This seminar approaches these developments through histories of empire, colonialism, and race-making situated in the expansive geographies of 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 also centers studies of intimacies, solidarities, nonalignments, and alternate world-making. How can histories of empire-making in Asia illuminate current imperial revivals?

Conceptualizing the inter-imperial present through palimpsest, debris, and colonial legacies, this seminar interrogates how we engage questions of sovereignty, race-making, diaspora, indigeneity, and racial capitalism. Attentive to contingency, we trace how imperial pasts shape emergent geopolitical and capitalist agendas. Building on recent scholarship, we examine imperial formations, shared settler idioms of countersovereignty and counterinsurgency, racial ideologies, imbricated infrastructures, and militarized/intimate/affective labor.

The seminar seeks to unsettle disciplinary boundaries by adopting an Inter-Asian, global framework. This includes histories of Asian imperial ambitions and Euro-American imperialism across East and South Asia, Asian America, and connected oceanic worlds of the Chinese Atlantic, Trans/Black Pacific, and Indian Ocean. Centering the entanglements of imperialism, settler colonialism, and global race-making, we seek to decenter Western paradigms of race and colonialism. We ask how radical traditions of decolonization and Afro-Asianism help us reimagine anticolonial, antiracist freedom struggles, activist networks, and indigenous epistemologies that have facilitated the unmaking of imperial subjects.

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?