Before Bandung: Afro-Asian Cross-referencing and Comparative Racialization

Abstract

Abstract This essay analyzes the rhetorical and political connections between African American and South Asian critiques of race and empire in the century leading up to the Bandung conference in 1955. Specifically, we trace the way “caste” emerges as a key rhetorical term in the mid-to-late nineteenth century for linking the oppressions of race, slavery, and its aftermath in the United States to those of caste and empire in India. Building on work by Nico Slate and Antoinette Burton, we identify a strategic citational practice we call Afro-Asian cross-referencing, which the writers under consideration use to advance anti-racism in sometimes very local contexts. Focusing on the dynamic periodical culture of the period, our study analyzes anti-caste sentiment as an expression of cross-racial solidarity uniting anti-colonial movements in India with racial uplift movements in the United States. Because the concept of “Afro-Asian solidarity” first took hold at the Bandung conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement that it helped to originate, the phenomenon itself remains most visible in relation to this later period and the Cold War context. By shifting focus to an earlier moment in the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, we illuminate the work that the idea of caste did in defining strategic transnational connections—as well as missed opportunities for connection—later in the century.