Revolutions of the Mind: Afro-Asian Politics of Change in Babylon

Abstract

On October 28, 2004, speaking at the Third Claudia Jones¹ Memorial Lecture, A. Sivanandan (the long-time director of the Institute of Race Relations)² invoked Britain’s racially hostile, racialized (indeed, racist) environment during decades following WWII. As he talked about the legacy of African-Asian-Caribbean political struggle on the one hand and racism in the age of global capitalism in the other, he reminded his audience that Afro-Asian unity in post-WWII Britain was not only the result of a racially hostile country that debased and dehumanized Africans, Asians, Caribbeans but, was also inspired by revolutionary struggles in Africa, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the war in Vietnam. Importantly, Sivanandan argues that Afro-Asian unity was borne from a politics that was influenced, indeed constituted by the common experience of class, too. Sivanandan’s words provide an insightful perspective from which to understand the socio-political environment that compelled African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporic communities to denaturalize racial boundaries and in doing so, create new political constellations.

Here what I am anxious to show is not the chronology or the particularities of the history of Black peoples in Britain, but its recurring themes such as the connection between state racism, institutional racism and popular racism, and the different resistances they elicited at different times to meet different circumstances.

—A. Sivanandan (2004, 4)

To frequently we think of identities as cultural matters, when in fact some of the most dynamic (transnational) identities are created in the realm of politics, in the way people of African descent sought alliances and political identifications across oceans and national borders.

—Robin D.G. Kelley (2000, 32)