This uneven volume is devoted to the hitherto neglected study of Africans in Asia. The original text – this is a reprint of a special edition of African and Asian Studies – was entitled The African diaspora in Asia but, as this volume demonstrates, the subject matter can be elusive. The African diaspora in Asia is not constituted in the image of the diaspora in the Atlantic World and, despite claiming to make it the object of study, the chapters instead rather effectively question the concept itself.

Three chapters are by Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya. In the first, she considers terms applied to Africans in Asia. Although rather haphazardly organized and containing a number of errors (Zayla is on the Gulf of Aden, not the Red Sea, and by no stretch of the imagination is the Niger ‘on the frontier of Egypt’), this linguistic survey demonstrates the author’s evident familiarity with the material, even if much of it, while interesting, is peripheral to the matter at hand. A more probing analysis of some of the terms – the word kafir, for example, as applied in various relevant contexts – would have been welcome, although the claim, apparently in the context of contemporary South Africa, that ‘the Kaffirs proper are represented by the Ama-Xosa, the Tembu and the Pondo’, and that the Zulu and the Xhosa are ‘true-born Kaffirs’ (p. 21) is rather disquieting.

De Silva’s second chapter concerns Maldivian music and African connections. Again the data – not substantial – are not subjected to any sustained analysis and as a result this is little more than a collection of casual observations. She states that ‘a few words were identified as Swahili’ (p. 137): it would have been useful to know what these words were and who identified them as such. Her third chapter, on Africans in Sri Lanka, while more promising, repeats much of the material in the first; and, once again, the chapter suffers from a lack of analytical rigour. Nevertheless, it provides a thorough overview of the African contribution to Sri Lankan history and concludes with useful data on the residence patterns of Africans (however they may be identified) in Sri Lanka.

Robert Collins provides a historical overview of the slave trade from Africa to Asia; he divides his analysis into distinct periods, considers the different routes, and provides figures (which, as he observes, can only be guesstimates for much of the period covered) for the numbers of slaves brought out of Africa. The numbers agree broadly with other such estimates. However, describing his timeframe as being from ‘the coming of the Arabs from 800’ appears to deny the presence of Arabs in Africa before 800 CE, and his reference to ‘vertical’ routes across the Sahara, apart from being geographically inaccurate, reinforces (certainly inadvertently) perceptions of Europe as ‘up’ and Africa as ‘down’.

Nicolini’s chapter is very poorly edited: many passages are grammatically awkward, some to the point of incomprehensibility; the text (indeed, most of the book) would have benefited greatly from a rigorous proofreading. The substance of the chapter is also of dubious value and contains a number of curious assertions and analytical non sequiturs. Despite the abstract claiming that it examines the role of the Makran-Baluchi tribes in East Africa, disappointingly it does nothing of the sort and instead is little more than an overview of Zanzibari history. Admittedly, Baluchis are mentioned in passing two or three times, but not until the last couple of pages are they the subject of significant commentary and this in a section that has little to do with the rest of the chapter.

There follow two rather brief chapters on Africans in Arabia. Ingrams and Pankhurst provide a welcome contribution to the study of Somalis in Yemen, a hitherto neglected but rapidly growing community. Their article discusses links between Somalia and Aden in the nineteenth century; and the inclusion of fragments of the autobiographical narrative of a Somali in Yemen in the early twentieth century is welcome insight into contemporary life for a young itinerant. Contemporary issues are limited to a couple of paragraphs’ comment, regrettably, since I suspect at least one of the authors would have something to offer to the study of this hitherto neglected community.

Pereira’s chapter is also regrettably concise. It usefully surveys the nineteenth-century travel literature on Africans in Arabia and emphasizes that, despite the recognition of African ancestry, there was a high level of social and cultural integration of Africans in the Arab world. Despite using the term himself, he rightly challenges the conceptual content of the word ‘diaspora’ in the Arabian context.

Pinto’s chapter, on Africans in India (the title, ‘in Indiaspora’, is misleading since she does not touch on the Indian diaspora), is, again, rather poorly organized. It is a general survey of the literature (much of which is not on Africans but the Portuguese) that reaffirms that the Portuguese possessed African slaves and that there are individuals of African origin in various parts of India. However, the author’s apparent surprise at the fact that Siddis now speak Indian languages seems curious and her use of the term ‘Negro’ is unfortunate. While there are certainly useful facts here, there are also many unsubstantiated statements – that the Siddis of Janjira originally came from Abyssinia, or that the mother tongue of the Siddis of Karnataka was Swahili – and the text provides little in the way of critical insight into the social or cultural practices of the diaspora itself.

Perhaps this is because, as Gwyn Campbell points out in his chapter, there isn’t one. The various criteria for the establishment of a diasporic consciousness – a stable community in exile, social rejection in the host society, an awareness of injustice suffered, a desire to return – are, according to Campbell, absent in Asia. His analysis of the turning of the scholarly gaze from the Atlantic, with its historically and socially constructed diaspora, to the Indian Ocean world suggests that scholarly perspectives politicize, essentialize, and raise questions of identity where there may be no call to do so. Africans in Asia are rarely constituted as a separate group with a conscious identity, and to suggest otherwise both risks negative consequences for those who prefer discretion and assimilation as Asians and also poses problems for scholars trying to find them.