From pre-colonial Indian Ocean trade relations to postcolonial formations like the Non-Aligned Movement, and from colonial displacements of enslavement and indenture to mercantile migration, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean have been closely interconnected. Through their entwined histories, multiple global narratives and legacies unfold. Yet, these critical transoceanic Afro-Asian relations are understudied and underrepresented in scholarship on race and ethnicity.

This Global Dialogue engages with transoceanic connections between the people, ecologies, and histories that the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes brought into contact. Three scholars will discuss how these encounters draw our attention to structuring hierarchies of racial, ethnic, linguistic, gender, and caste affiliations. Through an exploration of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, this panel invites us to engage with nuanced histories of cross-ethnic and cross-racial relations, which are filled with the messy collision of connections, antagonisms, frictions, and solidarities.

Register for the Zoom webinar

Speakers

Jazmin Graves Eyssallenne
Assistant Professor, African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of North Carolina Greensboro

Jazmin Graves Eyssallenne is assistant professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Jazmin earned her Ph.D. from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2021. Jazmin’s first book project, Waves of Ecstasy, develops her doctoral research on the Sufi devotional tradition of Sidis, Indian Muslims of East African ancestry, of Gujarat and Mumbai. In 2024, Jazmin was awarded a Career Enhancement Fellowship by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars to support the completion of her book. Jazmin’s work has been published, and is forthcoming, in several edited volumes and journals, including most recently Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In 2020, Jazmin co-edited the three-volume publication, Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora and in 2018 was named one of the MIPAD Global Top 100 Most Influential People of African Descent Under 40 for her service-oriented research with the Sidi community of Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

Najnin Islam
Assistant Professor, English, University of Connecticut

Najnin Islam is an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the historical archive and contemporary literary-cultural productions on indentured servitude in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. She is currently working on a book project that traces the entangled histories of race and caste within the context of Indian indentureship in the post-emancipation British Caribbean. Her work appears in Small Axe, Interventions, Global South Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Ariel: A Review of International English Literature.

Kaneesha Parsard
Assistant Professor, English Language and Literature, University of Chicago

Kaneesha Parsard is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her research concerns gender and sexuality amid the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and broader Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Her first book project, tentatively titled “An Illicit Wage,” traces how nineteenth and twentieth century British West Indian literature and visual culture imagine freedom as freedom from work and domesticity. Kaneesha’s scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, Representations, boundary 2, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and PMLA.

Moderator

Usha Iyer
Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies, Stanford University

Usha Iyer is associate professor of film and media studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Their research and teaching examine film and media cultures in relation to gender, sexuality, race, and caste. Their book, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a study of women’s labor and collaboration. Their current book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean, studies the affective engagements of Caribbean spectators with Indian cinema and the impact of Caribbean performance cultures on Indian film industries. They are co-editing the volume, Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves, with Manishita Dass.