This issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, “Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations,” edited by Vanita Reddy and Anantha Sudhakar, marks a key intervention into Afro-Asian studies, one that insists upon centering a feminist and queer framework. In addition to critiquing the centrality of male figures in much Afro-Asian scholarship (including cross-racial solidarities, such as friendships between W.E.B. Du Bois and Lala Lajpat Rai), the contributors to this volume interrogate the space of the archive, engage with material in unknown registers, and center social relations and spaces that are often figured as outside the historical record. In her contribution to this issue, for instance, Apryl Berney engages with the home, church, and school as sites of resistance and transformation.
In addition to attending to multiple registers of knowledge, the contributors to this issue also push against the notion of cross-racial solidarity as the necessary and desired outcome in Afro-Asian scholarship, and instead insist on the necessity of multiple forms of and approaches to solidarity. In their introduction, Reddy and Sudhakar note that this issue’s three key interventions are “to illuminate the cross-racial political and creative labor of women and queer subjects, to critique the heteropatriarchy of Afro-Asian solidarity history, and to critically reimagine new shapes and possibilities for interracial affiliations.” This issue reflects a deep and nuanced engagement with Afro-Asian studies, features essays and artistic productions that challenge its existing body of scholarship, and insists that we queer its ways of knowing.
