In 1972, Ugandan president Idi Amin expelled close to 80,000 South Asians of Ugandan heritage from the nation by dictatorial decree. This talk engages my book, Insecurities of Expulsion, where I argue that this expulsion is a “weighty” historical event and part of an evolving ethnographic and global present. I argue that 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.

Presented by the USC Dornsife Department of Anthropology Colloquiam Series