In Insecurities of Expulsion, Anneeth Kaur Hundle provides a critical and original analysis of the 1972 expulsion of South Asians from Uganda and its aftermath through a careful examination of shifting Black African-South Asian political, economic, and racial entanglements. The expulsion, as Hundle argues, was not an exceptional act of Black nationalism confined to Idi Amin’s Uganda, but a “global critical event” (6) that illuminates broader postcolonial African social formations and carries significance beyond its immediate historical and geographic setting.
This book “de-exceptionalizes and deparochializes” (45) the event in two ways. First, through a wide-ranging engagement with archival and ethnographic materials, Hundle traces the historical and structural conditions that made the expulsion possible. She shows how imperial racial, political, and class hierarchies across India and Uganda—especially a colonial bureaucratic order that positioned Indians as intermediaries above Black Africans, together with class differences in labour relations, Indian Ocean trade, and distinctions of caste and religion—produced entrenched tensions between South Asians and Black Africans in postcolonial Uganda. In this account, anti-colonial politics in independent Uganda came to be articulated through racialized resentment and expulsion directed at the South Asian community.
Second, drawing on long-term fieldwork and affective engagement with Ugandan Asians who remained after the expulsion or later returned, Hundle offers a nuanced account of the event amid mass property expropriation, security-seeking, and later repatriation and repossession. She captures the precarious and ambivalent states of being “Asian” among remainees and returnees, who were included on an exceptional basis and later welcomed for business interests while still racially excluded from full national membership. The expulsion emerges not as a closure but as “a persistent opening” (94) in the ongoing remaking of “Asian” in relation to citizenship, nationality, and sovereignty in post-expulsion Uganda.
Drawing on ethnographic research at the Uganda Investment Authority, Hundle further shows how “Asian” has been favorably renarrated and actively incorporated by the Ugandan state as it has pursued new geopolitical alliances and development strategies since the 2000s. Under what she terms “neoliberal Afro-Asianism,” an ideological and bureaucratic formation, Indian migrant labor, capital, and the post-expulsion diaspora became desirable agents of development. In the process, the ideal foreign investor became racialized as “Asian,” especially Indian and Chinese, while “Asian” itself was reframed as “wealthy Indian capitalist diaspora” (188) and expanded into a pan-Asian category detached from the history of expulsion. As one interview suggests, Ugandan Asian investors were valued for the “political and racial sensitivity” (189) shaped by that history. In this way, the expulsion was reworked within projects of national rebranding and development imagination.
By placing Afro-Asian racial entanglements at the center of its analysis, the book makes an important intervention in postcolonial studies, where racialized relations among nonwhite populations have often remained insufficiently examined. At the same time, Hundle shows that the ongoing racial incorporation of “Asian”—a selective and instrumental accommodation driven by political and neoliberal techniques rather than substantive social integration—generated new inequalities without resolving the deeper insecurities produced by expulsion, leaving this status desirable but fragile and conditional.
Yet the book is more compelling in staking out this terrain than in developing a new conceptual language for studying race and racialization in the Global South. Such a language would need to capture the ongoing, relational reproduction of racial categories and negotiations of inequalities in South–South encounters—shaped by colonial history and global racial capitalism, but not reducible to them—and resist frameworks, such as global anti-Blackness, that risk universalizing racial logics derived from the Black Atlantic experience. This limitation stems largely from the book’s emphasis on the global dimensions of racial formation, which comes at the cost of everyday local improvisation, contestation, and relational practices through which racial meanings are made and unmade. Also, as the monograph focuses on Ugandan Asian trajectories and state practice, the popular sentiments and moral judgments of ordinary Black Ugandans, surrounding both the historical event and contemporary inequalities, remain less fully developed. Hundle’s rich material calls for concepts that take seriously the local creativity, vernacular practices, and contingent negotiations in East African and South Asian contexts specifically. A similar concern applies to the gendered dimensions of the analysis: while the attention to women is valuable, gender at times appears as an additional angle rather than a fully integrated analytic.
Overall, it is an important and impactful anthropological study. At a moment when the global order is undergoing profound transformation, the study of racial formation in the Global South is especially urgent and calls for sustained, collaborative intellectual work. Hundle’s book opens a significant line of inquiry by demonstrating both the importance of race in South–South encounters and one productive way of doing so: through historical analysis, ethnographic attention to the diverse and precarious experiences of Ugandan Asians, and critical examination of state practice. The book would, however, have benefited from a more explicit comparative framing, whether through a juxtaposition with Kenya or through attention to other racially marked Global South investors, such as the Chinese. Even so, Insecurities of Expulsion makes a substantial contribution to debates on race, citizenship, and identity in postcolonial Africa and transcontinental encounters in the Global South.
