your theoretical and conceptual work around diaspora?
AB I was born in India, but I was five years old when I went to Africa. So I grew up in Uganda. I was in Uganda until I did my A levels. Then I went to America; I was in California, where I did my undergraduate degree, then Wisconsin, where I did my Master’s. This was about the time when Idi Amin was coming to power. I was in Britain, on my way back to Uganda, when the Idi Amin edict was issued8 – and even though I was a Ugandan citizen, I couldn’t go back. So I was stateless for about five years in Britain, until I became a citizen. (In those days, after five years you applied for naturalisation.) Hence, I’ve lived in all these different countries, and diaspora is very much part and parcel of my life experience. The things we’ve been talking about – SBS, other politics around racism, around class and so on – all those are very much part and parcel of my life.
My analysis has always been informed by my political activism, and vice versa. I think the two have gone together. So the concept of ‘diaspora space’, for example, emerged out of thinking through different life experiences and how to theorise about them, how to analyse them.
BB/RZ We wanted to follow up with the question of belonging and your work on belonging. The Indigenous Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson draws our attention to the fact that the conjoined twin of belonging is exclusion,9 which may sound obvious, but she points out how that often gets lost in the discourse on belonging. Lauren Berlant formulated this nicely: ‘Just because we are in the room together does not mean that we belong to the room or each other: belonging is a specific genre of affect, history, and political mediation that cannot be presumed and is, indeed, a relation whose evidence and terms are always being contested.’10 We were wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your understanding of the discourse of belonging and how that has been useful to your thinking on migration and diaspora?
AB I think, in fact, that what these two scholars say is very important. I do find the notion of belonging compelling, because without a sense of belonging, however contested and fractured it might be, you are vulnerable as an outsider – not just physically, but psychologically and psychically, as well. If we don’t feel any sense of belonging, we become quite dispersed, scattered beings. To have some sense of togetherness, of psychic coherence, means we have to have a sense of belonging – to our siblings, our families, our friends, our political allies, our ‘imagined communities’ as well as others that form our lifeworld. The point that Moreton-Robinson and Berlant are making is that the flip side of belonging is exclusion. Belonging only makes sense because there is exclusion. Histories of racism, class hierarchy and heteronormativity, for instance, tell us which groups, under what conditions, have belonged or been excluded.
Apart from being predicated against the socioeconomic, political and cultural landscape, belonging is also very much part of the affective domain. These different aspects need to be held together. But we always need to be aware – it’s like when Stuart Hall talks about the concept of ‘identity’, and he says that it’s a term without which he cannot do, but at the same time it’s a term that he’s continually interrogating. I think ‘belonging’ is such a term. You can’t do without it, but you have to always question how it is being evoked, always remain aware how it is being used and how a sense of belonging, or a sense of alienation, is being played out. Those two may go together. If you don’t feel a sense of belonging, you may become alienated. What kinds of social, political and cultural conditions favour alienation and anomie as opposed to a sense of belonging, a sense of well-being?
I would think of it that way, to be aware of those social issues alongside the sense that it gives you a feeling of being a part of something. A sense of affirmation.
BB/RZ I think you mentioned somewhere that a feeling of being at home is one way of describing what belonging is. Because for those of us who have moved around a lot or have come from families who were also immigrant families, migrant families, refugee families, it’s quite difficult to grasp what ‘belonging’ actually means. For many of us, the feeling of not belonging is what becomes familiar and even a primary psychic default position. What does belonging actually look like, and what does it mean?
AB It is a sense of feeling at home, isn’t it?
BB Yes, I think that’s why I recalled that. Because I thought, okay, that’s an interesting way to think about what it means to belong – feeling at home somewhere
RZ From a Palestinian perspective, for example, when home is a colonised space you are not allowed to return to – the struggle is to hold on to return, but also your rights and new belonging where you have ended up.
AB There’s always a tension. I remember thinking about this when I first came here. At first, you feel you’re in a new place; you don’t feel at home at all. But then there comes a time when you do begin to feel at home, but you may not necessarily be seen by the dominant group as belonging. That is why affect and the psyche are implicated in all of that. It’s also having that psychic strength to be able to say, ‘I now feel at home, and I’m going to contest you who say I’m not at home.’ To have that strength is very important. Political activism gives that collective strength, and our loved ones give us the personal strength. So it is a contest all the time. Because even now, I’ve been here twenty-odd years, more than that, but there are people who still think I’m an outsider. But I feel quite at home down here in London, and I challenge the processes that construct me as an outsider. But you’re absolutely right – it’s always contested, disputed, and how you feel does not necessarily reflect how others see you.
BB/RZ In Cartographies of Diaspora, you explore how the new Europe has been constituted juridically, legally, politically, economically and culturally, through race, class and gender. You make an intervention into the discourse of new racisms by showing how the racisms that emerged in Britain in the context of debates over the EU are informed by the New Right. This relates back to our earlier discussion about how terms like ‘nation’ and ‘people’ were used by Thatcher against trade unions and the working class and so-called welfare scroungers.
Alongside the austerity policies and politics that have saturated the UK and also the EU in the last decade, what differences do you perceive between the eighties and nineties, and this current moment? You mentioned Powellism and Thatcher and the language of the swarm, which came back, of course, in Cameron’s comments on refugees. We were wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about some of the similarities or differences you see between that earlier moment and what’s happening today?
AB Well, I suppose the linguistic content can sometimes be very similar. Often, immigrant groups are represented as dirty, as inherently different, as other. There’s a recursivity about ways in which certain groups are described and othered. But what changes is the broader social context, and I think that has changed hugely, if you look back at the eighties. In economic terms the situation for some groups, such as the precariat class in the gig economy, has worsened. But also the global scene has changed so much with all the wars, ever since the war in Iraq and the Gulf in 1990. We’ve had several other wars since. The rise of the Islamic State as well, and the ways in which the securitisation discourses and practices have come to the fore since 9/11, for instance. All of these have actually changed the world enormously. So, the racism of which we speak has never been one racism. We talk about Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism, which is a very specific racism. Similarly, we talk about racism that is directed at asylum seekers and refugees; that is another one. And, of course, anti-Semitism, as well as the racism that is directed at the so-called economic migrants, or against people of colour; these are all distinct forms of racism.
Even the refugees are not accepted to any great degree in Britain. Turkey and Pakistan have taken millions of refugees, and here in Britain
