While an earlier historical literature on the era of Afro-Asian solidarity has tended to primarily focus on interstate diplomacy and international cooperation, in the last decade scholars have been working in re-thinking and opening up the field in creative and productive directions. As the cultural and literary turns prompted a pluralisation of research agendas and methodologies in historical scholarship more broadly, scholars of Afro-Asian encounters have been moving away from perspectives that reify the nation-state as the locus of historical narration, to focus instead on cultural and discursive production and circulation as deeply constitutive of the politics of decolonisation and Afro-Asian solidarity. 

In order to grasp the heterogeneous nature and non-linear dynamics shaping the Afro-Asian movement, especially in view of the relative dearth – but increasing number – of studies that examine the everyday performance of Afro-Asian solidarity, the workshop intends to excavate the material, textual, affective, and performative dimensions of Afro-Asia in the early decolonisation era. We are interested in mapping out the imaginative geographies and political formations produced and inhabited by Afro-Asian writers, activists, and intellectuals; in taking account of the pragmatics of transnational interactions and dialogue; and in exploring the multiple archives and registers of the Afro-Asian movement. By bringing together scholars from different backgrounds as well as Afro-Asian artists and intellectuals, our goal is to tease out the situated and experienced meanings of Afro-Asianism and to reflect critically and originally on our research practices, epistemologies and modalities of historical narration.