Current Institutional Affiliation
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witswatersrand

Award Information

International Dissertation Research Fellowship 2011
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan
Histories of an Event: The Ugandan Asian Expulsion of 1972

My research examines the social and intellectual history of the 1972 Asian expulsion from Uganda. My work will focus on the circulation of racial ideas among activists in the preceding decades, race as a political resource in the trading hub of Kabale, and subsequent popular memory of the expulsion. This will help me to trace intellectual currents and forms of governmentality that are critical to racial politics but often erased in structural analyses. I will spend three months conducting ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Kabale, one month working in the National Archives in Entebbe, and eight months pursuing ethnographic and archival work around Kampala. The archives I will explore in Kabale, Entebbe and Kampala all contain material that previously has been inaccessible to scholars. My research will be the culmination of ongoing restoration projects. Finally, I will organize a public photography exhibit, both as a site of memory for Ugandans to reckon with their postcolonial past and as a means with which to elicit responses to visual representations of the expulsion.

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