A great deal of that research was conducted by Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London and one of the pioneers in this field. Here, in her chapter entitled The African diaspora in South Asia: A theoreticalperspective, she examines the '[d]ispersed communities of Africans in Asia [...] both historic and contemporary', through which she sees a triadic relationship between Africa as homeland, Africans and their descendants and an adopted residence or home abroad. Identifying migration streams and points of origin and destination is fundamental to this study. Scholarship on the communities of Sidis, or Afro-Indians, throughout India has advanced in recent years. For the author, the migration, diaspora and identity of Afro-Asians are entangled and should be considered together. While the lack of Afro-Asian voices and the disenfranchised status of Afro-Asians have led to 'the assumption that diasporic consciousness was lacking', field research and conferences, such as that of The African Diaspora in Asia (TADIA) Society (2006), are breaking with this tradition and revealing a desire to connect. Thus, she concludes that 'Afrodescendants are claiming their heritage and negotiating a new identity as they emerge from the peripheries'.  
Beyond speculative work on and occasional glimpses of Africans in China, Li Anshan's Blacks/Africans in China: bistorical process and diasporic experience provides a study of the African presence in China from antiquity to the present. The author spends some time looking at how the various identities, such as Kunlun or Sengzhi, have been languaged and indicates that ethnocentrism has been a constant throughout human existence. His discussion covers the African presence in China, from the Han dynasty ( $206 \mathrm{BCE}-220 \mathrm{CE}$ ) to the current time. First, he looks at the ways in which Africans have been represented in archaeological evidence that suggests the possibility of contact between