Two faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington will serve as co-editors for a newly launched scholarly book series that will examine how African and Asian peoples have encountered each other across diverse geographical and cultural contexts, in the past and present, with a focus on the frictions and solidarities of these encounters as catalyzed by contemporary trends in global migration, movement, and interrelation.
The book series, Afrasia: Contours, Crossings, Connections, is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and aims to establish a framework through which to understand the various interactions and enmeshments that took and take place between and across African and Asian actors. These interactions are neither stable nor unchanging, but rather defined by their complexity, richness, mutability, and depth.
The book series editors are Marvin D. Sterling, an associate professor of Anthropology, and Pedro Machado, an associate professor in the History department. An international editorial board of distinguished academics will advise the editors and the Press on series matters.
Welcoming interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the myriad dimensions of these exchanges, the series traces the contours of Afrasia to encompass West, Central, South, Southeast, and East Asia; Sub-Saharan and North Africa; and diasporic zones worldwide, including the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Americas.
Afrasia: Contours, Crossings, Connections takes Afrasia as the conceptual and contingent space—historical and contemporary; sociocultural, political economic, and ideological; interpersonal, collective, and mass-mediated, among others—through which African and Asian peoples, as well as peoples of African and Asian descent, have engaged each other on and between their respective continents, across and through oceanic regions, and around the world.
“The complex, myriad, and increasingly deep entanglements of Africans and Asians—and people of African and Asian descent—have chartered broad and wide-ranging trajectories whose contours and dynamics have shaped the currents of the global past and are defining the contemporary world,” said Machado. “Interest in exploring these enmeshments has been growing in recent years and this series will provide an urgently needed venue to showcase scholarship in this field.”
“In addition to the international political, economic, and similar terms in which the interactions between African and Asian peoples have been understood, we are invested in what have been under-explored perspectives that are socio-culturally attentive, ethnographically attuned, and humanistic in their framings of the global histories, as well as the present and emergent futures, of these interactions,” noted Sterling. “In this way, the series is both forward looking, and decades overdue.”
The series invites proposals for monographs and edited volumes from new and experienced scholars. Inquiries should be directed to William Masami Hammell, Senior Acquisitions Editor: whammell@upress.pitt.edu. Submission information is available on the University of Pittsburgh Press website.
Professor Sterling’s research interests revolve around cultural transnationalism, performance theory, ethnographic writing, race and global Blackness, Afro-Asia, and human rights. He is author of Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan and coeditor of Who is the Asianist? The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies.
Professor Machado is a global and Indian Ocean historian with interests in commodity histories; enslavement and unfree labor and migratory movements; and the social, cultural, environmental, and commercial trajectories of objects. He is author of Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants and Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1850 and coeditor of Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth and Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds.
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