory

Regions of Memory
Author: Simon Lewis
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2022-08-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030937054

“Regions of memory” are a scale of social and cultural memory that reaches above the national, yet remains narrower than the global or universal. The chapters of this volume analyze transnational constellations of memory across and between several geographical areas, exploring historical, political and cultural interactions between societies. Such a perspective enables a more diverse field of possible comparisons in memory studies, studying a variety of global memory regions in parallel. Moreover, it reveals lesser-known vectors and mechanisms of memory travel, such as across Cold War battle lines, across the Indian Ocean, or between Southeast Asia and western Europe. Chapters 1 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Sustaining Support for Intangible Cultural Heritage

Sustaining Support for Intangible Cultural Heritage
Author: Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2022-05-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527581357

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) has recently grown as an analytical construct for documenting and interpreting culture, and as a canonical term to support official concepts of heritage. ICH, while compelling scholars to explore its multiple forms of expressive culture, has become codified through UNESCO, specifically within the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH. This volume explores case studies from Gabon, India, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, and the USA to represent diverse positionalities and voices articulating the complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties within heritage discourses. The chapters illustrate how ICH, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, has become an analytical resource and a proscriptive device for safeguarding, presenting, and interpreting culture to a range of constituents, and will serve as a useful resource in the classroom for a range of fields, as well as for scholars and practitioners.

AfroMecca in History

AfroMecca in History
Author: Chanfi Ahmed
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2019-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527537986

Just as the racist imaginary of Europeans about Black Africans has centered since the 18th century on the term “monkey/ape”, that of Arabs has centered, since at least the middle ages, on the term “ʿabd” (“slave”). According to this imaginary, any black person is, by definition, a slave. As such, this book discusses anti-Black racism in Mecca and in other Arab regions, as well as the ancient presence of the Black diaspora in Mecca and Hijaz and the contribution it has made in different areas. The book also looks at the teaching system in the al-Haram Mosque of Mecca, its religious and political role, and the way it was dispensed during the Ottoman period, the reign of Sharīf Husayn and the political regime of the Āl Sa'ūd Wahhābī.

Legacies of Trade and Empire

Legacies of Trade and Empire
Author: Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2023-04-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1527594386

This book problematises established histories of slavery and indentured labour, as carried out through European empires, to interpret the impact of trade, particularly in the region surrounding the Indian Ocean. The discourse within these chapters explores the aesthetics of silence, poetics of relation, creolisation, agency and assertion of identities, musical practices, cuisine, knowledge transfers, decolonisation, and afterlives of empire. These critical analyses draw from Africa, India, Indonesia, Seychelles, Sri Lanka and Suriname as their case studies. This book breaks the silence on several legacies of empire, looking through the prisms of history, politics, economics, sociology, linguistics, literature, anthropology and ethnomusicology, all the while employing a range of concepts. The authors of these chapters search through the annals of history for ways of living harmoniously in an increasingly globalised world.

Rethinking American History in a Global Age

Rethinking American History in a Global Age
Author: Thomas Bender
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2002-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520230582

"In One eloquent essay after another, some of the wisest historians of our time write American history in a grand cosmopolitan context. From the era of discovery to the present, histories that we thought we knew—of labor, of race relations, of politics, of gender relations, of diplomacy, of ethnicity—are more richly understood when causes and consequences are traced throughout the globe. One emerges invigorated, ready to welcome a new American history for a new international century."—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship "Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an extremely stimulating and thought-provoking collection of essays written by leading historians who offer wider contexts for illuminating the traditional themes and issues of American national history. Particularly impressive is the book's combination of caution and original, sometimes daring insights."—David Brion Davis, author of In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery "For decades American historians have been urging one another to place our culture in comparative or transnational perspective. Thomas Bender's unique volume includes not only essays theorizing such efforts and essays exemplifying such work at its most successful and its most provocative, it also provides more skeptical assessments questioning whether American historians can meet the challenge of overcoming our longstanding national preoccupations. Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an indispensable book that will shape the work of a rising generation of historians whose horizons will extend beyond our own shores."—James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism

Diaspora, Memory and Identity

Diaspora, Memory and Identity
Author: Vijay Agnew
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0802093744

Memories establish a connection between a collective and individual past, between origins, heritage, and history. Those who have left their places of birth to make homes elsewhere are familiar with the question, "Where do you come from?" and respond in innumerable well-rehearsed ways. Diasporas construct racialized, sexualized, gendered, and oppositional subjectivities and shape the cosmopolitan intellectual commitment of scholars. The diasporic individual often has a double consciousness, a privileged knowledge and perspective that is consonant with postmodernity and globalization. The essays in this volume reflect on the movements of people and cultures in the present day, when physical, social, and mental borders and boundaries are being challenged and sometimes successfully dismantled. The contributors - from a variety of disciplinary perspectives - discuss the diasporic experiences of ethnic and racial groups living in Canada from their perspective, including the experiences of South Asians, Iranians, West Indians, Chinese, and Eritreans. Diaspora, Memory, and Identity is an exciting and innovative collection of essays that examines the nuanced development of theories of Diaspora, subjectivity, double-consciousness, gender and class experiences, and the nature of home.