1 Rethinking African-Asian Encounters in Terms of Transregionalisation: An Introduction
Ross Anthony and Uta Ruppert
Part I Situating African-Asian Encounters Globally
2 Afro-Asian Trade and the “Africa Rising” Story
Ian Taylor
3 Reason and Number: African Reflections on Japan
Seifudein Adem
4 The Globalisation of Foreign Investment in Africa: In Comes the Dragon
Adams Bodomo and Dewei Che
5 Indian Influence on Nigeria's Development: Challenges, Lessons and Possibilities
Joseph C. A. Agbakoba
Part II Challenging Asia-Africa Grand Narratives
6 Poaching Plots, Plastic Forms and Ambiguous Goods: Ways of Telling the China-in-Africa Story in the Anthropocene Age
Meg Samuelson
7 Entangled Solidarities: African-Asian Writers Organisations, Anti-colonial Rhetorics and Afrasian Imaginaries in East African Literature
Frank Schulze-Engler
8 Bringing Transnationalism Back In: On Gender Politics in South Africa’s China Interactions
Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel and Uta Ruppert
9 China's Global Environmental Engagement – Africa and Southeast Asia in Comparison
Meryl Burgess
Part III Embedding Transregionalisation
10 Seeing Like Scholars. Whose Exile? Making a Life, at Home and Abroad
Mamadou Diawara
11 Afro-Asian Solidarities to Afrasian Spaces and Identities: Exploring the Limits of Afrasia
Yoon Jung Park
12 Scale and Agency in China’s Belt and Road Initiative: The Case of Kenya
Ross Anthony
13 Afterword
Ross Anthony and Uta Ruppert
Ross Anthony is Research Fellow in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. From 2014 to 2018, he was the Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies, also at Stellenbosch University.
Uta Ruppert is Professor of Political Science and Political Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, where she was also one of the initiators and principal investigators of the AFRASO research program on “Africa’s Asian Options.”
This volume examines the Africa-Asia relationship from a transregional perspective, namely as a set of emergent social, political and economic practices spanning a number of analytical and spatial scales. Drawing on a host of countries from both regions, the contributions illustrate how encounters increasingly transcend fixed territorial categories at local, national and regional levels. While large-scale political and economic considerations tend to dominate in Asia-Africa related literature—for instance, in China-Africa, BRICS and South-South discourses—the current volume seeks to foster dialogue between these broader levels of analyses and more localized social practices and experiences, including the role of civil society, cultural production and migration. With an emphasis on the “trans” aspects of inter-regional exchange, the volume contributes to a better understanding of new forms of space-making between these two increasingly important regions.
Ross Anthony is Research Fellow in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. From 2014 to 2018, he was the Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies, also at Stellenbosch University.
Uta Ruppert is Professor of Political Science and Political Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, where she was also one of the initiators and principal investigators of the AFRASO research program on “Africa’s Asian Options.”