Extracting Value from Africa-Asia: Nature, Land, People, and Politics

Panel Convenor(s)

• SS

  Shobana Shankar

  Stony Brook University, United States

Panel Chair(s)

• TF

  Tamara Fernando

  Stony Brook University, United States

Presenter(s)

• SS

  Shobana Shankar

  Stony Brook University, United States
• RR

  Robert Rouphail

  University of Iowa, United States
• TF

  Tamara Fernando

  Stony Brook University, United States

Africa-Asia is a value-laden space, both materially and ideologically. The emergence of this spatial configuration in the mid 20^th century in movements such as Afro-Asian Solidarity and the Global South operationalized beliefs, desires, and oppositional forces related to political independence, but material interests of the members of these movements have received less attention. These material interests were often ambiguous, misaligned with political ideology, and even contrary to stated aims of unity in resistance to dominant actors. For instance, conflict between China and India in 1963 created new axes of alliances within parts of the decolonizing world, where military or technical cooperation with one of these Asian nations would trump the stated anti-Western alliance with the other. Since the Cold War, growth of so-called “middle powers” and multipolarity, and technological transformations such as the intensification of energy extraction, the economic realities and deal-making of Africa-Asia demand new attention.

This panel explores material interests and extraction across African-Asian spaces and encounters, focusing on the lens of “nature”—constructed through various tropes of human demography, land and environment, and other so-called raw material resources—as it is used in negotiating African-Asian relations, relatedness, and differences. Extracting value from nature as well protecting or preserving it (in the forms of colonial environmentalism) were forms of power that European empires wielded in Africa and Asia, and postcolonial nations had to contend with the politics of natural resources as part of development. As the assembled papers discuss, the politics of nature have also been a vital but rather understudied aspect of African-Asian contestation and collaboration that are ongoing especially as environmentalist politics and human-caused climate changes become ever more urgent.

Presentations:

• 09:00 - 10:45 GMT

  The Indian Ocean's Land Politics—An African-Indian Perspective
  

  Presenter: Shobana Shankar – Stony Brook University
• 09:00 - 10:45 GMT

  Building Afro-Asia: Urbanism, Decolonization, and the 1967 Singapore Afro-Asian Housing Meeting
  

  Presenter: Robert Rouphail – University of Iowa
• 09:00 - 10:45 GMT

  Oceanic Connections in the Mine: Gem Merchants and Labor between Madagascar and Sri Lanka in the Twenty-First Century
  

  Presenter: Tamara Fernando – Stony Brook University