Indian Ugandan, African Asian, or Both?: Community-Building, Community Citizenship, and Culture and Indigeneity Available to Purchase

The chapter examines the insecurities of expulsion through African Asian and Indian Ugandan community-building practices, focusing on contestations surrounding ideas and practices of racial difference, social integration, community, and culture, as transnational Ugandan Asian stayees, returnees, and post-1990s South Asian entrepreneurs and migrants remake their livelihoods and homes in urban Uganda. Postcolonial and transnational Ugandan state projects of “Asian” racialization and citizenship shape the ways that contemporary Asian (African Asian and new South Asian) community leaders participate in racialization practices and both formal and informal community-building practices—themselves necessary for making citizenship claims on the state, and for internal community governance and the welfare of the community members. Examining critical moments of community crisis and heightened race consciousness in contemporary Kampala, the author shows how these practices can facilitate social integration and cross-racial and cultural understanding, or conversely, reassert racial, ethno-religious, and caste-based communal endogamies, segregation, and hierarchy.