This research network will examine Black and Brown relations across Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. We will engage with histories of colonialism, enslavement, indenture, and mercantile migration, shared movements and imaginations of decolonization, and enduring contemporary legacies of these encounters. Inviting scholars and artists who study Afro-Asian relations through political, religious, performance, linguistic, culinary and other forms will help us collectively discuss how these encounters draw our attention to the specificities of region, to structuring hierarchies of ethnic, linguistic, and caste affiliations, and overall, to engage with more granular histories of cross-ethnic and cross-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of the connections and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities.

Transoceanic Black and Brown intimacy is under-researched and under-represented in scholarship on race and ethnicity. Our network is informed by a firm grounding and investment in the people, ecologies, and histories that oceanic routes brought into contact, and the political, artistic, and other collaborations that attest to coalition solidarity and sensuous intimacies. We will invite scholars and practitioners mainly from Africa and the Caribbean, who bring new perspective to key conceptual frameworks, including creolization, relation, métissage, amarrage, hybridity, negritude, and coolitude, among others.