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Across the Color Line: Indians, Blacks, and Landscapes of the Self

Author:Vinay Lal
Binding:Hardcover
Size:16 x 24 cm
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About the Book
Across the Color Line is an original and deeply reflective exploration of the historical, intellectual, and moral encounters between Indians and African Americans. Combining history, memoir, travel writing, cultural criticism, and political thought, Vinay Lal examines how race, migration, identity, and memory have shaped the lives of two peoples whose histories have intersected in unexpected ways but have seldom been studied together.

Drawing on extensive archival research as well as journeys through the American South, Lal revisits sites central to the Civil Rights Movement while recovering little-known histories of Indian migrants, interracial communities, and the shifting meanings of race in the United States. From the citizenship case of Bhagat Singh Thind and the forgotten histories of Bengali Muslim peddlers and Punjabi immigrants to the intellectual conversations linking Gandhi with W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard Thurman, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Martin Luther King Jr., the book reveals how ideas, political movements, and ethical traditions travelled across continents and reshaped one another.

Moving beyond familiar narratives of black-white relations, Across the Color Line asks how histories of race, empire, and migration can be understood from perspectives that transcend conventional national and disciplinary boundaries. Richly researched and elegantly written, it offers a fresh interpretation of the intertwined histories of India and the United States while making an important contribution to the study of race, diaspora, global intellectual history, and the enduring legacies of anti-colonial and civil rights movements.
About the Author
Vinay Lal

Vinay Lal is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his Ph.D. with Distinction from the University of Chicago after completing his undergraduate and master's studies at Johns Hopkins University. His research spans modern South Asian history, historiography, colonialism, the Indian diaspora, race, culture, Gandhi, and the global politics of knowledge. He has authored and edited more than twenty books, including The Other Indians: Politics and Culture of South Asians in America; Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy; The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India; Insurgency and the Artist; and The Fury of Covid-19. His writings have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and leading newspapers and magazines, and his work has been translated into many languages.
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