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Dr. Renu Modi

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Short Bio

Dr. Renu Modi is Professor and former Director of the Centre for African Studies, University of Mumbai. Her areas of teaching and research are interdisciplinary and cross cut disciplines including: International Relations, Indian Ocean Studies, Migration and Diasporas. Dr. Modi specializes in research across a number of subjects that include: agriculture and food security, climate change and infrastructure, South, South–South Development Cooperation, BRICS and bilateral, Health/Covid-19 diplomacy, India – Africa trade, investments and bilateral partnerships, Indian and African diasporas and memory spaces that migration trajectories engendered within the Indian Ocean World.

Dr. Modi has been a recipient of several national and international research grants and fellowships from; the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Indian Council of Historical Research, the University Grants Commission, and the Observer Research Foundation (New Delhi, India). Her most recent international projects were funded by the Research Council of Norway (University of Oslo), UK’s Department for International Development (Margret Ainsteee Centre for Global Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.) She was awarded the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute Fellowship (University of Victoria, Canada), South-South Exchange Programme on the History of Development (SEPHIS, Netherlands), DAAD Fellowship (Germany) Visiting fellowships at the Nordic Africa Institute (Sweden), and at the Centre for Refugee Studies (University of Oxford). She has also taught at several Erasmus Mundus programs (Germany, France and Italy), and at the United Nations University (Tokyo). Dr. Modi also has served as a consultant to the Inspection Panel (World Bank) on an urban infrastructure project in Mumbai.
Dr. Modi has published several books, edited volumes, monographs, journal articles, e-publications, and directed educational documentary films.

Selected Publications

Book

Journal articles/book chapters

  • Women as an invisible constituency: a gendered reading of the life narratives of Nanji Kalidas Mehta and Muljibhai Madhvani. (2017) (co-authored with Mala Pandurang) South Asian Diaspora, 9(2), 179–192.
    URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/19438192.2017.1339842
    Publisher: South Asian Diaspora, Routledge Publications; ISSN: 1943-8184
  • Migration, successes and liminal Spaces: a contemporary perspective on Africans in India. (2017) In U Röschenthaler & A Jedlowski (Ed.), Mobility between Africa, Asia and Latin America.
    Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
    ISBN: 9781786990839
    URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/mobility-between-africa-asia-and-latin-america-9781786990839/
  • Africans in India, past and present. (2017) In D. Hodgson & J. Byfield (Ed.), Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century (pp. 71-80).
    Publisher: University of California Press.
    ISBN: 9780520962514
    URL: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520962514-010
  • Liminal spaces: racism against Africans in India (2016) (co-authored with Rhea D 'Silva) Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 51 (41), (pp.18-20).
    ISSN: 0012-9976
    URL: https://www.epw.in/journal/2016/41/commentary/liminal-spaces.html

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Project Description

Mobilities Between India and Africa: Solidarities, Ruptures and Memory Spaces

 For India, Africa has never been peripheral or a 'dark continent'. It has consistently occupied a central role in various interactions and knowledge production since antiquity. The Western Indian Ocean World, a socio-spatial entity, has served as a bi-directional transoceanic pathway for people-to-people connections between India and Africa over the longue dureé. This study aims to understand mobilities in the historical and contemporary context. It focuses on three key issues: spaces of solidarities ( the spirit of Bandung and South-  South cooperation, co-created spaces through cinema, ideologies of Non- Alignment, anti-Apartheid;  ruptures (the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, nationalization across East Africa and, tenuous relations between Indians and Africans) and, memory spaces(cultural transfers through religion, films, and ideas from India and centuries of bi-directional migratory movements and interaction of peoples across the western Indian Ocean. These exchanges have left rich memories embodied through quotidian artifacts such as textiles and culinary and ritual practices, that have been engendered due to historical and contemporary people to people interactions.

This research aims to curate a heteronomy of experiences through visual narratives; objects and artifacts -textiles and musical instruments; repositories of historical records-photographs and letters; and literary works- biographies, that trace the genealogies of Asian and African migrations and the micro-narratives from a gendered perspective.

The axial question is: how can we rewrite a more representative history of people with rooted histories and shared diasporic connections through decolonizing our sources of data and infusing these epistemologies into the present for furthering South-South solidarities and people–to–people connections in the future.

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