1 00:00:01,020 --> 00:00:06,630 OK, so thank you, everyone for hanging and for the last presentation. 2 00:00:06,630 --> 00:00:12,030 And I want to thank Professor David and and other presenters for all the wonderful conversations. 3 00:00:12,030 --> 00:00:16,590 It's been really rich and I've learnt a lot. 4 00:00:16,590 --> 00:00:25,650 So my talk today is a short synopsis where a preview of my forthcoming book Insecurities of Expulsion Based Violence, 5 00:00:25,650 --> 00:00:30,660 Citizenship and Afro-Asian Entanglements and Trans Regional Uganda. 6 00:00:30,660 --> 00:00:36,090 I make three major contributions in this spot, which I'd like to discuss today. 7 00:00:36,090 --> 00:00:38,970 First, I reworked popular western, 8 00:00:38,970 --> 00:00:50,010 liberal and illiberal imaginaries and scholarly understandings of the 72 Asian expulsion by restructuring the expulsion as a global critical event. 9 00:00:50,010 --> 00:01:00,040 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. 10 00:01:00,040 --> 00:01:05,590 We are better able to track and trace what I call the insecurities of expulsion, 11 00:01:05,590 --> 00:01:13,690 a concept that I use to denote the unresolved nature of expulsion and its lingering effects both in Uganda and across the trans, 12 00:01:13,690 --> 00:01:23,170 regional, imperial and sub imperial geographies that continue to inform nation and state building projects in Uganda today. 13 00:01:23,170 --> 00:01:23,920 So in effect, 14 00:01:23,920 --> 00:01:33,860 I recenter contemporary Uganda in conversations about the shifting nature of empire within a kind of contemporary ethnographic framework. 15 00:01:33,860 --> 00:01:39,770 Hmm. I'm actually interested in three dimensions of the insecurities of expulsion. 16 00:01:39,770 --> 00:01:48,110 First, its effects and its effects by effects, I mean political and racialised insecurities, 17 00:01:48,110 --> 00:01:52,700 but also the gendered and sexualised domains of those insecurities, 18 00:01:52,700 --> 00:01:58,040 the circulating imaginaries, memories and meaning making that surround the expulsion event. 19 00:01:58,040 --> 00:02:05,840 And finally, the practises and performances of Ugandan, Asian and South Asian citizenship that have flourished after the expulsion. 20 00:02:05,840 --> 00:02:13,490 And we can also talk a little bit more about the categories that I'm using in this research later on. 21 00:02:13,490 --> 00:02:20,780 The final contribution of my books is to frame my interventions in relation to my concerns with conventional disciplinary 22 00:02:20,780 --> 00:02:29,510 knowledge formations in the university and making legible and accessible the study of global Afro-Asian encounters, 23 00:02:29,510 --> 00:02:36,680 especially in Africa, South Asian Indian Ocean world, but their connexions to North America and Europe as well. 24 00:02:36,680 --> 00:02:40,460 Building on decolonising currents and the discipline of anthropology and student 25 00:02:40,460 --> 00:02:45,530 movements around the material and epistemological decolonisation of the university. 26 00:02:45,530 --> 00:02:52,520 I argued for an anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements, but is concerned to keep them out of Afro-Asian study. 27 00:02:52,520 --> 00:02:59,780 Indeed, to really think through the contemporary relevance of the study to Asian expansion and related topics. 28 00:02:59,780 --> 00:03:01,160 So in his own research, 29 00:03:01,160 --> 00:03:08,870 Edgar Taylor has argued that expulsion has been framed in singular and total ideas in ways that include complex and contested histories, 30 00:03:08,870 --> 00:03:14,960 practises and imaginaries of national citizenship and belonging in the pre expulsion period. 31 00:03:14,960 --> 00:03:23,480 Expulsion is a rupture, and it redefines the sense of closure around multiracial or non-racial possibility in the colony. 32 00:03:23,480 --> 00:03:33,200 Here, the figure of the Asian is on a similar both foreign and culturally and racially other to the nation, especially within Ugandan historiography. 33 00:03:33,200 --> 00:03:40,040 I build on tailors interventions to argue that conventional style representations of expulsion as a total izing 34 00:03:40,040 --> 00:03:47,510 rupture also create methodological problems for anthropologists and others working on contemporary Uganda. 35 00:03:47,510 --> 00:03:56,420 A sense of postcolonial closure surrounds the question and issues of South Asian presence and the ongoing politics and practises of race making, 36 00:03:56,420 --> 00:04:01,610 nation state building citizenship and belonging, even in the post expulsion years. 37 00:04:01,610 --> 00:04:04,970 In fact, much of the ethnographic research produced an expose. 38 00:04:04,970 --> 00:04:15,290 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. 39 00:04:15,290 --> 00:04:24,500 During following anthropologist Jemima Pierce arguments about the lack of race analysis often found in knowledge production on Africa and Africans, 40 00:04:24,500 --> 00:04:34,070 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, 41 00:04:34,070 --> 00:04:35,060 the expulsion, 42 00:04:35,060 --> 00:04:45,410 coupled with a sense of the Indian position in the post expulsion years and the rise of the ethnicity paradigm methodological nationalism. 43 00:04:45,410 --> 00:04:54,830 All this means that as researchers and scholars, we can wittingly or unwittingly reproduce racial nationalism or nativism in our own writings. 44 00:04:54,830 --> 00:05:02,390 Moreover, exceptionalism representations of the expulsion in which it is divorced from broader Ugandan histories and presence 45 00:05:02,390 --> 00:05:09,170 means that it's usually discussed with respect to either Ugandan Asian history or South Asian Diaspora studies. 46 00:05:09,170 --> 00:05:17,690 And so I would argue that in some ways the expulsion is it tends to be racially, racially exceptionalist. 47 00:05:17,690 --> 00:05:21,320 So insecurities of expulsion takes a different approach. 48 00:05:21,320 --> 00:05:27,800 Although expulsions are by no means exceptional, as we've been talking about today in decolonising Africa, 49 00:05:27,800 --> 00:05:32,150 even if we think about neoliberal Africa or the global south, 50 00:05:32,150 --> 00:05:36,530 I argue that this expulsion is an example of what venal Das has described in 51 00:05:36,530 --> 00:05:42,320 the context of postcolonial and post Partition South Asia as a critical event. 52 00:05:42,320 --> 00:05:47,720 Thus argues that Critical Events Institute new modalities of historical action 53 00:05:47,720 --> 00:05:52,340 and new modes of action come into being which redefined traditional categories, 54 00:05:52,340 --> 00:05:55,430 such as codes of purity and honour the meaning of martyrdom. 55 00:05:55,430 --> 00:06:03,590 The construction of a heroic white well thus uses the concept of the critical event with respect to communal violence. 56 00:06:03,590 --> 00:06:11,240 Genocidal acts and pogroms in the past, in the partition era and not settler indigenous relations, 57 00:06:11,240 --> 00:06:16,010 I find her analytics useful and builds on her theories, issues of violence, 58 00:06:16,010 --> 00:06:22,220 critical events and the everyday Tyreece situate the expulsion in anthropological directions, 59 00:06:22,220 --> 00:06:33,290 discussions and ethnographic study expulsions signified as the undoing of a normative liberal democratic conceptual apparatus normative sorry. 60 00:06:33,290 --> 00:06:42,080 As the domain of liberal political practise closes for Indians and we begin to see new repertoire as a social and political action emerge. 61 00:06:42,080 --> 00:06:51,710 Citizenship becomes unbundled from legal juridical criteria and shifts into performative and moral domains of belonging and identity. 62 00:06:51,710 --> 00:06:56,740 Moreover, by framing expulsion as a critical event. 63 00:06:56,740 --> 00:07:03,790 I aim to interrogate liberal imaginaries of expulsion that market within the domain of a liberalism or the failure of liberal, 64 00:07:03,790 --> 00:07:10,960 democratic, multiracial ism or the failure of citizenship in general following postcolonial scholars, 65 00:07:10,960 --> 00:07:21,040 expulsion is an equally important experiment with decolonisation and the emergence of liberal democratic norms and practises surrounding citizenship. 66 00:07:21,040 --> 00:07:27,930 In effect, the methodological move I make is to shift away from primarily nationalist and liberal framing of Uganda, 67 00:07:27,930 --> 00:07:30,600 Uganda, Asian history and expulsion, 68 00:07:30,600 --> 00:07:41,200 and to argue for attention to the shifting contexts of imperialism, stubborn realism, nation state building, race making and citizenship. 69 00:07:41,200 --> 00:07:47,250 So I'm less interested in thinking about expulsion at an event as a historical construct 70 00:07:47,250 --> 00:07:53,640 that constitutes a rupture or a more sort of conventional historical narrative, 71 00:07:53,640 --> 00:08:00,810 or even the ways in which it's primarily understood through Ugandan Asian experience, although I think that's very important. 72 00:08:00,810 --> 00:08:06,690 I reframe expulsion as a global critical event that lends itself to the study of 73 00:08:06,690 --> 00:08:11,730 the possibilities and limitations of liberal nation building and decolonisation. 74 00:08:11,730 --> 00:08:16,640 But moreover, how everyday people imagine those two projects as well. 75 00:08:16,640 --> 00:08:25,340 Expulsion as global critical event creates analytical and epistemological space to study the insecurities of expulsion and 76 00:08:25,340 --> 00:08:35,240 Afro-Asian entanglements in Uganda and its trans regional geographies by positioning Uganda with an ongoing circuits of Ugandan, 77 00:08:35,240 --> 00:08:41,240 Asian and South Asian migration, mobility, labour and capital, and that local, 78 00:08:41,240 --> 00:08:50,060 regional and trans regional scales of expulsion afterlives, arguing that South Asian, as has always been integral to Ugandan society. 79 00:08:50,060 --> 00:09:00,020 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. 80 00:09:00,020 --> 00:09:05,420 So as I mentioned, the insecurities of expulsion is a multidimensional concept, 81 00:09:05,420 --> 00:09:13,970 a focus here on the performances and practises of citizenship and one that has been constituted by expulsion events in 72. 82 00:09:13,970 --> 00:09:19,460 We came to see the unbundling of abstract liberal notions of citizenship from its contents. 83 00:09:19,460 --> 00:09:26,810 The formal legal juridical dimensions of citizenship came to be disaggregated from the actual steps of citizenship, 84 00:09:26,810 --> 00:09:32,240 substantive citizenship, membership in a political community, a sense of belonging and inclusion. 85 00:09:32,240 --> 00:09:36,860 In this case, national, racial and cultural belonging. In my book, 86 00:09:36,860 --> 00:09:44,180 I signalled this shift from liberal to the post liberal by building on existing scholarship in the anthropology of citizenship 87 00:09:44,180 --> 00:09:52,400 that uses the categories of the non-citizen or non citizenship to critique the substantive inequities that are often normalised, 88 00:09:52,400 --> 00:09:57,740 enshrined through liberal and formal legal juridical notions of citizenship. 89 00:09:57,740 --> 00:10:03,410 I used these concepts of the non-citizen and non citizenship to examine inclusion 90 00:10:03,410 --> 00:10:09,260 that of Naira notes is both within and through conditions of legal impossibility. 91 00:10:09,260 --> 00:10:15,500 As the money Partridge observes and analytic of non citizenship opens up a space for thinking about how 92 00:10:15,500 --> 00:10:22,780 the foreign subject is incorporated into social and political life without being totally excluded. 93 00:10:22,780 --> 00:10:24,850 So building on Professor Amanda, 94 00:10:24,850 --> 00:10:35,470 foundational interventions that decolonisation and post-colonial Africa proceeded on the basis of the de racialisation of urban civil society without 95 00:10:35,470 --> 00:10:40,600 the attendant dismantling of the broader racialisation and native ization 96 00:10:40,600 --> 00:10:46,660 processes inscribed by the colonial state across both urban and rural society. 97 00:10:46,660 --> 00:10:53,530 I continue to emphasise indigenous Ugandan Asian racial exclusion in the post colony, 98 00:10:53,530 --> 00:10:59,050 especially as it is inscribed in legal categories, artefacts and state policies. 99 00:10:59,050 --> 00:11:08,350 However, it's increasingly important to study the non-citizen incorporation of Ugandan Asian returnees and new South Asian migrants in Uganda, 100 00:11:08,350 --> 00:11:17,560 as well as the broader structural forces and modalities of governance and sovereignty that make this non-citizen incorporation possible. 101 00:11:17,560 --> 00:11:25,450 In fact, post-colonial migrations of Ugandan Asians and South Asians in and out of Venetian continued in the post seventy two era. 102 00:11:25,450 --> 00:11:31,030 Successive governments have shifted from policies of Indian racial expulsion to maintaining 103 00:11:31,030 --> 00:11:37,930 racial exclusion and incorporating South Asian heritage subjects as non-citizens in the legal, 104 00:11:37,930 --> 00:11:41,830 juridical, racial and cultural sense. In my research, 105 00:11:41,830 --> 00:11:48,280 I examine the complex terrains of non citizenship that Ugandan Asians and other South Asian migrants 106 00:11:48,280 --> 00:11:56,830 are navigating structurally formal formally as an equal critically but also substantively. 107 00:11:56,830 --> 00:12:03,100 At the same time, I'm interested in their incorporation and access to new kinds of substantive entitlements and privileges, 108 00:12:03,100 --> 00:12:13,930 especially economic in the post expulsion context. I argue that this new kind of this non-citizen incorporation offers a view into post 109 00:12:13,930 --> 00:12:18,850 liberal democratic norms of citizenship and belonging in Uganda and East Africa, 110 00:12:18,850 --> 00:12:24,540 as well as renewed attention to imperialism and decolonisation in this part of the world. 111 00:12:24,540 --> 00:12:31,260 So in terms of evidence, I focus on five examples of non-citizen incorporation. 112 00:12:31,260 --> 00:12:40,290 First, I studied the experiences of states or those Ugandan agents who remained in the nation after a young woman's expulsion order. 113 00:12:40,290 --> 00:12:49,950 I argue that Ameen and his government not only perfected the technology of expulsion to remake national citizenship along racial exclusive lines, 114 00:12:49,950 --> 00:13:00,900 but that after expulsion. You mean government also nurtured a political and social context conducive to the racialised denizens of Ugandan Asian men, 115 00:13:00,900 --> 00:13:11,430 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 116 00:13:11,430 --> 00:13:17,730 non-citizen incorporation of some Ugandan Asians and other migrants who are coming 117 00:13:17,730 --> 00:13:22,860 and joining the new machine examine the ways in which their subjectivities come to 118 00:13:22,860 --> 00:13:28,140 be shaped by their proximity to the state and state bureaucrats and sovereigns. 119 00:13:28,140 --> 00:13:35,220 And I study their claims to Ugandan and African identity and their performances of longing and citizenship, 120 00:13:35,220 --> 00:13:40,680 notably in the oral histories and memories of these expulsion is not narrated 121 00:13:40,680 --> 00:13:45,960 as a rupture and as a critical event that leads to the practises of reality, 122 00:13:45,960 --> 00:13:52,800 economic and political action in which Ugandan Asians and Indians must show 123 00:13:52,800 --> 00:13:58,290 respect and deference to African sovereignty and African sovereign leaders. 124 00:13:58,290 --> 00:14:07,530 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 125 00:14:07,530 --> 00:14:17,880 nation state building projects and forge relationships with the exiled Ugandan Asian diaspora through state led repatriation processes. 126 00:14:17,880 --> 00:14:23,490 I introduced the terms Property Repossession Without Reconciliation, 127 00:14:23,490 --> 00:14:30,570 Citizenship by invitation and Sovereign Authorisation to analyse the repatriation of exiles 128 00:14:30,570 --> 00:14:36,750 or returnees who were conceptualised as rehabilitated moral and economic citizens in 129 00:14:36,750 --> 00:14:43,680 partnership with the NRM to reconstruct the nation in the midst of broader global processes 130 00:14:43,680 --> 00:14:51,120 of structural adjustment liberalisation at the national level and no party democracy. 131 00:14:51,120 --> 00:14:56,220 Although returnees are still structurally, informally legal, genetically non-citizens, 132 00:14:56,220 --> 00:15:06,270 Ugandan post-colonial elites incorporated non-citizen expatriate transnational Ugandan Asians through this new substantive criteria. 133 00:15:06,270 --> 00:15:12,660 Nonetheless, Centre has also maintained racially exclusive notions of African national identity, 134 00:15:12,660 --> 00:15:21,150 while many urban Ugandans continue to assert African sovereignty and racial nationalism during key moments of national crisis. 135 00:15:21,150 --> 00:15:26,160 So Professor Assimilé mentioned Schedule three and that and that is an important 136 00:15:26,160 --> 00:15:31,590 part of the kind of interim project in relation to early 1990s state policy. 137 00:15:31,590 --> 00:15:36,780 As I explore how you got Indonesian returnees claims and disabilities to national citizenship and their 138 00:15:36,780 --> 00:15:44,520 performances of citizenship as they became as they themselves came to be shaped by state and nationalist logic. 139 00:15:44,520 --> 00:15:51,300 Third, I examined the work of post-colonial elites at a state agency called the Uganda Investment Authority 140 00:15:51,300 --> 00:15:57,000 as they labour to recruit foreign direct investment and non-citizen investors from South Asia, 141 00:15:57,000 --> 00:16:06,590 especially Indian diasporic elites. I introduced the term Afro-Asian governance and neo liberal Afro-Asian ism to make 142 00:16:06,590 --> 00:16:11,690 legible state and late capitalist appropriations for regional histories of Afro-Asian 143 00:16:11,690 --> 00:16:16,820 Solidarity's that are circulating across the global south in this era of South-South 144 00:16:16,820 --> 00:16:22,490 cooperation and increasing diplomacy and trade between the Ugandan and Indian nation. 145 00:16:22,490 --> 00:16:26,270 I demonstrate how post-colonial elites fashion the Ugandan, 146 00:16:26,270 --> 00:16:34,940 Asian and new South Asian body politic as investor citizens through moral attachments to South-South or Afro-Asian 147 00:16:34,940 --> 00:16:42,780 Connexions and incorporate them in the nation on the basis of their neoliberal and entrepreneurial identities. 148 00:16:42,780 --> 00:16:48,750 Explorer or explorer citizenship practises amongst a more recent cohort of newcomers, 149 00:16:48,750 --> 00:16:55,140 non-citizen Indian middle class expats and more precarious migrant workers from South Asia. 150 00:16:55,140 --> 00:17:03,060 I assessed the citizenship practises of community elites in the context of this transnational urban proletariat. 151 00:17:03,060 --> 00:17:07,560 I show how elites simultaneously utilise transnational Indian labour, 152 00:17:07,560 --> 00:17:12,090 but also expressed anxieties about labour migrants who display global Indian 153 00:17:12,090 --> 00:17:18,030 diasporic identities and desires rather than Ugandan nationalist commitments. 154 00:17:18,030 --> 00:17:22,800 Community elites wield community and tribal citizenship claims on the state 155 00:17:22,800 --> 00:17:28,350 working to obtain political and racial security despite their non-citizen status. 156 00:17:28,350 --> 00:17:35,310 At the same time, their new contests around Indian and Asian African Community Building initiatives finally examined the 157 00:17:35,310 --> 00:17:41,380 plight of non-citizen Indian migrant women who have settled in urban Uganda and the post expulsion years. 158 00:17:41,380 --> 00:17:47,370 I show that community governance has become the new horizon in managing many of these women's life fortunes, 159 00:17:47,370 --> 00:17:53,820 and I argue that many indigenous Ugandan women activists are making moral claims for non-citizen migrants, 160 00:17:53,820 --> 00:18:00,440 South Asian women's inclusion in the nation, especially to live free from family and community violence. 161 00:18:00,440 --> 00:18:11,150 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 162 00:18:11,150 --> 00:18:16,700 research to argue for the development of an anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements, 163 00:18:16,700 --> 00:18:21,110 as I've laboured in my fieldwork in communities and universities over many years. 164 00:18:21,110 --> 00:18:26,900 I've struggled with making sense of the ethics and politics of knowledge production and making knowledge work, 165 00:18:26,900 --> 00:18:32,570 especially for minority communities that are entangled with each other via these 166 00:18:32,570 --> 00:18:38,930 difficult and complicated legacies of colonial and post-colonial violence and expulsion, 167 00:18:38,930 --> 00:18:43,820 whether in East Africa or in the Western diasporic context. 168 00:18:43,820 --> 00:18:52,580 I dwell with many of my discomforts around the postcolonial closure and political repression surrounding expulsion in Uganda today, 169 00:18:52,580 --> 00:18:56,810 in scholarly work and in the diasporic context that I grew up in. 170 00:18:56,810 --> 00:19:02,360 I connect these silences and discomforts to intellectual closures around the study of 171 00:19:02,360 --> 00:19:08,450 affirmation encounters in global perspective more broadly to the contemporary university, 172 00:19:08,450 --> 00:19:14,690 following Professor and Googie work on Ghost Call to move the centre in our research, scholarship and teaching. 173 00:19:14,690 --> 00:19:18,980 The conclusion of my book assesses the epistemological limitations of the different 174 00:19:18,980 --> 00:19:24,440 fields of study that I've had to navigate in order to develop my research programmes. 175 00:19:24,440 --> 00:19:27,740 I assess the possibilities and limitations of Uganda studies, 176 00:19:27,740 --> 00:19:34,190 especially the anthropology of Uganda studies, African studies and African Diaspora Black Studies, 177 00:19:34,190 --> 00:19:41,810 South Asia, Diaspora, Diaspora Studies and Afro-Asian studies that's typically been framed in the US context. 178 00:19:41,810 --> 00:19:53,060 Ultimately, I define Afro-Asian entanglements as the complex material and affective temporal and spatial scales across racial violence, 179 00:19:53,060 --> 00:20:03,110 interdependency, hierarchy, intimacy and estrangement that bind Africans and South Asian histories, presence and features to each other. 180 00:20:03,110 --> 00:20:08,210 I argue that an anthropology of aspiration entanglements displaces frameworks and research 181 00:20:08,210 --> 00:20:14,120 paradigms that maintain Africans and South Asians within separate domains of study. 182 00:20:14,120 --> 00:20:17,750 Instead, this field creates methodological, conceptual, 183 00:20:17,750 --> 00:20:25,010 theoretical and epistemological tools to study Afro-Asian entanglements in the contemporary university, 184 00:20:25,010 --> 00:20:35,600 potentially ruinous for focus in the study or the study of imperialism, nationalism, citizenship and violence in their ongoing nature. 185 00:20:35,600 --> 00:20:44,870 The study of race and racial formation, particularly race, religion and caste, racial capitalism and under is new work emerging on caste capitalism? 186 00:20:44,870 --> 00:20:52,790 That's really interesting. Gender and feminist approaches to the study of Afro-Asian encounters state appropriations of substance 187 00:20:52,790 --> 00:20:59,450 preparation and Afro-Asian ism and the circulation of intellectual political thought in this region. 188 00:20:59,450 --> 00:21:05,930 So I will just end here, but I'm looking forward to the conversation and happy to talk later on as well. 189 00:21:05,930 --> 00:21:06,730 Thank you.