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.
Anneeth Kaur Hundle
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Editorial Reviews
“In this detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive study, Anneeth Kaur Hundle develops a complicated picture of South Asian presence, inclusion, and exclusion in contemporary Uganda that grapples not only with the 1972 expulsion but its articulation through different regimes and global economic shifts in capitalism. She offers a rare look at race and racialization in Africa and the Indian Ocean region that goes beyond colonialism or South Africa. In this way, Hundle paves a new path to think about race, imperialism, and capitalism.”
—Bettina Ng'weno, author of Turf Wars: Territory and Citizenship in the Contemporary State
“In Insecurities of Expulsion, Anneeth Kaur Hundle skillfully demonstrates how the 1972 Asian expulsion event in Uganda lingers discursively, affectively, and ideologically across various publics, reproducing racialized diasporic subjectivities, nativist nationalisms, and Eurocentric narratives about the 'illiberal' African state. This is pathbreaking work that reconfigures anthropology away from its enduring area studies preoccupations and toward a transnational and imperial accounting.”
—Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, New York University