Faculty Lecture by Shobona Shankar/HIS -- An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India, and the Spectre of Race, on Wednesday, October 2, 2024 from 5:00-6:30 PM in 1008 Humanities. Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan New York University, respondent.

An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India, and the Spectre of Race is the first intellectual and cultural history to explore how Africans and Indians—two of the world’s largest diasporas—make and unmake their differences. Although Indians were deemed subimperialists in parts of Africa, in Atlantic Africa, Black diasporic and internationalist politics, especially Pan-Africanism, Afrocentrism, and négritude, brought the so-called Indian question into a new light.

Shobana Shankar is Professor of History/Africana Studies Affiliate at Stony Brook. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial West Africa and Africa-South Asia networks and covers themes related to religious and racial politics, humanitarianism, history of health and disease, intellectual history, and critical development studies. In 2022-2023, she was an Africa Program Fellow in the Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she worked on her next book on centuries-old informal economies and the making of multidirectional migration of people, goods, and ideas between Nigeria and India. This book builds in new directions from her book An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race, published by Hurst/Oxford in 2021, which was shortlisted as a finalist for the P. Sterling Stuckey Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and the International Studies Association’s Global Development Section Book Award.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University and co-editor of the Multimodal Section of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. His first book, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity and Urban Space in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020). His second book, co-written with Sahana Udupa and titled Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media is forthcoming from NYU Press.