Yasser Ali Nasser is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His work explores the intersections between postcolonial nationalism and new internationalist impulses that emerged in Asia in the wake of the Cold War.
His book project, titled Just Friends: China, India, and the Promise of Asian Solidarity in the Early Cold War, tells the story of how, from the end of World War II through to the early 1960s, an eclectic group of statesmen, intellectuals, activists, and workers reached across national and ideological divides between India and China in the service of what they called ‘friendship’. Committing to a program of mutual learning and respect for differences, the advocates of Sino-Indian friendship declared that its vision of horizontal international relations and a steadfast commitment to cosmopolitanism stood in stark contrast to the tutelage and discipline associated with bloc politics and imperialism, and offered a potential ‘Asian’ blueprint for other countries in the region. The Indian and Chinese states used this vision of a decolonized, New Asia to teach domestic audiences about the significance of their work at home, thus rendering international struggles legible to local interests. The story of friendship in New Asia highlights the ways in which Cold War challenges and postcolonial aspirations forged an intimate connection between local, national, and international politics in the Global South.
Yasser is also the author of a number of peer-reviewed articles and public facing essays on the different forms Sino-Indian friendship took, as well as on politics and solidarity in the Global South more generally. His work on these topics appear or are forthcoming in Past & Present, The International Journal of Asian Studies, Twentieth-Century China, Cold War History, The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism, Afro-Asian Visions, and Democratic Left.
Yasser’s research and writing has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the China-US Scholars Program, the Association of Asian Studies, the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and numerous internal sources at the University of Chicago.