Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda

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.

Dr. Anneeth Kaur Hundle is the Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Associated Faculty with the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of California, Merced. Prior to her arrival at UC Merced, she was a Research Associate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in Uganda from 2013-2015. She completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2013. 

While a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, Dr. Hundle completed her book manuscript, “Unsettling Citizenship: African Asian Lives and the Politics of Racialized Insecurity in Postcolonial Uganda.” This project explored the complicated contradictions between the unresolved historical event of the 1972 expulsion of Ugandan Asians with a new post-1990s landscape of economic liberalization policies, geo-political and trade relations between Africa and South Asia, and new South Asian migration and community-building practices. Through detailed empirical and ethnographic research, the manuscript explored these ambiguities by centering the 1972 expulsion of Asians in Uganda as a critical event in the study of decolonization that reveals the practical and analytical limits of liberal citizenship in the African postcolony. It explored the segmentation of racialized “African” and “Asian” communities in scholarship and in practice, providing space for examining Afro-Asian intimacies and the micro-politics of community-building and boundary-making after the expulsion. It then examined minority citizenship through highly informalized realms of social, cultural and political practice, arguing that Ugandan Asian returnees, new Indian migrants, and elite foreign investors respond to the postcolonial structure of racialized insecurity through the flourishment of racialized “flexible securitization practices.” This theorization provided new analytical and epistemological ground for the study of citizenship practices in relation to race, racialization and securitization in East Africa. In doing so, it provoked new thinking about the kinds of local socio-political practices that make nations habitable after the violence of colonization and displacement in the anthropology of citizenship and in a global, African perspective. Finally, the project contributed to key literatures on race, nativism, pluralism, and citizenship in East Africa, Africa/diaspora studies, and Afro-Asian studies.