Book Talk | Anneeth Kaur Hundle - 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 nation by dictatorial decree. In this talk, I argue that this expulsion is a “weighty” historical event and part of an evolving ethnographic and global present. This expulsion is neither exceptional nor parochial, neither a result of primordial Afro-South Asian racial conflict, nor an opening into a redemptive search for Afro-South Asian interracial solidarities. I examine the aftermaths and continuous nature of the expulsion event, exploring 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, what I understand as a politics of racial non-reconciliation. Situating the insecurities of expulsion through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender, and sexuality, the continued dynamics of community, citizenship, and identity in transcontinental Uganda and its diasporas is central to envisioning Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms during shifting imperial, postcolonial, nationalist, and geopolitical times. Ultimately, I argue for stronger attention to transcontinental knowledge production on global Afro-South Asian connections and an anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglement, which shapes many lines of inquiry in anthropology, from methodological to topical. I close by exploring the generative potential of anthropologies of expulsion in relation to the expulsions of undocumented migrants and others deemed as racial noncitizens under the current Trump administration in the US.
About the Speaker:
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has held previous appointments at Makerere University in Uganda, UC Merced and UC Berkeley. She is the author of Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda (Duke University Press, 2025). She currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory. She can be reached at ahundle@uci.edu.
Co-sponsored by the Yale South Asian Studies Council; Council on African Studies; and Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration