Insecurities of Expulsion: Race, Violence, Citizenship and Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transregional Uganda

Anneeth Kaur Hundle (UC Irvine) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality In this short talk, I offer a synopsis of my forthcoming book and its core interventions. Namely, I recenter contemporary Uganda within scholarly discussion on the 1972 Asian expulsion. I assess the exceptional ways in which the 1972 Asian expulsion is understood within global knowledge formations, arguing that expulsion is a “critical event” with lingering effects and affects in territorial Uganda and its diasporas, which I situate as the “insecurities of expulsion." Despite the historic expulsion of Ugandan Asians, South Asian-ness continues to define the very constitution of the Ugandan nation and the normative construction of (racially nativist) Ugandan national identity. Ugandan postcolonial governments have shifted from policies and practices of Asian racial expulsion to maintaining racial exclusion while incorporating Ugandan Asian returnees and South Asian subjects as racial non-citizens and economic subjects. I utilize the post-liberal democratic analytic of “non-citizenship” to explore gradations in substantive privileges, rights and entitlements and exclusions across Ugandan Asian returnee and new South Asian migrant communities across old and new imperial and sub-imperial formations, orienting us to the study of Afro-Asian entanglements and the broader decolonization of political community in both national and transregional scope. Ultimately, I am proposing an “anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements”-an arena of study that is concerned with the ways in which indigenous Africans and South Asians are bound together in relations of interdependency, hierarchy, intimacy and estrangement both within territorial Uganda and its transregional geographies across the Indian Ocean and North Atlantic. Anneeth Kaur Hundle is assistant professor of anthropology and Dhan Kaur Sahota Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine (UCI). Prior to UCI, she was Visiting Professor at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Merced, and Research Associate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. She is completing a book manuscript entitled, Insecurities of Expulsion: Race, Violence, Citizenship and Afro-Asian Relationalities in Transregional Uganda and beginning work on two new projects on Sikh feminisms and the intersections of Sikh Studies and university studies. She is also involved in new research clusters on Global Africa/Global Blackness, Interrogating South Asia/diasporas and Decolonizing Universities in Global Perspective with her colleagues at UCI.

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