This seminar approaches these developments through histories of empire, colonialism, and race-making in Global Asia. Asia has long been central to studies of imperialist competition, military occupations, multiple colonialisms, client regimes, extraterritoriality, wars on drugs, and extractive economies. Asia has also been the site for theorizing intimacies, solidarities, nonalignments, and alternate world-making. How can the interconnected histories and expansive geographies of Global Asia illuminate current imperial revivals and reconfigurations?

This seminar conceptualizes the inter-imperial present through palimpsest, debris, and colonial legacies, considering how we write with archives of empire and the stakes of historical narratives. This seminar engages entangled questions of sovereignty, race-making, diaspora, indigeneity, and racial capitalism. While attentive to contingencies, we trace how imperial pasts shape emergent geopolitical and capitalist agendas through shared settler idioms, racial ideologies, imbricated infrastructures, and forms of militarized, intimate, and affective labor.

The seminar seeks to unsettle disciplinary boundaries by bringing together different geographies and positionalities, examining histories of Asian imperial ambitions, then and now, and Euro-American imperialism across Asia, Asian America, and oceanic worlds. We seek to decenter Western paradigms of race and colonialism, and complicate how we name and study colonial, imperial, and racial formations within Asia. We turn to radical intellectual and political traditions of Global Decolonization and Afro-Asianism to reimagine forms of anti-colonial, anti-racist affinities and divergence within a shifting world order.

Historians and scholars at all stages, particularly PhD students and early career researchers, are encouraged to apply to participate in the seminar and share their work. Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome.

Recent histories of decolonization have traced ideas of anti-colonial and nationalist intellectuals across South Asia, Middle East, the Black Atlantic, and the Caribbean worlds to unearth alternative visions of world-making "after empire," in spite of decolonization's failures (Lee 2010; Getachew 2019; Elhalaby 2025). In this session we revisit Afro-Asian intellectual and political histories of decolonization to consider what these radical traditions offer in a renewed moment of empire-making across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. In the spirit of Bandung humanism and Third World solidarity, Afro-Asian scholarship renews the unfinished project of decolonizing knowledge production, excavates subjugated knowledge as an intercontinental archive of "freedom dreams," and mounts a critique of racism, empire, capitalism, and Euro-American modernity.

We welcome papers that expand on Afro-Asia as a critical transregional unit and method for writing new histories of decolonization and its legacies, intercontinental exchange, and global reordering "after empire." We imagine revisiting an earlier generation of Afro-Asian scholarship that emerged from developments at the turn of the millennium, exemplified in "The Afro-Asian Century" (2003) special issue of positions. How might Afro-Asian work on anti-racist anti-imperial solidarities offer a basis for imagining political identities and commitments in a world remade by Asian ascendance?