Requiem for a Dream

September 28, 2014. At Delhi’s Rajiv Chowk metro station, a frenzied mob of Indians surround three African students. They begin to abuse them; they punch and hit them with belts and sticks. This recorded—and widely circulated— incident shows the African students seeking refuge in a police booth, but a policeman on duty (who appears to be from the Delhi Police force) does nothing to assist them. In a curious display of jingoistic nationalism, some of those gathered can also be heard (and seen) egging the mob on by chanting “Bharat Mata ki Jai” (“Victory toMother India”).1 This is just one (more) instance of racist violence faced by Africans living in India and points to the difficult relationship Indians—and India at large—have with racialized “others.”2 And although this may seem a banal instance of “brown over black”3 racism, I draw on this incident for a different reason. This episode signals, in concrete terms, the demise of the abstract notion of “third world” or “Afro-Asian” solidarity that was premised upon and activated through what Auritro Majumder calls “peripheral internationalism,” itself an expression of the insurgent imagination called decolonization. Lest we forget, it was less than a century ago that we lived in “a world divided into compartments,” where metropolitan states, through a complex of political