Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe historiography of South Asian diaspora in colonial Southeast Asia has overwhelmingly focused on numerically dominant South Indian labourers at the expense of the small, but important, North Indian communities, of which the Sikhs were the most visually conspicuous and politically important. This paper will analyse the creation of various Sikh communities in one critical territory in British Asia—Singapore, and chart the development of the island's increasingly unified Sikh community into the post-colonial period. The paper will scrutinize colonial economic roles and socio-cultural formation, whilst links of Singaporean Sikhs to Punjab and their place within the post-colonial Singaporean state will preoccupy the latter portion of the paper. It will argue that more complicated notions of division relative to the social norms of Punjab must be acknowledged in this region of Sikh diaspora and indeed others. The final sections will assess the remarkable success of local Sikhs in utilizing statist policies of 'domesticating difference' towards altered 'community' ends. Such attachment to the state and the discursive parity of Singapore's Sikhs with official values, moreover, stymied the appeal of transnational Sikh militant movements that gained momentum in the West in the 1980s. The result has been the assertion of 'model minority' status for Singapore's Sikhs and notably successful socialization into Singaporean society.

This paper analyses contemporary non-Western engagement with Africa through the lens of the second most significant, but surprisingly neglected, 'Asian driver' – India. Much of the literature on India's renewed interest in Africa is panoramic, highlighting concepts of 'South–South' cooperation in ways relatively uncritical of continued Indian claims to the Nehruvian moral high ground in the developing world. This article, by contrast, focuses on critical realities of India's relations with a single country – Kenya, a nation with which India has had ostensibly close links due to the historic presence of South Asian communities in the region. It critiques notions that 'diasporic' ties between India and Kenya facilitate contemporary Indian economic ambitions. Rather, the paper argues, fractious historical race relations in Kenya, and the cynosure of 'African' homogenisation of 'Asians' within an 'ethnicised' post-colonial political economy, might partially impede Indian ambitions relative to capital-rich foreign suitors devoid of such historical baggage. The second major argument holds that the specific state-led imperatives of much economic liaison within Kenya today favour certain 'partners' with statist investment models in contrast to India's more explicit, but not absolute, private sector-led engagement. Most importantly, analysis within a localised African context points to African agency in encounters with the 'Asian drivers', a term implying a certain unidirectional power flow. The competitive interest of a range of 'new' suitors has allowed African leaders, not least in Kenya as this paper suggests, unprecedented choice in international negotiations. The danger, however, is that these new liaisons can reify divisive socio-political conflicts in which many African nations are mired. This appears to be pertinent to Kenya where strains within the elite political sphere are being somewhat exacerbated by foreign investment, particularly from China and the Arab world.

This article sheds new light on the relationship between internationalism, decolonisation and ideas about development through a reassessment of an overlooked period in the life of Joseph Murumbi (1911–90), cultural collector and Kenya's second vice-president. It follows Murumbi's engagement with three internationalist spaces during the 1950s: in the Afro-Asian worlds of India and Egypt he honed his vision for community development and the practical coordination of internationalism; in London he pushed British activists to take a more internationalist approach to anti-colonialism in a case of 'reverse tutelage'; disillusioned with the British Left, in Scandinavia and Israel he questioned the translatability of community development and the practical role of external sympathisers as Kenyan independence approached. Murumbi's trajectory confirms the inseparability of internationalism and nationalism in 1950s Africa, reinserting internationalist thought into narratives of Kenyan freedom struggles and suggesting how alternative visions for post-colonial Kenya were lost. Moreover, we argue, this reassessment of Murumbi's life advances the burgeoning scholarship on internationalisms in the decolonising world by showing that Murumbi's internationalist practices and his interest in the supposedly 'local' question of community development drove one another. Murumbi thus shows us a particular set of entanglements between the 'local' and the 'global'.