Afro-Asian Adjacencies in South Africa's Long Twentieth Century

Abstract:In South Africa and beyond, Chinese and Indian indenture and diasporas have been rarely examined comparatively, and their racialization even less. Drawing from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Johannesburg, this essay illuminates the coeval migratory paths and racialization processes of Chinese and Indian peoples over South Africa's long twentieth century (1860 to present). I theorize the enduring logics, forms, and adjacencies of Asian racialization. Adjacency names a proximate relation of Chinese and Indians appearing side by side in archives, overlapping migrations, and fraught intimacies. Adjacency characterizes their categorical proximity as "Asian," "Asiatic," and "Coolie" in relation to "Black" and "white," and the irreducible gap of difference. The essay offers a framework for locating Afro-Asian formations at the interstices of China-Africa, Afro-Asian, and Indian Ocean studies.