As part of the Spring 2025 Aurora Lecture Series and the Cultural Studies Colloquium, we welcome Anneeth Kaur Hundle, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine, for her lecture entitled “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 country by dictatorial decree. This talk 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. The talk 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. It describes Afro-Asian entanglements in transcontinental Uganda through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender, and sexuality, arguing for stronger attention to knowledge production on global Afro-South Asian connections and the continued dynamics of 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. Finally, the talk examines the significance of global anthropologies of expulsion in relation to the ongoing contemporary mass expulsions under the Trump regime in the US.citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning contemporary Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms.

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 trained in anthropology and gender studies at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has previously held appointments at UC Berkeley, UC Merced, and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Hundle has recently published Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda (Duke University Press, 2025), an anthropological examination of citizenship and the ambivalent politics and processes of racial nonreconciliation in post-Asian expulsion Uganda and the study of scholarly and epistemological expulsions from the contemporary university. She has also published in several peer-reviewed journals, including American Anthropologist, Public Culture, and Critical Ethnic Studies, and is currently working on a book project on Sikh and Punjabi and Black and Afro-Diasporic encounters that engages with her interests in Sikhism and global South Asian and African diasporas, critical religious and secularism studies; race, religion, caste, labor-capital relations, gender and sexuality; feminist anthropology and critical university studies. At UCI Anthropology, she has led Sikh Studies and Punjabi language program-building and many other initiatives, including the Sikh feminisms working group from 2020-2022. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory.

Co-sponsored with the Aurora Endowment for Sikh Studies.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210. Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.