This book contributes to the building of a more comprehensive narrative of global African migration. This book contains four black and white photographs.

"In One eloquent essay after another, some of the wisest historians of our time write American history in a grand cosmopolitan context. From the era of discovery to the present, histories that we thought we knew—of labor, of race relations, of politics, of gender relations, of diplomacy, of ethnicity—are more richly understood when causes and consequences are traced throughout the globe. One emerges invigorated, ready to welcome a new American history for a new international century."—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship "Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an extremely stimulating and thought-provoking collection of essays written by leading historians who offer wider contexts for illuminating the traditional themes and issues of American national history. Particularly impressive is the book's combination of caution and original, sometimes daring insights."—David Brion Davis, author of In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery "For decades American historians have been urging one another to place our culture in comparative or transnational perspective. Thomas Bender's unique volume includes not only essays theorizing such efforts and essays exemplifying such work at its most successful and its most provocative, it also provides more skeptical assessments questioning whether American historians can meet the challenge of overcoming our longstanding national preoccupations. Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an indispensable book that will shape the work of a rising generation of historians whose horizons will extend beyond our own shores."—James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism

The coastal belts and hinterlands of East Africa and South Asia have historically shared a number of cultural traits, commodities and cosmologies circulated on the wings of the monsoon winds. The forced and voluntary migrations of Asians and Africans across the Indian Ocean littoral over several centuries have reverberated in the memories, literatures, travelogues and religious, architectural, and socio-political imaginations of both the regions. And, they continue to do so in various forms and platforms. This book explores nuances of various narratives on these long-term transcultural exchanges with a special focus on India. It explores the ways in which Africa and Africans have been narrated in South Asian history and culture in order to unravel the nuanced layers of reflexive, rhetorical, stereotypical, populist, racialist, racist and casteist frameworks that informed diverse narratives in vernacular texts, songs, films and newspaper reports. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary approaches of narratology, Afro-Asian studies, and Indian Ocean studies, the contributors enunciate how the African lives in South Asia have been selectively remembered or systematically forgotten. Through multi-sited ethnographies, multilingual archival researches and interdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter provides theoretical engagements on the basis of empirical research in such regions as Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai as well as in Sri Lanka. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

“Regions of memory” are a scale of social and cultural memory that reaches above the national, yet remains narrower than the global or universal. The chapters of this volume analyze transnational constellations of memory across and between several geographical areas, exploring historical, political and cultural interactions between societies. Such a perspective enables a more diverse field of possible comparisons in memory studies, studying a variety of global memory regions in parallel. Moreover, it reveals lesser-known vectors and mechanisms of memory travel, such as across Cold War battle lines, across the Indian Ocean, or between Southeast Asia and western Europe. Chapters 1 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) has recently grown as an analytical construct for documenting and interpreting culture, and as a canonical term to support official concepts of heritage. ICH, while compelling scholars to explore its multiple forms of expressive culture, has become codified through UNESCO, specifically within the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH. This volume explores case studies from Gabon, India, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, and the USA to represent diverse positionalities and voices articulating the complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties within heritage discourses. The chapters illustrate how ICH, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, has become an analytical resource and a proscriptive device for safeguarding, presenting, and interpreting culture to a range of constituents, and will serve as a useful resource in the classroom for a range of fields, as well as for scholars and practitioners.