At AFRO-ASIA GROUP, our mission is to foster radical future coalition-building by exploring the converging history of African and Asian diasporas. To us, Afro-Asia is a political project that we understand through the lens of feminism, technologies, and braided intellectual traditions. We collaborate with designers, museums, collectives, and publishers to create programming, research, and digital and print media on the ongoing vibrancy of Third World solidarity and anticolonial movements that continue everyday.
We address the deep history of intimacies and tensions between people of African and Asian descent across the world, helping to understand these dynamics beyond the context of European colonialism.
This year our offices are based in New York City at NEW INC, the art and technology incubator by the New Museum, in TriBeCa.
Bandung Conference (Asian-African Conference), Indonesia, 1955
British Pathé newsreel footage of the Bandung Conference. In April, 1955, representatives from twenty-nine governments of Asian and African nations gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to discuss peace and the role of the Third World in the Cold War, economic development, and decolonization.
Taking Afro-Asia as distinct but overlapping with the term Afro-Asian, at AFRO-ASIA GROUP we anchor the political stakes of our work in the anticolonial dream of the 1950s. Looking at this archival footage that mainly features men, we speculate on the dinner parties and afterparties of Bandung and who was there whose presence and labor was not recorded.
Established in 2019 as a working group at Cornell University to support research, AFRO-ASIA GROUP has developed to focus on three areas.
Led by the tradition of the Birmingham Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies (founded in 1964) and Black British thinkers such as Stuart Hall we work collectively around common keywords.
technofutures \ gastropoetics \ infrastructure \
AFRO-ASIA TECHNOFUTURES
Creative technology is at the core of our method for global and inclusive engagement. AFRO-ASIA GROUP was selected as part of the Year 9 (2022-2023) cohort of NEW INC, the New Museum’s art and technology incubator. Through a digital humanities grant awarded by the National Endowment (US) for the Humanities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) from 2022-2024, we are researching the colonial archives of the indenture system in the British Empire.
AFRO-ASIA INFRASTRUCTURE
From hard infrastructure (the tangible, physical assembly of structures such as roads, bridges, tunnels, and railways) to soft infrastructure (the services required to maintain the economic, health, and social needs of a population), AFRO-ASIA GROUP offers consulting services on the geopolitical stakes of dynamics regarding China in Africa and China in the Caribbean and Latin America. From legal history to climate impact to community-level engagement, we are prepared to provide bespoke research dossiers and critical insight outlining the ongoing debates in these fields. We have provided expert witness testimony for court cases on discrimination between African and Asian communities.
AFRO-ASIA GROUP is made possible by the support of donors, partnerships, sponsorships, and collaborations. We are grateful to have participated in collaboration with the following organizations.
AFRO-ASIA GASTROPOETICS
We host virtual and in-person events and cooking demos. Our clients have included museums, law firms, financial services corporations, and universities. Our work and recipes have been featured in cookbooks and other food media publications.
Read the essay “The Poetics of Afro-Asian Cuisine” by founder Tao Leigh Goffe, PhD in the 2021 book Black Food (Penguin Random House). For more on gastropoetics and foodways, visit the website for Kitchen Marronage an initiative funded by invitation of the Mellon Foundation in 2022 on plantation food systems, global supply chains, regenerative agriculture, and fermentation science.
@AfroAsiaGroup on Twitter
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RT @DukePress: Even if you're not on-site with us at #AAAS2023, you can still browse the latest titles in #AsianAmericanStudies on… https://t.co/5B50t5VwIc -
RT @chowleen: Qing Ming Festival falls on April 5 this year. Once again I find myself far from home and unable to sweep my loved… https://t.co/67X9TIfIyd
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RT @YonghiBonghi: Please consider applying for this lectureship in Black British/Diasporic Literatures in the School of English at Ne… https://t.co/IwXCV1ar7O
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RT @suyinsays: I’m so deeply saddened to share that after eight years, @galdemzine is closing. I will always be incredibly proud o… https://t.co/ohQthhCWro
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RT @maliniranga: Confronting Global Political Ecologies of Caste, Climate, and Racial Capitalism. Will be at the University of Pen… https://t.co/NMR7vg7jfI
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Larry Ossei-Mensah curates African Diasporic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila | Tatler Asia 🇵🇭🇬🇭 https://t.co/uqI3at7fou
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RT @OxfordTGHS: We invite graduate students, early career historians and scholars in adjacent fields submit an abstract for our ann… https://t.co/8qFAVU5oiq
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RT @MohitLingual: Are there Asian American practitioners of yoga who would be willing to talk to an Asian American Studies students w… https://t.co/5VeFMEF9Vv
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RT @aaww: TONIGHT, join us and @greenlightbklyn for a live celebration of @MonikaYoun's FROM FROM (@GraywolfPress), and a con… https://t.co/KaXJrOZ5JQ
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RT @clintonyates: Fun reminder: black americans were integral in popularizing baseball in Japan. And by that, I mean, VITAL. Go learn… https://t.co/B3hcQsD0qV