AFIAfrican Feminist Initiative

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 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. She 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. In this talk, Anneeth highlights her use of feminist anthropology and feminist approaches in the book by studying Afro-Asian entanglements in transcontinental Uganda beyond the usual lenses of race, ethnicity and class to focus on patriarchies, religion, caste, gender, and sexuality as well. Ultimately, she argues for stronger attention to knowledge production on global Afro-South Asian connections and the continued dynamics of gender, 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.