Full Description
In 1972, Ugandan president Idi Amin expelled close to 80,000 South Asians of Ugandan heritage from the country by dictatorial decree. In Insecurities of Expulsion, Anneeth Kaur Hundle revisits this weighty historical event, arguing that it is neither an exceptional nor a parochial event, neither a result of primordial Afro-South Asian racial conflict nor an opening into a redemptive search for Afro-South Asian interracial solidarities. Hundle explores the aftermaths and continuous nature of the expulsion event, examining its effects and affects; the images, representations, and differentiated experiences and memories of the event; and the tense and ambivalent practices of citizenship, sovereignty, and governance that have emerged in the decades following the expulsion. She examines Afro-Asian entanglements in what she describes as transcontinental Uganda through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender, and sexuality. Throughout, Hundle argues for stronger attention to knowledge production on global Afro-South Asian connections and the continued dynamics of community, citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms during shifting imperial, postcolonial, nationalist, and geopolitical times.
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Preface. From Diasporic to Transcontinental Entanglement xiii
Maps xxvi
Part I. Imperial Entanglements
Introduction. Expulsion as Closure, Expulsion as Opening 1
1. Becoming a Racial Exile, Becoming a Black Nation: Colonial and Postcolonial Orientations 41
Part II. Entanglements of Expulsion
2. Exceptions to the Expulsion: Racial Denizenship in Amin's Uganda 91
3. Insecurities of Repatriation: From Refugee to Returnee 128
Part III. South-South Entanglements
4. Insecurities of Foreign Direct Investment: From Returnee to Investor-Citizen 173
5. Indian Ugandan, African Asian, or Both? Community-Building, Community Citizenship, and Culture and Indigeneity 207
6. Of Gendered Insecurities: Contingent and Ambivalent Feminist Afro-South Asian Intimacies and Solidarities 242
Conclusion. Toward a Transcontinental Anthropology of Afro-South Asian Entanglement 279
Postscript. Fifty Years On 301
Appendix. Active South Asian Community Associations and Institutions in Uganda since the Early 1990s 307
Notes 311
Bibliography 345
Index
