Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourse of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. Black Transnationalism and Japan introduces the diverse activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and African American people. While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were often expressed in the form of decolonization movements, this volume introduces various transnational phenomena that transcended such dichotomies. Black American-Japanese transnational encounters often occurred on the non-state level from within the two new competing empires of America and Japan. Such transnational encounters reveal not only heretofore hidden historical actors, friendships, and solidarities, but also innovative cultural productions that challenged hierarchies of race, culture, and imperialism.

The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project. This book turns the lens on these other visions, and the transnational interactions which emerged from various other gatherings of the 1950s and 1960s that existing beyond the realm of high diplomacy, while blurring the lines between state and non-state projects. It examines how Afro-Asianism was lived by activists, intellectuals, cultural figures, as well as political leaders in building a post-imperial world - particularly women. As a whole, this collection of essays examines the diversity of Afro-Asian ideals that emerged through such movements, untangling the personal relationships, political competition, racial hierarchies, and solidarities that shaped them. By visualising political Afro-Asianism and its proponents as a living network, a fuller picture of decolonization and the Cold War is brought into view.

In the twenty-first century, terms such as globalization, global, and world function as key words at the cusp of new frontiers in both historical writing and literary criticism. Practitioners of these disciplines may appear to be long time intimate lovers when seen from pre and early modern time periods, only to divorce with the coming of Anglophone world history in the twenty-first century. In recent years, works such as Martin Puchner's The Written World, Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch, or the three novels that encompass Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy, have rekindled a variant of history and literature's embrace in a global register. This book probes recent scholarship concerning reflections on global history and world literature in the wake of these developments, with a primary focus on India as a site of extensive theoretical and empirical advances in both disciplinary locations. Inclusive of reflections on the meeting points of these disciplines as well as original research in areas such as Neo-Platonism in world history, histories of violence, and literary histories exploring indentured labor and capitalist transformation, the book offers reflections on conceptual advances in the study of globalization by placing global history and world literature in conversation.