Forgotten convergences: Afro-Asian ecologies of entanglement, survival, and circulation

Abstract

This article excavates “Afro-Asian convergences” as ecological practices of survival forged in conditions of racial capitalism, caste hierarchy, climate precarity, and imperial violence. Rather than centering formal political alliances alone, it traces how African-descended and Asian communities have historically cultivated solidarities rooted in sustaining life—communal, interspecies, and planetary life—often outside official archives. Drawing on Black feminist geographies, decolonial thought, and the work of Sylvia Wynter and Paul Gilroy, the article conceptualizes solidarity as an ecological necessity rather than a purely ideological stance. Through three interlinked sites, the analysis moves across temporal and geographic scales. First, it examines the Siddi communities of India as an instance of embedded Afro-Asian convergence, where African-descended peoples forged marronage ecologies within forested margins of caste society. Second, it explores contemporary Afro-Asian labor encounters in the Gulf states, where African and South Asian migrant workers develop pragmatic solidarities of survival under extreme heat, wage theft, and climate crisis. Third, it turns to cultural and affective circulations—music, art, devotional practice, and diasporic imagination—as mycelial networks that sustain Afro-Asian ethical friendship across oceans. Across these cases, the article argues that solidarity emerges not only from declared political alignment but from shared vulnerability and cohabitation within hostile environments. By reframing Afro-Asian histories through ecological interdependence, it illuminates forgotten genealogies of coalition and offers a planetary vision of care grounded in material survival, difference, and mutual responsibility.