From Baghdād to Baghpūr: Global Blackness in Medieval Arabo-Asia

In this lecture, co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department’s Castille Fund and the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program, Dr. Guangtian Ha previews his book From Baghdād to Baghpūr, under preparation for Columbia University Press. Weaving together sources in classical Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Bahasa Indonesia/Malay, and combining an array of methodologies from historiography to literary criticism to ethnography, From Baghdād to Baghpūr aims to excavate or reimagine a premodern globality. This globality tracks across the Indian Ocean, tying East Africa, Arabia and Persia to South, Southeast and East Asia — tracing a history where multiple regimes of racialisation overlap and heterogeneous conceptions of Blackness intersect. By examining entangled histories and listening to entwined tongues, From Baghdād to Baghpūr asks if there could be a space where an inchoate premodern history is possible of a certain “Black Pacific” that predates modernity yet lays the ideational, if not also the political and economic, foundation for the rise of the Black Atlantic in later times.