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Relationality, Mutuality, Collaboration: Relational Approaches to Race and Empire

2023; American studies; Volume: 62; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ams.2023.a910895

2153-6856

Ashvin R. Kini,

Australian History and Society

Relationality, Mutuality, Collaboration:Relational Approaches to Race and Empire Ashvin R. Kini (bio) WARRING GENEALOGIES: Race, Kinship and the Korean War. By Joo Ok Kim. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2022. THE BLACK SHOALS: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. By Tiffany Lethabo King. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2019. UNSETTLED SOLIDARITIES: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas. By Quynh Nhu Le. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2019. SOUNDS FROM THE OTHER SIDE: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music. By Elliott H. Powell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2020. [End Page 111] In the introduction to their groundbreaking 2011 edited collection Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson argue that ethnic studies scholarship is in need of new ways of thinking and theorizing race comparatively. Noting the limits of identitarian models of comparative race studies—wherein the racialization of different groups is conceptualized as discrete, equivalent, and thus comparable—Hong and Ferguson turn to women of color feminisms and queer of color critique to make legible alternative forms of comparison. "Women of color feminism and queer of color critique," they write, "reveal the ways in which racialized communities are not homogeneous but instead have always policed and preserved the difference between those who are able to conform to categories of normativity, respectability and value, and those who are forcibly excluded from such categories."1 The comparative analytics offered by women of color feminisms and queer of color critique are grounded not in a politics of similarity, in which racialized groups find common cause within a shared history of common oppression. Rather, the intersectional and relational frameworks emergent in these fields speak to the foundational role of difference, both between and among racialized communities, not only in the construction of dominant racial power but also in the critical and resistant forms of antiracist, anti-imperial, and feminist coalitional politics. Rather than conceptualizing processes of racialization only and primarily in relation to whiteness, relational frameworks, as noted by Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina, "consider the racialization and formation of subordinated groups in relation to one another… mak[ing] visible the connections among such subordinated groups and the logic that underpins the forms of inclusion and dispossession they face."2 The four monographs discussed here each take up this work by foregrounding intersectional analyses of race, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy to reveal the ways that differently [End Page 112] racialized and colonized groups may find common cause in struggles against white supremacy and U.S. military colonialism. In Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music, Elliott Powell argues that African American musical engagements with South Asian and South Asian diasporic musical traditions constitute an important site of Black queer cultural politics. Moving from the 1960s to the present and engaging jazz, funk, and hip hop, Powell's monograph offers a fascinating "Afro-South Asian genealogy of sound" (4). As Powell rightly notes, the dominant approach to thinking about the influence of South Asian musical traditions on Western popular music often centers the work of white musicians (think Madonna or The Beatles) and tends to subsume Afro-South Asian collaborations into a framework of cultural appropriation. Refusing that subsumption of Black American aesthetics within a broader—and whiter—frame, Powell asks "What happens when we consider Black musicians' South Asian explorations as distinct from those of their white Western counterparts?" (3). Examining works by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Rick James, Outkast, Truth Hurts, Missy Elliot, Timbaland, and Beyoncé, Powell convincingly argues that Black American engagements with South Asian musics constitute something much more complicated (and more interesting) than the current discourse on cultural appropriation would suggest. Indeed, in these Afro-South Asian "entanglements of sound," Powell finds moments of Black queer and Black feminist political possibility as well as sonic theorizations of transnational and cross-racial solidarities. Powell's centering of Black queer and Black feminist politics marks an important intervention into Afro-Asian studies by focusing on cultural collaborations and exchange that are often marginalized by the implicit heteronormativity and masculinism of the field. As Vanita Reddy and Anantha Sudhakar have argued, much...