In both the introduction and conclusion to An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race, historian Shobana Shankar deploys the reception and legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi's ideas and life in Africa as a metonym for Africa-India relations writ large. She sees this relationship symbolically embodied in the ‘doomed Gandhi statue in Ghana – a looming silent Mahatma’ (212) that was toppled by the #GandhiMustFall movement in 2018. Yet despite these repeated invocations, Gandhi is ultimately incidental to the book's key contributions. Rather, it is his silencing that matters more as Shankar stiches together disparate strands of non-elite historical cultural encounters between Africans and Indians and examines them from an Afrocentric perspective.

This methodology strives to displace the emphasis on political leaders and organizations that dominates scholarship on Africa-India connections with a narrow focus on the Afro-Asian and Non-Aligned Movements. It also searches for racial discourses that preceded or evaded essentialisms of difference concretized ‘in the shadow of Euro-American power’ (5). African and Indian relationships had a long history predating the moments of solidarity that emerged during the era of decolonization, and Shankar's study of their cultural and intellectual exchanges is productive and sometimes provocative. In this way, the text shares the agenda and approach of works like Antoinette Burton's Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (2016, reviewed by this author in The Journal of African History, 59:1, 2018), which called for the reading of alternative archives to analyze ‘tense and tender’ (15) Indian-African encounters distant from prominent events like the 1955 Asian-African Conference at Bandung. While a discussion of Burton's monograph is oddly absent in An Uneasy Embrace, the latter provides a response to the former's call by positioning India in the African imagination, especially from the vantage point of West Africa.

The heart of the book beats in the stories of individuals who crafted innovative and occasionally transformative transnational networks that enmeshed people of African and South Asian descent. To tell their stories, Shankar unearthed an astonishing and wide-ranging array of understudied and unconventional sources on four continents, yielding fresh understandings of interactions at a series of local levels. After an introduction that offers more context and rationale than historiographical or theoretical interventions, the first chapter asks how the ‘transoceanic Black cultural imagination' (22) across the Atlantic intersected with influences that flowed from the Indian Ocean world. The author accomplishes this most successfully by depicting how interwar collaborations in West Africa between pan-Africanists and Ahmadiyya Muslim missionaries ‘created a powerful African-Indian cultural symbiosis’ (51) through a form of pan-Islamism that possessed a critical racial consciousness and centered Africa. The second chapter, ‘Fears of Indian Independence’, surveys a motley set of uneasy, grassroots-level associations between Indians and Africans on the continent — from the initiatives of Hindu religious movements to the operations of India's newly opened official missions — that simmered underneath global expressions of Afro-Asian solidarity as decolonization unleashed new political, economic, and cultural tensions on the ground.

The subsequent three chapters are the most focused and effective in the book. Chapter Three unpacks the creative philosophies of Senegalese president Léopold Senghor in navigating the postcolonial world, such as his government's establishment of an Indo-African Department at Dakar University to facilitate Afro-Dravidian studies. In ‘[a]ligning Afrocentrism with Dravidian history [as] a rejoinder to white supremacy and high-caste Hindu dominance’ (97), Shankar writes, Senghor brought ‘India into Africa's racial humanism’ (88). The next chapter shifts to exploring how the Edward Bouchet Abdus Salam Institute (1988), an outgrowth of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, became a locus of racial and cultural politics as Black scientists marginalized in a racialized world scientific order encountered Ahmadiyya scientists cast out of an increasingly intolerant Pakistan. The fifth chapter similarly tracks the lives of actors at the margins of traditional histories of African-Indian interactions through the activities of the Hindu Monastery of Africa in Accra, directed by the Ghanaian Swami Ghanananda, who was initiated into Hinduism in 1969 in Rishikesh, India. The final chapter, ‘Négritude Beats Bollywood’, again widens the lens to assess recent iterations of the cultural economy coursing between Africa and India amid ‘African ascendency’ (180) and the descent of India into ‘rightwing xenophobic nationalism and neoliberal economic growth’ (204). Given this grim outlook, An Uneasy Embrace's conclusion points to why its fragmentary, often unconnected stories hold value as examples of ‘attempted and unfinished projects of non-Western universalism and humanism.… Political leaders aside, peoples’ histories present African-Indian alternatives’ (212).

The author's fascinating alternate histories of vibrant African-Indian entanglements locate agency at the level of individuals and the institutions and networks they built. This dislodges the frames of states, international relations, and diasporas that prevail in most historiographies of Africa-India interactions. Yet it is challenging to discern larger patterns in the dispersed and varied encounters among the text's compelling sets of local actors. An avowal that ‘African-Indian history has been replayed on too small a stage’ (12) inclines the narrative to glide intentionally across a dizzying range of geographical and intellectual scales. While West Africa is positioned centrally, the author frequently raises the state of relations between Africans and Indians in East and South Africa as a specter of racial tensions gone awry. This denies people in those regions the same imaginative agency in crafting lives in a cosmopolitan milieu that Shankar brilliantly accords to the ‘[n]onconforming, lived African-Indian experiences’ (211) that comprise the compassionate and sometimes conflicted soul, simultaneously tense and tender, of An Uneasy Embrace. The book is a must-read for all scholars interested in histories of Africa-India connections and those who seek evidence that ideas from the past continue to exist with the potential to forge pathways toward solidarity and progress in the Global South, on the cultural and intellectual terms of people's own making.