OK, so thank you, everyone for hanging and for the last presentation.
And I want to thank Professor David and and other presenters for all the wonderful conversations.
It's been really rich and I've learnt a lot.
So my talk today is a short synopsis where a preview of my forthcoming book Insecurities of Expulsion Based Violence,
Citizenship and Afro-Asian Entanglements and Trans Regional Uganda.
I make three major contributions in this spot, which I'd like to discuss today.
First, I reworked popular western,
liberal and illiberal imaginaries and scholarly understandings of the 72 Asian expulsion by restructuring the expulsion as a global critical event.
And I'll explain what I mean by this in a moment. My second intervention is to argue that about recontextualizing expulsion in this way.
We are better able to track and trace what I call the insecurities of expulsion,
a concept that I use to denote the unresolved nature of expulsion and its lingering effects both in Uganda and across the trans,
regional, imperial and sub imperial geographies that continue to inform nation and state building projects in Uganda today.
So in effect,
I recenter contemporary Uganda in conversations about the shifting nature of empire within a kind of contemporary ethnographic framework.
Hmm. I'm actually interested in three dimensions of the insecurities of expulsion.
First, its effects and its effects by effects, I mean political and racialised insecurities,
but also the gendered and sexualised domains of those insecurities,
the circulating imaginaries, memories and meaning making that surround the expulsion event.
And finally, the practises and performances of Ugandan, Asian and South Asian citizenship that have flourished after the expulsion.
And we can also talk a little bit more about the categories that I'm using in this research later on.
The final contribution of my books is to frame my interventions in relation to my concerns with conventional disciplinary
knowledge formations in the university and making legible and accessible the study of global Afro-Asian encounters,
especially in Africa, South Asian Indian Ocean world, but their connexions to North America and Europe as well.
Building on decolonising currents and the discipline of anthropology and student
movements around the material and epistemological decolonisation of the university.
I argued for an anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements, but is concerned to keep them out of Afro-Asian study.
Indeed, to really think through the contemporary relevance of the study to Asian expansion and related topics.
So in his own research,
Edgar Taylor has argued that expulsion has been framed in singular and total ideas in ways that include complex and contested histories,
practises and imaginaries of national citizenship and belonging in the pre expulsion period.
Expulsion is a rupture, and it redefines the sense of closure around multiracial or non-racial possibility in the colony.
Here, the figure of the Asian is on a similar both foreign and culturally and racially other to the nation, especially within Ugandan historiography.
I build on tailors interventions to argue that conventional style representations of expulsion as a total izing
rupture also create methodological problems for anthropologists and others working on contemporary Uganda.
A sense of postcolonial closure surrounds the question and issues of South Asian presence and the ongoing politics and practises of race making,
nation state building citizenship and belonging, even in the post expulsion years.
In fact, much of the ethnographic research produced an expose.
Her 6000 years in the context of civil war in Uganda often mobilises the ethnicity paradigm rather than an analytic of race and racial formation.
During following anthropologist Jemima Pierce arguments about the lack of race analysis often found in knowledge production on Africa and Africans,
despite the implicit racialisation of African studies as a field of study and the racialisation of Africa itself as a subject and object of study,
the expulsion,
coupled with a sense of the Indian position in the post expulsion years and the rise of the ethnicity paradigm methodological nationalism.
All this means that as researchers and scholars, we can wittingly or unwittingly reproduce racial nationalism or nativism in our own writings.
Moreover, exceptionalism representations of the expulsion in which it is divorced from broader Ugandan histories and presence
means that it's usually discussed with respect to either Ugandan Asian history or South Asian Diaspora studies.
And so I would argue that in some ways the expulsion is it tends to be racially, racially exceptionalist.
So insecurities of expulsion takes a different approach.
Although expulsions are by no means exceptional, as we've been talking about today in decolonising Africa,
even if we think about neoliberal Africa or the global south,
I argue that this expulsion is an example of what venal Das has described in
the context of postcolonial and post Partition South Asia as a critical event.
Thus argues that Critical Events Institute new modalities of historical action
and new modes of action come into being which redefined traditional categories,
such as codes of purity and honour the meaning of martyrdom.
The construction of a heroic white well thus uses the concept of the critical event with respect to communal violence.
Genocidal acts and pogroms in the past, in the partition era and not settler indigenous relations,
I find her analytics useful and builds on her theories, issues of violence,
critical events and the everyday Tyreece situate the expulsion in anthropological directions,
discussions and ethnographic study expulsions signified as the undoing of a normative liberal democratic conceptual apparatus normative sorry.
As the domain of liberal political practise closes for Indians and we begin to see new repertoire as a social and political action emerge.
Citizenship becomes unbundled from legal juridical criteria and shifts into performative and moral domains of belonging and identity.
Moreover, by framing expulsion as a critical event.
I aim to interrogate liberal imaginaries of expulsion that market within the domain of a liberalism or the failure of liberal,
democratic, multiracial ism or the failure of citizenship in general following postcolonial scholars,
expulsion is an equally important experiment with decolonisation and the emergence of liberal democratic norms and practises surrounding citizenship.
In effect, the methodological move I make is to shift away from primarily nationalist and liberal framing of Uganda,
Uganda, Asian history and expulsion,
and to argue for attention to the shifting contexts of imperialism, stubborn realism, nation state building, race making and citizenship.
So I'm less interested in thinking about expulsion at an event as a historical construct
that constitutes a rupture or a more sort of conventional historical narrative,
or even the ways in which it's primarily understood through Ugandan Asian experience, although I think that's very important.
I reframe expulsion as a global critical event that lends itself to the study of
the possibilities and limitations of liberal nation building and decolonisation.
But moreover, how everyday people imagine those two projects as well.
Expulsion as global critical event creates analytical and epistemological space to study the insecurities of expulsion and
Afro-Asian entanglements in Uganda and its trans regional geographies by positioning Uganda with an ongoing circuits of Ugandan,
Asian and South Asian migration, mobility, labour and capital, and that local,
regional and trans regional scales of expulsion afterlives, arguing that South Asian, as has always been integral to Ugandan society.
Expulsion is actually alive and formative in the present and must be understood as a mobile signifier and site of meaning making for multiple actors.
So as I mentioned, the insecurities of expulsion is a multidimensional concept,
a focus here on the performances and practises of citizenship and one that has been constituted by expulsion events in 72.
We came to see the unbundling of abstract liberal notions of citizenship from its contents.
The formal legal juridical dimensions of citizenship came to be disaggregated from the actual steps of citizenship,
substantive citizenship, membership in a political community, a sense of belonging and inclusion.
In this case, national, racial and cultural belonging. In my book,
I signalled this shift from liberal to the post liberal by building on existing scholarship in the anthropology of citizenship
that uses the categories of the non-citizen or non citizenship to critique the substantive inequities that are often normalised,
enshrined through liberal and formal legal juridical notions of citizenship.
I used these concepts of the non-citizen and non citizenship to examine inclusion
that of Naira notes is both within and through conditions of legal impossibility.
As the money Partridge observes and analytic of non citizenship opens up a space for thinking about how
the foreign subject is incorporated into social and political life without being totally excluded.
So building on Professor Amanda,
foundational interventions that decolonisation and post-colonial Africa proceeded on the basis of the de racialisation of urban civil society without
the attendant dismantling of the broader racialisation and native ization
processes inscribed by the colonial state across both urban and rural society.
I continue to emphasise indigenous Ugandan Asian racial exclusion in the post colony,
especially as it is inscribed in legal categories, artefacts and state policies.
However, it's increasingly important to study the non-citizen incorporation of Ugandan Asian returnees and new South Asian migrants in Uganda,
as well as the broader structural forces and modalities of governance and sovereignty that make this non-citizen incorporation possible.
In fact, post-colonial migrations of Ugandan Asians and South Asians in and out of Venetian continued in the post seventy two era.
Successive governments have shifted from policies of Indian racial expulsion to maintaining
racial exclusion and incorporating South Asian heritage subjects as non-citizens in the legal,
juridical, racial and cultural sense. In my research,
I examine the complex terrains of non citizenship that Ugandan Asians and other South Asian migrants
are navigating structurally formal formally as an equal critically but also substantively.
At the same time, I'm interested in their incorporation and access to new kinds of substantive entitlements and privileges,
especially economic in the post expulsion context. I argue that this new kind of this non-citizen incorporation offers a view into post
liberal democratic norms of citizenship and belonging in Uganda and East Africa,
as well as renewed attention to imperialism and decolonisation in this part of the world.
So in terms of evidence, I focus on five examples of non-citizen incorporation.
First, I studied the experiences of states or those Ugandan agents who remained in the nation after a young woman's expulsion order.
I argue that Ameen and his government not only perfected the technology of expulsion to remake national citizenship along racial exclusive lines,
but that after expulsion. You mean government also nurtured a political and social context conducive to the racialised denizens of Ugandan Asian men,
despite their status as racial and cultural non-citizens. So this is the first instance where one really begins to see this kind of exceptional
non-citizen incorporation of some Ugandan Asians and other migrants who are coming
and joining the new machine examine the ways in which their subjectivities come to
be shaped by their proximity to the state and state bureaucrats and sovereigns.
And I study their claims to Ugandan and African identity and their performances of longing and citizenship,
notably in the oral histories and memories of these expulsion is not narrated
as a rupture and as a critical event that leads to the practises of reality,
economic and political action in which Ugandan Asians and Indians must show
respect and deference to African sovereignty and African sovereign leaders.
Second, I assess the work of Milton Abertay and be wary and 70 70 led national resistance movement government or the NRM as they inaugurate a new
nation state building projects and forge relationships with the exiled Ugandan Asian diaspora through state led repatriation processes.
I introduced the terms Property Repossession Without Reconciliation,
Citizenship by invitation and Sovereign Authorisation to analyse the repatriation of exiles
or returnees who were conceptualised as rehabilitated moral and economic citizens in
partnership with the NRM to reconstruct the nation in the midst of broader global processes
of structural adjustment liberalisation at the national level and no party democracy.
Although returnees are still structurally, informally legal, genetically non-citizens,
Ugandan post-colonial elites incorporated non-citizen expatriate transnational Ugandan Asians through this new substantive criteria.
Nonetheless, Centre has also maintained racially exclusive notions of African national identity,
while many urban Ugandans continue to assert African sovereignty and racial nationalism during key moments of national crisis.
So Professor Assimilé mentioned Schedule three and that and that is an important
part of the kind of interim project in relation to early 1990s state policy.
As I explore how you got Indonesian returnees claims and disabilities to national citizenship and their
performances of citizenship as they became as they themselves came to be shaped by state and nationalist logic.
Third, I examined the work of post-colonial elites at a state agency called the Uganda Investment Authority
as they labour to recruit foreign direct investment and non-citizen investors from South Asia,
especially Indian diasporic elites. I introduced the term Afro-Asian governance and neo liberal Afro-Asian ism to make
legible state and late capitalist appropriations for regional histories of Afro-Asian
Solidarity's that are circulating across the global south in this era of South-South
cooperation and increasing diplomacy and trade between the Ugandan and Indian nation.
I demonstrate how post-colonial elites fashion the Ugandan,
Asian and new South Asian body politic as investor citizens through moral attachments to South-South or Afro-Asian
Connexions and incorporate them in the nation on the basis of their neoliberal and entrepreneurial identities.
Explorer or explorer citizenship practises amongst a more recent cohort of newcomers,
non-citizen Indian middle class expats and more precarious migrant workers from South Asia.
I assessed the citizenship practises of community elites in the context of this transnational urban proletariat.
I show how elites simultaneously utilise transnational Indian labour,
but also expressed anxieties about labour migrants who display global Indian
diasporic identities and desires rather than Ugandan nationalist commitments.
Community elites wield community and tribal citizenship claims on the state
working to obtain political and racial security despite their non-citizen status.
At the same time, their new contests around Indian and Asian African Community Building initiatives finally examined the
plight of non-citizen Indian migrant women who have settled in urban Uganda and the post expulsion years.
I show that community governance has become the new horizon in managing many of these women's life fortunes,
and I argue that many indigenous Ugandan women activists are making moral claims for non-citizen migrants,
South Asian women's inclusion in the nation, especially to live free from family and community violence.
And I can go into more of this later on. So the final contribution of my book just to wrap this up is that I plan to use this
research to argue for the development of an anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements,
as I've laboured in my fieldwork in communities and universities over many years.
I've struggled with making sense of the ethics and politics of knowledge production and making knowledge work,
especially for minority communities that are entangled with each other via these
difficult and complicated legacies of colonial and post-colonial violence and expulsion,
whether in East Africa or in the Western diasporic context.
I dwell with many of my discomforts around the postcolonial closure and political repression surrounding expulsion in Uganda today,
in scholarly work and in the diasporic context that I grew up in.
I connect these silences and discomforts to intellectual closures around the study of
affirmation encounters in global perspective more broadly to the contemporary university,
following Professor and Googie work on Ghost Call to move the centre in our research, scholarship and teaching.
The conclusion of my book assesses the epistemological limitations of the different
fields of study that I've had to navigate in order to develop my research programmes.
I assess the possibilities and limitations of Uganda studies,
especially the anthropology of Uganda studies, African studies and African Diaspora Black Studies,
South Asia, Diaspora, Diaspora Studies and Afro-Asian studies that's typically been framed in the US context.
Ultimately, I define Afro-Asian entanglements as the complex material and affective temporal and spatial scales across racial violence,
interdependency, hierarchy, intimacy and estrangement that bind Africans and South Asian histories, presence and features to each other.
I argue that an anthropology of aspiration entanglements displaces frameworks and research
paradigms that maintain Africans and South Asians within separate domains of study.
Instead, this field creates methodological, conceptual,
theoretical and epistemological tools to study Afro-Asian entanglements in the contemporary university,
potentially ruinous for focus in the study or the study of imperialism, nationalism, citizenship and violence in their ongoing nature.
The study of race and racial formation, particularly race, religion and caste, racial capitalism and under is new work emerging on caste capitalism?
That's really interesting. Gender and feminist approaches to the study of Afro-Asian encounters state appropriations of substance
preparation and Afro-Asian ism and the circulation of intellectual political thought in this region.
So I will just end here, but I'm looking forward to the conversation and happy to talk later on as well.
Thank you.