Towards Understanding Contemporary African Diasporas: Bringing Race and Decolonisation In

This year’s Fage Lecture will be given by Dr Dominic Pasura, University of Glasgow.  

Few contemporary topics are more pertinent in the UK and globally than those concerning migration and diasporas and their impact on both the countries they move to and the ones they leave behind. Dr Pasura’s lecture will seek to enhance our understanding of the migration processes and experiences of contemporary African diasporas by incorporating race and decolonisation into the literature on diaspora.

Even though race and forms of coloniality shape transnational migration processes and experiences, these factors are often silenced, ignored or absent from the diaspora literature and migration studies as a whole. The concept of diaspora and its social and historical implications are usually approached through a Eurocentric lens, which embraces integration into Western societies as normative.

Dr Pasura will draw on the decolonial approach and use his research on the Zimbabwean diaspora to emphasise the importance of viewing contemporary African diasporas through the lenses of history, context, relationality and African agency. The lecture will examine how and in what ways contemporary African diasporas in Britain organise and mobilise in the face of "otherness," racial structures and a hostile environment. In doing so, Dr Pasura will position race, racism and colonialism at the centre of the lived experiences and cross-border practices of contemporary African diasporas. 

• Register for the online Zoom link

This event is organised by the Department of African Studies and Anthropology (DASA) in collaboration with the Birmingham Institute for History and Cultures (BRIHC).