The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging (Politics of Citizenship and Migration) 3031387961, 9783031387968

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POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP AND MIGRATION

The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging Edited by Benjamin Maiangwa

Politics of Citizenship and Migration Series Editor

Leila Simona Talani Department of European and International Studies King’s College London London, UK

The Politics of Citizenship and Migration series publishes exciting new research in all areas of migration and citizenship studies. Open to multiple approaches, the series considers interdisciplinary as well political, economic, legal, comparative, empirical, historical, methodological, and theoretical works. Broad in its coverage, the series promotes research on the politics and economics of migration, globalization and migration, citizenship and migration laws and policies, voluntary and forced migration, rights and obligations, demographic change, diasporas, political membership or behavior, public policy, minorities, border and security studies, statelessness, naturalization, integration and citizen-making, and subnational, supranational, global, corporate, or multilevel citizenship. Versatile, the series publishes single and multi-authored monographs, short-form Pivot books, and edited volumes. For an informal discussion for a book in the series, please contact the series editor Leila Simona Talani ([email protected]), or Palgrave editor Isobel Cowper-Coles ([email protected]). This series is indexed in Scopus.

Benjamin Maiangwa Editor

The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging

Editor Benjamin Maiangwa Department of Political Science Lakehead University Thunder Bay, ON, Canada

ISSN 2520-8896     ISSN 2520-890X (electronic) Politics of Citizenship and Migration ISBN 978-3-031-38796-8    ISBN 978-3-031-38797-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Book cover artwork by Jerry Buhari. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Prologue

Let’s go on a quest … To break free from the incarcerating ideology that our differences cannot co-exist in a space of unity. On a quest … To acknowledge humanity as a relational experience beyond the realm of singularity. On a quest … Through the fields of racial, ethnic, and cultural identity, to fully embrace one another unconditionally. On a quest … To understand that we each carry so much more similarity, you, me, them, him, she … all yearning for inclusivity. Come join me on a quest … That will pull us closer to the oneness of humanity, without us denying the beauty of our diversity. —Catherine M. Wafula

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Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to Alfred Kiadii and Nkasiobichukwu Ruth Nweke for research and editorial assistance. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of colleagues in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Lakehead University: Antony Puddephatt, Kevin Brooks, Patrick Cain, Toby Rollo, and Betsy Birmingham. Especial thanks to Karthika Devi Ravikumar and Anne-­Kathrin Birchley-Brun at Palgrave Macmillan. My heartfelt appreciation goes to the contributing authors.

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Praise for The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging “A rich and reflective collection. Foregrounding diasporic and multinational identities, expressions of home and belongingness, The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging acknowledges and challenges post/colonial projects of displacement and division. Maiangwa and his contributors weave together personal narrative, lived experience, interdisciplinary research and resistance. This exemplifies and will inspire a humane and spiritual scholarship of difference of the very sort we need, nurturing connectedness and knowledge bridging.” —Gillian Anderson, Professor of Sociology, Vancouver Island University

Contents

1 The  Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging  1 Benjamin Maiangwa Part I Identity, Coloniality and Home  21 2 Can  We Forgo Our Attachments to Socially Constructed Identities? 23 Sabena Singh 3 On  Names, Labels, and Colonial Amnesia 45 Christiane Ndedi Essombe 4 The  Unresolved Crisis of Belonging in African Literature: A Reflection 63 Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba 5 Being  and Becoming “African” in the Postcolony 79 Benjamin Maiangwa and Christiane Ndedi Essombe

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Part II Diaspora, Race, and Immigration 109 6 Notes  on the Nervous Condition of Black and African Immigrants in Canada111 Ademola Adesola 7 The  Geo-cultural Politics of Space and the Poetics of Race129 Dominic James Aboi 8 Exiting  Whiteness and Patriarchy: Embracing Oneness, Breaking Free of Incarcerating Ideologies, and Enabling Pathways to Belonging153 Chuck Egerton Part III Belonging: Cross-cutting Issues 175 9 Migrant  Women’s (Non)Belonging in Pandemic Times: An Intersectional Analysis of Home/Land177 Anoosh Soltani and Holly Thorpe 10 How Social Enterprise Can Facilitate the Inclusion of Highly Skilled Newcomers to Canada199 Ireoluwatomi Oloke 11 Racialized  Skilled Immigrants in the Canadian Labour Market223 Alka Kumar 12 On  Blackness and Related Subjects: Concluding Conversation245 Ademola Adesola, Adey Mohamed, Christiane Ndedi Essombe, and Benjamin Maiangwa  Spider Web and Dew Drops265 Laure Paquette Index269

Notes on Contributors

Dominic James Aboi  teaches English and Creative Writing in the Department of

English and Literary Studies, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Kaduna State. His research interests are in the Novel; Shakespeare and His Contemporaries; Advanced Creative Writing; East, Central and Southern African Poetry; African and African American Literature and Critical Theory. He has been at work on a novel that interrogates the wounds of history with regard to transnational communities, immigration, gender, and postcolonial relationships between the once colonized and their colonizers.  Department of English & Literary Studies, Faculty of Arts, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria Ademola Adesola  is an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures, Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada. Ademola’s research and teaching interests are Postcolonial Studies, African/Black Diaspora Literatures, Child Soldier Narratives, War and Literature, Popular Culture, and Human Rights Issues. Ademola has published essays and book chapters on African literature and sociopolitical issues. Ademola’s current project is on Representations of Child Soldiers in African Narratives.  Department of English, Languages, and Cultures, Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba  is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. His teaching and research interests focus broadly on African and Black/African diaspora xiii

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literatures. Anyaduba is the author of The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests for Meaningfulness (Liverpool University Press, 2021).  University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, MB, Canada Chuck  Egerton  is an educator, photographer, and Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) practitioner, trained and experienced as a visual artist and in the art of conflict transformation. His BFA (1978) in drawing and painting is from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and his MA (2013) in Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) is from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. He completed his Ph.D. in PACS from the University of Manitoba in 2020.  Parallel with his twenty-five-year career teaching photography and six years as a lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at UNC Greensboro, he has worked to design and direct arts-based dialogue and photographic projects delving into racism, whiteness, and patriarchy, and knowing self—all to seek social justice and human oneness based on his commitment to the Bahá’í Faith. Egerton’s Ph.D. dissertation is titled: “Being and Becoming: A Photographic Inquiry with Bahá’í Men into Cultures of Peace.” His research asked participants to take an inner journey of exploration and self-discovery to uncover the masculinity most suited to equality using a new method he created called PhotoSophia. PhotoSophia (light and wisdom) is a real-time interview/ portraiture (photo elicitation) technique that asks participants to study their own portrait during an in-depth interview and inscribe it with expressions of weeding out toxic divisive qualities and cultivating qualities of belonging and oneness within diversity.  Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA Alka  Kumar  is a Research Fellow at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration program at Toronto Metropolitan University. With education and work experience in the humanities and in literary studies, migration, and peace studies. Her work lives between research and practice, spanning across sectors, with focus on social justice and equity, inclusion and capacity building for racialized communities. She also teaches Business English, Communication Skills and Conflict Resolution in Bridging Programs; and she writes op-eds and blogs, reports and articles on related topics. Alka also works with organizations, contributing to the objective of developing frameworks that build leadership potential so community-led initiatives can flourish, and inclusion structures for families and cultural communities may be strengthened. Alka is

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also a member of the senior leadership team at the Coalition for Manitoba Cultural Communities for Families (CMCCF), where she works in a strategic role, helping to envision, design, and facilitate a range of community engagements and learning events.  Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada Benjamin  Maiangwa  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada. Maiangwa’s projects use storytelling, action research, and critical ethnography to explore notions of contested belonging, mobility, and how people experience conflict and peace in everyday life.  Department of Political Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada Adey  Mohamed  is a social worker, community researcher, and a PhD candidate in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manitoba. She works at Aurora family therapy as Newcomer Mental health facilitator. Her areas of research interests include interethnic conflict, indigenous peacebuilding, and contemporary African peacebuilding approaches.  Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada Christiane Ndedi Essombe  (she/her) holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Montreal School of Public Health. She has worked with various communities such as people with albinism in Tanzania, migrating people at the US/Mexico border, survivors of the Colombian armed conflict and refugee claimants in Montreal. She has been involved in anti-racism work for over 7 years and is currently completing a PhD in Psychology at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on interrogating Negrophobia in African contexts and its link with contemporary racial identities on the continent, appropriated racial oppression and aspirations to whiteness.  Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa Ireoluwatomi  Oloke is an independent researcher working on the potential of social enterprise to address certain forms of economic inequality. She earned her Ph.D. in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manitoba and has a Master’s degree in Political Studies from the same university. Her interests are in social enterprise, critical political economy, socio-economic inequality and exclusion, and locally owned

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peacebuilding. In her spare time, she provides consulting services to a non-profit that serves black Canadian youth.  Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada Laure  Paquette (B.SC.  Soc.  [Ottawa] 1984, PC [ENAP], 1986, Ph.D. [Queen’s], 1993) help people get what they want when they have no power and no money. She has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, at Bar-Ilan University, at the National Institute of Defense Studies of Japan, the National Defense College of the Republic of Korea, the National Defense University of the People’s Liberation Army, People’s Republic of China, the Japan Forum on International Relations, at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, and was Adjunct Professor at Queen’s Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Medicine. She has been an Associate Fellow of Joint Special Operations University’s Department of Strategic Studies (US Special Operations Command) and has advised the Pentagon on air force doctrine and military education. She is the author of Strategic Intervention, More Strategic Activism, Political Strategy and Tactics, Security for the Pacific Century, NATO and Eastern Europe After 2000, Political Strategy and Tactics Workbook, Bioterrorism and Medical and Healthcare Administration, among others. Paquette was for twenty years a political commentator and has also published two novels of a six-­ novel cycle currently in preparation. She is represented for her visual art by Anishinaabe Art Gallery. Her art features in several permanent public and private collections, including her extensive photography at Lakehead University.  Department of Political Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada Sabena Singh  is completing a PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Arthur V.  Mauro Institute for Peace & Justice at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She has scholarly and personal interests in decolonization, non-violence, and spiritual approaches and practices to peace and peace research. She holds a B.Ed and M.Ed from the University of Manitoba, where her topics of interest included anti-racist education, immigration, program planning, and social and public policies.  She has worked in the field of adult education for over 20 years with experience in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Canada. In addition to teaching, she also served as the Education Director for an adult literacy program, a Curriculum Consultant for Intercultural Teaching and Learning at Red

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River College, both in Winnipeg, Canada. She is currently employed at Indspire as Program Coordinator for an Indigenous Teacher Education Program in Winnipeg, Canada.  Sabena has also been offered His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal Peace and Conflict Studies Graduate Fellowship (April 2021);  Senator Murray Sinclair Peace and Conflict Studies Graduate Scholarship (Sept 2019);  and Kanee Mauro Scholars Fellowship (August 2018).  Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada Anoosh Soltani,  Ph.D., is a social and cultural geographer, with expertise in the areas of feminism, geography, migration, the body, and wellbeing. Her research interests centre on the challenges and spatial complexities of inequality at the intersection of culture, religion, and gender.  Geography, Environmental Planning, Tourism Studies| Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences | Te Kura Kete Aronui, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Holly Thorpe  is Professor of Gender and Sport in Te Huataki Waiora School of Health at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a feminist sociologist with a focus on the entanglements of gender, bodies, movement, culture, health, and wellbeing.  Te Huataki Waiora - School of Health, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Catherine M. Wafula  received her B.Sc. degree in Psychology from the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 2017 and a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the Arthur V.  Mauro Institute for Peace & Justice at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, in 2022. She currently works as a human rights and mental health advocate for numerous organizations across Canada and East Africa, where she provides research consultation and develops programs that address refugees’ mental health needs with the goal of promoting holistic wellbeing of the refugee community. Her current research interests include exploring the challenges of the resettlement process and socio-cultural barriers that refugees encounter in their new homes and its impact on their overall wellbeing.  Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

CHAPTER 1

The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging Benjamin Maiangwa

Introduction What would you be if you were not a citizen or resident of your country, a member of your family, community, or racial category? Who will you be without any form of conjectured identity? I have grappled with these questions since my childhood in Nigeria, where I had observed with much bewilderment how in a generally “black” country, people are still condemned for how darker—hence ugly—they were compared to their lighter-skin or ostensibly more good-looking peers. This condemnation often felt to me like an indictment of ipseity. What gave me a better perspective on this issue was the understanding that dignity was sui generis and that people’s racial attitude toward one another was not necessarily an ingrained practice, a blind atavistic urge. The attitude is a product of the fundamental attribution error that describes how we cast aspersions on

B. Maiangwa (*) Department of Political Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_1

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others based on our “impulsive cognitive bias that leads us to see the behaviour of others as emanating from some underlying essence—who the person is—rather than from the situation that they are in” (Cohen, 2022: 107). This attribution error is also fundamentally a product of the colonial logic—emanating from both precolonial and colonial conflicts around the borders of race, caste, religion, and ethnicity. It is a politics of an orchestrated notion of a master-slave mentality; it breeds lateral violence among a colonized people who are entrapped in the bigoted consciousness of their own making and of an inherited and internalized violence with all its lies about the human nature reduced largely to the prototype of Black and White. Richard Wright explains this condition of lateral violence in his autobiography, Black Boy, thus: “Being an organic part of the culture that hated him, the black man [sic] grew to hate in himself, that which others hated in him” (Wright, 2020: 266). Repulsed by the obsession with the skin color or blackness at home, I realized that my identity as a Black man was also considered a fait accompli in other parts of the world. Among other things, I have been suffused with the celebratory idea that Black people have internalized about their beauty and strength, expressed in such trite slogans as “Black is beautiful,” or “Black is powerful.” I could not help but to think that such slogans are unnecessary defense of my humanity that disparage my own real and unchanging essence. I understand that many enslaved Africans who went into the Transatlantic slave trade, emerged in the “New World” among other places in the Caribbean islands as Black people. Their enslavers went into the same world and became White or “Whited” (see Chap. 8). To survive, the enslaved had to transform their enforced Black identity to contend with servitude and obtain their freedom. It is, therefore, arguable that patterns of transformative relations and development have emerged from this notion of “blackness.” However, the transformation of the Black people in the New World meant they could only be Black-Americans or African-Americans as opposed to just being Americans. This reality, according to Howard French (2021: 3), is “one of numerous examples in a centuries-long process of diminishment, trivialization, and erasure of Africans and of people of African descent from the story of the modern world.” To be sure, “there’s still a huge attempt to keep the words American and America white and to hyphenate Black Americans as a category, an offshoot, an accessory of the dominant group” (Williams, 2021: 144). But as James Baldwin argues, Black-Americans

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“have no other experience besides their experience on the continent [North America] and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet remains to be embraced” (Baldwin, 1955: 43). Thus, although “Blacks were the catalyst that made an American society possible” (French, 2021: 143), they are a “catalyst that for the most part went selectively unabsorbed in the mixing process. Their … persistent relegation to limited and secondary roles … served to create and to elevate whiteness, producing a legacy that we have powerfully suffered from and still struggle to emerge from today” (French, 2021: 143). The Black person, though an organic part of the New World, “is excluded by the entire tide and direction of American culture … Our America … hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness” (Wright, 2020: 272–3). America, argues Wright (2020), must “probe into its most fundamental beliefs” or be perpetually confronted by the paradox of its civilization. As my journey wore on the razor edge of identity markers, I would ponder about the difference between being “Black” at home and being “Black” abroad and ask whether these are necessarily different appellations in which one denotes criminality and an obnoxious existential flaw at home and the other signifies a unique, even hubristic, identity marker of a triumphant people abroad. My conclusion was simply that whether I was Black at “home” or “Black” abroad, these epithets represent two sides of the same coin; and so often, both epithets are garbed in the subtleties of racial innuendos. I believe the nervousness I had observed among people who carry this imposed sense of self in my neighbourhood also shares some similitude to the situation of other groups or individuals in the Postcolony and settler states. For example, I have wondered about the labels that have been used to define a complex and dynamic people in Africa, North America, New Zealand, and Australia. Some of these labels include “Indigenous,” “tribal nations,” “Aboriginals,” “Natives,” “First Nations,” “Red Indians,” “Inuit,” “Métis,” and so on. When applied to Africa, notions like “Indigenous” or “Natives” take on a whole new meaning that borders on cultural essentialism and ignores the problematic arbitrarily drawn colonial borders which, oftentimes, mean little to the everyday life of the people. This volume explores how questions about home and belonging have been framed in different conflict and political science discourses on race, migration, and social relationships. It does this with the aim of envisioning

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alternative modes of living that question the legacy of colonization and constructed identities such as “blackness,” “whiteness,” and “people of colour” (see Chap. 2). It aims to exit these categories of difference (without denying the dignity of difference) and transform human relations beyond our materialistic political economy. The contributions in the volume seek to expand the frontiers of research in the social sciences on the various processes of exclusionary violence— particularly as it affects diasporic and other minority populations—arising from our innate disposition to belong to something, someone, or someplace. This reality is ever more pertinent as we contend with unprecedented planetary changes such as health pandemic, global warming, racial and conventional warfare, and other debilitating crises tearing at the core of our capacity to recognize sameness and difference in one another. These crises underscore the importance to rethink a new post-modern consciousness for the attainment of the “Good Life” within a “re-balanced world order” (Jallani-Rabbani, 2020). Some traces of this consciousness can be seen in how certain people—particularly among the global subaltern community with their expansive notion of rights and justice—are embracing a geocentric global identity and challenging exclusionary notions of ethnicity and nation. However, this renewed progress in human relations, transnational belonging, and cohabitation appears to be skewed in one direction. More and more people are becoming citizens of or settling in countries in the global North than the South. The attraction to the global North seems to derive from the drive to become more like the colonizers and to transcend certain socio-economic and racial barriers in the Postcolony and the White metropoles—barriers tied to the fundamentals of the Good Life as conceived in our “I-it” or thing-oriented capitalist economy (hooks, 2001). Global capitalism roams without passport (Jallani-Rabbani, 2020), creating boundless opportunities and problems as people struggle to realize their human potentials in a fragile planet. This transnationalism is somewhat tempered by the recurrence of celebratory nationalism, border politics, and ethnocentrism in different parts of the world, which is proving defiant to the globe-spanning connections and web of civil solidarity forming in several geopolitical spaces (Schiller, 2018; Jallani-Rabbani, 2020). Within this milieu, nationalists “identify non-nationals as the source of deteriorating life conditions and mobilize people against them” (Jallani-Rabbani, 2020: 6).

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Nationalism and obsessive populist policies mobilize the border patrol officers, custom officers, and gendarmes like the ones in Belgium that suffocated Semira Adamu by pressing her head against a cushion on September 22, 1998, “in accordance with state-imposed expulsion techniques” (CADTM, 2018) of undocumented immigrants. Non-nationals who constitute the migrant community are victims to the violence of political hardliners and racist immigration officials (see Chap. 6) preoccupied with the “security threat of the immigrant” (Schiller, 2018). Kocijan and Kukec (2022) claim that some European members of parliaments who hold pessimistic views about the future of their country, and those who prioritize social security over economic competitiveness, tend to advance stronger anti-immigration attitudes. These politicians and their supporters might also be influenced by the Great Replacement theory which holds that nonWhite people are reversing the trends of racism in ways that might be injurious to the Whites. This kind of thinking may partly account for such extreme right-wing policies associated with Trumpism and Brexit (Al-Solaylee, 2021). Some personal anecdotes may foreground this crisis of non-nationalist belonging, particularly as it disproportionately affects the mobile subaltern in search of a home. On my first visit to South Africa in 2008, having endured the stress of the visa application process, an immigration officer intercepted me at the airport in Johannesburg, asking: “Did you bring cocaine today?” I was in complete shock and only managed to retort: “I do not know what you are talking about.” The enthusiasm of my new adventure in the country almost worn off. At the expiration of my initial study visa, I applied for a renewal and was denied. According to the visa processing officer of the South Africa Home Affairs, “my study pathing contradicts.” I had just finished a philosophy degree and secured admission to study political science at another university in South Africa. I eventually left the country to further my studies elsewhere. Paradoxically, as at the time I left South Africa for pastures new, my overall experience felt like I had been part of a community with the most fulfilling sense of solidarity. My experience is certainly not unique, and people of other races could have a similar story in uncharted territories. But it is pertinent to draw this vital example from South Africa to look at it as a microcosm of the many challenges individuals travelling as migrants to places other than their “home” countries or places of origin are facing or are likely to face across the world. For whether in South Africa, the United States, Belgium, the

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UK, and elsewhere, the outsider or migrant remains, in the words of Franz Fanon, the “wretched of the earth.” In April 2022, for instance, the UK and Rwandan governments signed a deal to send boat migrants to Rwanda to await the processing of their refugee claims. The UK Prime Minister noted that “the deal could potentially see Rwanda resettle tens of thousands of people in the years ahead” (Aljazeera, 2022). UK may be borrowing this psychologically inhumane practice from Australia, a country with decades-long policy of intercepting migrants and asylum seekers before they reach Australia’s coast and abandoning them in Papua New Guinea where they stay for years awaiting the processing of their refugee claims by the Australian authorities. Australia and UK are some of the “Advanced Nations” in the world who are constantly preaching adherence to human rights and respect for the dignity of persons, yet they treat the refugee migrant as non-beings. This reality, coupled with the spree of deportation of “illegal migrants” such as Black Jamaicans who have settled in the UK for more than 50 years, “completes a cycle of exploitation that began with enslavement, peaked with colonization, and continued with forced repatriation” (Al-Solaylee, 2021: 85). The human migrant becomes objectified and de-personalized, and is framed as a national, regional, and international security threat. As such, they are conceived as people that bring undesirable socio-economic and security problems to bona fide citizens (Jones, 2019). This perception and treatments of migrants have created a distrustful exploitative environment for partaking in the web of civil solidarity (Jallani-Rabbani, 2020). The threat-perception of the migrant (Alkopher & Blanc, 2017) triggers a security dilemma, encourages identity politics, and fortifies the pseudo neo-racist clash of civilizations between the North and South (Short & Kambouri, 2010). The continuing plight of racialized groups confronting vast racial conditionings and violence such as police brutality, border apartheid, and deep socio-political (health, housing, education) segregation hinges on “gross inequities in life chances … [and] evinces unmistakable continuities with the previous history of race relations” (McCarthy, 2009: 9). Constitutionally, at least in Canada, an immigrant would have all these rights and protections. But then there is the actuality of what may happen as they negotiate and contemplate the possibilities of fulfilling their everyday survival needs in a largely colonized infrastructure. Moreover, the violence and humiliation that the migrant encounters at the border, airport, or embassy are often banal and difficult to fight given the bureaucracies within which the activities at these sites of power are

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often shrouded. Arguably, border security would want to be able to operate their territories to prevent human trafficking, drugs, crime, illegal immigration, and terrorism. This sense of duty may explain the paranoia and hard time that some of these border officers express to those accessing their services. The issue arises with the outright discrimination and profiling of people because of who, where, and what they represent. That is why transforming border violence may entail some radical changes at the bureaucratic level, and of a more social and economic type that challenges oppressive local and global establishments dictating the socio-cultural and political flows of ideas, people, and goods (Schiller, 2018). As the border walls grow taller and travel bans tighten in the context of heightened insecurity and health disasters (Jones, 2019), it bears asking how we can reconcile the seemingly contradictory processes of hyper-­globalization through immigration and increased trade and intersecurity agreements and the fear of a security dilemma and neo-racism. A starting point to engaging this paradox of our diasporic belonging within a paradoxically globalizing and deglobalizing world order is to reconsider the performative discourses of identity. This is instructive as part of the overarching constellation of political activities, particularly when we consider who gets what when and how in global and local political communities.

The Crisis of Identity: Race, Belonging, and Citizenship Identity is a notoriously fluid term with multifaceted composites. Although it is sometimes framed as an absolute marker of human distinctiveness, identity is often constructed and deconstructed, created, recreated, and imposed or arrogated for various economic, political, and socio-cultural causes. These features of identity reflect in our perception of people as citizens of the “indissoluble nation-state,” as newcomers/immigrants or diasporic/transnational and, hence, precarious citizens. The notion of the diaspora or diasporic community springs to mind the discursive identity formations of migrant communities (Schiller, 2018). The migrant’s identity is always in a state of flux, and their lived reality of contested identity in their new homes often coalesces with the larger political or globalized community to create hybrid perceptions of home

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(Chavan, 2014). What is home? What creates the feeling of belonging or (dis)connection to a place/space or other people? Is home a place, a feeling, an abode of repose and activities, or an idea? Is it a fleeting or static feeling, a destination? Is it a spiritual experience or a metaphysical space? Is home where we feel the most gratified, resilient, and fulfilled? Is home a country? How is a sense of home created, sustained, or lost? These are some of the tiring questions (Williams, 2021) that are invariably entwined with the migrants’ lived reality of constantly searching for a place to belong, to flourish, and to escape precarity and invisibility within their environments and elsewhere. Gillian Anderson et al. (2016) explored this notion of home in Canada from a sociological standpoint, drawing on studies on rural communities, families, and immigrants. The idea of home is also experienced as being both present in the here and now and distant in far-off places. This latter notion of home  resonates with Martin Heidegger’s dictum that “Man [sic] is a being of faraway places” (cited in De Beauvoir, 2020: 25); “he [sic] is always somewhere else” (Ibid). In other words, people are always in a constitutive relationship with other people and places, known and unknown, near and far. It is therefore no coincidence that peacebuilding approaches in recent years, especially those peacebuilding models in Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) oriented to alternative models (e.g., Indigenous or local peacebuilding), are increasingly focusing on the questions of home and belonging (MacGinty, 2019a, b). The assumption is generally that redressing or finding amicable solutions to the restoration of home and belonging (particularly to historically displaced and dispersed populations) could go a long way in entrenching lasting structures and systems of peace some of which may differ markedly from the prevailing idea of the liberal democratic peace and its global governance architecture. The need to feel at home in a specific or multiple spaces may entail some reimagination of socio-cultural ideas about self, others, and the distinctive politics of a place. The migrant may attain this self-fulfilling sense of home by acquiring a diasporic membership or citizenship status by way of formal procedures that may entail going through what Geoffrey Cohen (2022) dubs “privilege-laundering devices” (p. 127). This could involve a daunting journey from being an international student to permanent residency and, ultimately, citizenship, facilitated by the privilege-laundering devices of SAT, GRE, and IELTS.  These devices merely make

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generalizable conclusions about people’s innate abilities and foreclose opportunities for creativity, innovation, and organic relationships (Cohen, 2022).1 Attaining a sense of belonging could also happen informally through the conscientious  forging of  enduring and meaningful socio-political and economic relationships that traverse territorial bottlenecks. Thus, identity is simultaneously a condition of how we see ourselves and how we are perceived by others—and these could be conditioned by the ethics or societal norms of our environment and our different spiritual yearnings and trajectories. As the defining feature of self-other perception, identity has deep political and spiritual undertones. Hence, it is arguable that identity allows for creative means of belonging and transcending psychological, historical, and everyday existential crises. On the flip side, identity is a medium to reinforce all these things too. Identity is laden with ideological underpinnings tied to cultural symbols and rituals or linked to one’s affective or fixated attachment to an in-group or a distinctive place that may embolden affective polarization, with its attendant violence and othering. Thus, identity has the potential to connect but also to disconnect a person from others, a feeling, a discursive narrative, or a place. As a meaning-making tool that engenders a desire for recognition, acceptance, association, and protection, identity enables conversations around questions like who am I, where am I from, where am I going? Such questions are telling of the nervousness to belong, especially when directed at the migrant in search of a home or community. For some communities, the “where are you from” question may simply be a formal expectation before participating in a cultural exercise like a Talking Circle or Powwow where it may be useful for declaring one’s background and journey up to this point. This form of questioning and identification may not necessarily engender nervousness, particularly because it is conducted among people of a shared heritage and deep history. It can simply be understood as people’s natural curiosity, a celebration of diversity, and an attempt to better understand where a subject is coming from so as to position their ideas accordingly. The problem arises when a person’s identity is 1  These could also be called “privilege leveling devices” since they test everyone the same way (particularly GRE and SAT), and the test does not always care about skin color or ethnic background. It sort of aligns with Weber’s notion of bureaucracy as leveling of social differences.

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assumed for them because of how they look, speak, or where they live, which invites more division. The colonists and their nationalist successors accentuated this practice by imposing categories of difference on people through narrowly construed binaries of citizens and subjects, natives and non-natives, indigenes/autochthones, and settlers. These divisive political categories underscore naturalists’ or nativists’ claims to homelands where autochthones or “children of the soil” feel “threatened” by “outsiders” who are invariably from the same community (Geschiere, 2009). Peter Geschiere notes that both indigeneity and autochthony have made a strong comeback in our contemporary politics since the end of the Cold War with such force, ambiguities, and nervousness. The strong appeal to the politics of autochthony “is often so strong that it threatens to sweep the very politicians who launched it right from their feet” (Geschiere, 2011: 334). The nervousness and ambiguities associated with issues of belonging underline how people grapple and contend with prevailing colonial structures of difference, meaning(lessness), and loss. How to grapple with being an oppressor and an oppressed at the same time, basically, might be a fresh way of thinking (and subvert the usual hierarchies of difference to provide some more freedom of movement and a sense of belonging). The following questions seem apposite when we speak of the ambiguities of identity and belonging: How are people contending with physical and psychological displacement from their home/land, cultural identity, and resources? How are they reclaiming and reasserting their right and pride of place within different contexts in which their identity is constantly evolving or repressed through the state’s illiberal instruments of control and/or violence? Peter Geschiere engages these questions in a seminal work titled “The Perils of Belonging,” in which he explores belonging through the prism of autochthony and the different politics of space that it assumes in Africa and Europe. He traces the concept’s classical roots in Greece and explores its significance to the politics of identity in Cameroon and the Netherlands where the socio-economic and political changes of colonization and Cold war politics created the nervousness of the “other” as the unwelcomed migrants or allochthones competing for resources and living space with the acclaimed “people of the soil” or autochthones. In Cameroon, this nervousness assumes a “tribal” battle hinged on colonial differences between Anglophones and Francophones, while in the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, as with other European countries, it centers

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around debates on the acceptance and integration of immigrants within the state polity (Geschiere, 2009). Similarly, and with specific reference to Africa, Morten Bøås and Kevin Dunn (2013) argue in Politics of Origin in Africa: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Conflict that due to the history of migration, conquests, and resettlements of groups, claims of autochthony are hardly ever convincing in most African states. If anything, these claims indicate the vestiges of colonialism with its contrived tribal binaries. The authors claim that notions of indigeneity and autochthony are oblivious of Africa’s deep history characterized by patterns of migration and shifting boundaries, urbanization, resettlements, inclusivity, permeability, religious conversions, intermarriages, assimilation, wars, and conquests (Bøås & Dunn, 2013). Igor Kopytoff (1987) alludes to this openness and incompleteness of social relations and formations in Africa, arguing that “the largely frontier character of African societies has been ignored in the anthropological fixation on the elusive authentic insider firmly located in ‘the unambiguous heart-land’, to the detriment of the ‘uncertain peripheries’ that represent histories of mobility, cultural encounters, negotiation and flux” (Kopytoff, 1987: 3–17 cited in Nyamnjoh, 2017: 259). This sense of incompleteness that connect people at the intersection of different borders also speaks to the complexities of the human composition which Mohsin Hamid (2018) describes as “impurity.” “Impurity” is contrasted with the nationalist obsession with “purity” and “purification” (Nyamnjoh, 2022). As an ultra-nationalistic ideology, “purity” denies the complexity of the “impure” human experience steeped in difference and sameness. It equates sameness to our feelings of safety and considers difference a threat (hooks, 2001). However, the incomplete being is always in motion reaching out to others to expand and enhance the full  possibilities of the human experience (Nyamnjoh, 2022).

Probing Questions and the Objective of the Volume The discussion in the volume is hinged on the following questions: 1. How are combative colonial identities of difference manufactured within our political communities? 2. How do we expel the racialized and tribalized political identities that seek to deny our impurities and incompleteness?

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3. Is the nationalist claim of completeness or enclosure (Nyamnjoh, 2017) a fantasy of the colonists alone, or was it also a feature of many precapitalist societies? 4. Can we understand a sense of humanity as a relational experience beyond the realm of atomist capitalism? 5. How do we embrace the notion that everyone we encounter is a mirror reflecting our fears of suffering, our yearning to belong, and our desire for happiness? 6. How do we honor the uniqueness of those around us by loving them as we love ourselves? This volume is an attempt to unleash the flourishing of the human spirit guided by a spiritual consciousness that recognizes the essence of our sameness and difference in the forging of a more cohesive and humane political community. Since the Good Life seems to be more about accumulating material and hedonistic pleasures than forging strong human connections in a people-oriented society (hooks, 2001), the volume underscores a holistic sense of belonging that pivot on the spiritual domain as a deeper site of connection and flourishing (Jallani-Rabbani, 2020). It is essentially a compendium of conversations across the intersection of the racial, national, ethnic, spiritual, and sexual boundaries in which we live.

Methodology The analyses in the volume draw on a variety of qualitative sources in Peace and Conflict Studies, Sociology, Migration Studies, International Relations, Political Science, Gender Studies, English and Literary Studies. Established academic disciplines like Political Science and IR are historically hinged on a racist structure, and some of the major proponents of these fields are based in the global North. This is quite striking given that the conversations within these fields often revolve around such concepts as nation, culture, civilization, and ethnicity—notions upon which racial violence is often articulated or manifested (Short & Kambouri, 2010). Thus, a critical lens is employed in analyzing scholarly texts from these fields, corroborated with findings from classroom conversations and the experiences of the contributors in negotiating binary oppositions between the universal and particular identities on which their daily activities and wellbeing are sustained.

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Most of the contributors have experienced various forms of physical and psychological migration as students or faculty at higher institutions of learning in the global North and elsewhere. As well, it is probably fitting to acknowledge the privileged nature of immigration experiences for the authors versus the rank-file members of those who immigrate from similar countries but who constantly face class struggles and are considered as having less skills to offer in the global North. While the authors may have had unique experiences of class struggles and racism (see Chap. 6), they are not posing as the representatives of all migrants or disadvantaged groups in the global political community. Through their own positionality and awareness of the sources of their identity struggles at home and abroad, they advance new social practices and cultural expressions that reflect their agency and those of other diasporic and settled communities the world over. The volume links themes from the lives and environments of the contributors to prevailing research on migration, belonging, and postcoloniality.

Contribution of the Volume This volume places decolonization as a way of life that allows for a new form of self-other reflexivity in acts of awareness, (re)appraisal, acclamation, criticism, and love. The overarching goal of this reflexive practice is to detribalize and deracialize vestiges of combative colonial identities that truncate relational possibilities in our ever-expanding communities, beginning in our classrooms, at home, and in the workplace. We acknowledge that race-as-discursive-formations have many sources (internal and external). When the racialization is from the colonial powers that be (including racialized immigrants as part of the army), it presents a clear picture of where the issues are coming from. But when racial identities are claimed from within the Postcolony and relate to arguments about indigeneity, connection to land, blood lines, and suchlike, it is more so difficult to deracialize. The volume advances transformative ideas to dismantle prevailing categories of difference through an emphasis on the spiritual re-making of ourselves in ways that challenge the values of a “production-centred commodity culture” (hooks, 2001: 72) which often deflects attention from our spiritual and other non-material connections (see Chap. 2). We bring attention to how people forge relationships and learn from others in their localities while recognizing their incompleteness. The volume is designed

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to be a research and personal resource for students and practitioners, and anyone working through conflicted bordered spaces. Those working through processes of decolonization, migration, and specifically the calls for the restitution of land in settler and postcolonial societies can have ready access to a body of practical academic and experiential work on the vagaries of human relations in an era where questioning pre-established power dynamics and the exclusion and inequities they normalize have become preeminent to the survival of our socio-political systems.

Book Structure The chapter by Sabena Singh notes that the complexities of socially and politically constructed identities can weigh heavily on a person’s psyche, thereby disrupting our inner need to be in harmony with our Selves, the environment, and those around us. The chapter provides a critique on identity scholarship in Peace and Conflict Studies and other social science disciplines, and how it is used as a tool to exacerbate divisiveness and instigate conflict, balancing it with an autoethnographic collection of some of the author’s experiences in her own quest to feel a sense of belonging in Canada. Singh shares how she has learned to disengage from the external narratives that erode her sense of belonging and instead focus on an internal dialogue that cultivates harmony. Christiane Ndedi Essombe’s chapter examines the importance that name plays in African philosophy and Western psychology, especially in one’s life trajectory. Specifically, the chapter examines the hegemonic social orders and colonial narratives embedded in commonly used labels to refer to the Other, whether it be a female body, a colonized and racialized body, a non-Western body, or any body trapped at any intersection of physiological and social markers used to normalize supremacist orders. Essombe invites readers to consider the new paradigms and imaginary that could be unlocked if labels, names, and the narratives they carry were re-­ thought outside of a colonial mindset. Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba’s chapter presents a sideways reflection on belonging, taking a cue from African literary and cultural studies and his observations from teaching a second-year university course titled, “African Migration Narratives.” The chapter shares some preliminary thoughts and insights on what the author describes as the “unresolved crisis of belonging in African literature”: the idea that the normative condition of African experience is unending liberation struggle to find a

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sense of belonging in the world. The challenge, according to the author, is whether one can imagine a world where Africans belong and are at home, and what such a world might look like or be constituted by, given what one has come to understand from studying these works about the entrenched and enduring violence of colonialism and racism that the African subject confronts. The fifth chapter by Benjamin Maiangwa and Christiane Ndedi Essombe asks: Where do Africans or Black people belong? The obvious answer is “anywhere they like.” But following years of racial reckoning around the world and particularly in the United States, people of African descent are confronted with the violence of racism, colonial laws, and standards that normalize anti-blackness. The chapter situates the conversation of African identity within the context of its past socio-cultural arrangements and then traces the roots of identity violence faced by people of African descent to both endogenous and exogenous colonial exploits such as religious/ethnic wars of conquests, the slave trade, and European colonization. It discusses the internalization, banalization, and standardization of colonial violence within people of African descent themselves and reflects on the legacies of colonization in Black communities. In the sixth chapter, Ademola Adesola asks: What does it mean to be Black and African in Canada? Drawing from personal experience and those of others to reflect on what it means to be in “multicultural” Canada as Blacks and Africans, the chapter argues that the reality of Black and African immigrants in Canada, as it is in most Western nations, is one of a nervous condition. In “The Geo-Cultural Politics of Space and the Poetics of Race,” Dominic James Aboi takes a postcolonial angle to historically interrogates the geo-cultural politics of space in relation to the technical manipulations of race by highlighting histories of colonization as both a catalyst in the creation of a global diaspora and the cause of forced migrations. It argues that the string holding up the paradoxes of race, indentured labor, and perceptions of belonging as it relates to migration and the diaspora is the unequal relationship between the “dominant” and its supposedly weak “subaltern” subjects. Chuck Egerton’s chapter explores the journey of ideological transformation needed for the “whited” and “gendered” to exit the narrow, divisive, and incarcerating hegemonies of whiteness and patriarchy (soul-killing cancers that spawn racism and sexism) to embrace the inclusive humanizing embrace of oneness, wholeness, and belonging. The chapter examines

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how the conditioning of whiteness and patriarchy causes a splintering, schizophrenic double consciousness, a false self, cloaking the existence and integrity of our true core self. Through the wisdom of W.E.B. DuBois, bell hooks, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Paulo Freire, Thandeka, and others, Egerton seeks pathways to strip away these toxic ideologies to reclaim our true self, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with unity and justice in our diversity. In Chapter nine, Anoosh Soltani and Holly Thorpe explore ways in which migrant women experience belonging at the intersection of migration and culture at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their findings foreground that extended international border closure and some regulations based on partial definition of citizenship took an emotional toll on migrant women. In particular, long family separation induced feelings of “panic,” “guilt,” and “rejection” in a state of “living in between two realities.” The stories of the research contributors in New Zealand reveal intensified experiences of being Othered in policy and practice during the pandemic, surfacing diverse expressions of ambivalent belonging. Ireoluwatomi Oloke’s chapter explores the extent to which the sense of belonging experienced by immigrants in a new country is tied to socio-­ economic accomplishments. It also explores how immigrants may feel out of place until attaining a level of career success similar to that which they had in their home country. This reality is particularly so for racialized individuals migrating from less economically developed countries to more developed ones, who often feel like they have to prove their socio-­ economic worth in the new country. The chapter considers how the interim period of retraining and regaining credentials leaves lasting psycho-­ social impacts on the individuals involved until they have accomplished their career and attendant socio-economic goals, which could be facilitated through social enterprise schemes. Alka Kumar’s chapter begins with the author’s situatedness in the migration field, as a researcher and as a practitioner, while the subsequent sections argue for the potential of interdisciplinarity for creating holistic solutions for the multilayered and intersectional economic integration challenges that highly qualified immigrants and newcomers face in Canada. The chapter concludes with a discussion of relevant theoretical insights and methodological approaches from Peace and Conflict Studies that can help researchers, practitioners, and policy makers identify and understand complex issues raised by job market barriers in the global North.

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The concluding chapter is structured as a conversation among African or Black academics contending with diasporic or transnational identities. It is a conversation about who they are and how they maneuver difficult spaces where they are essentially reduced to different strands of “blackness.” Some of the intriguing questions and themes that emerged from the volume are covered in this conversation. These include such questions as, What is blackness? Who is involved, and who qualifies within that category? Who is excluded and by what parameters does that exclusion happen? Are Black people Africans and vice versa? Who should speak and/or act for Black people? Is “Black” and “White” useful social categories or do these identities shrink spaces of engagement and agency? Altogether, the contributors join a growing body of empirical work on diasporic or transnational studies by providing an account of their own socio-cultural experience while highlighting the work they and others do as members of the knowledge production community (Chavan, 2014), and as social and political actors. Hopefully, the ideas and stories in this volume will create in our readers a sense of what it means to live simply and embrace the dignity of our oneness and difference (Sacks, 2002); to live a life in which, as Richard Wright reflected long ago, “the basic emotions of life were shared, in which common memory formed a common past, in which collective hope reflected a national future” (Wright, 2020: 279).

References Anderson, G., Moore, J.  G., & Suski, L. (Eds.). (2016). Sociology of home: Belonging, community, and place in the Canadian context. Canadian Scholars’ Press. Aljazeera. (2022). UK to send asylum seekers to Rwanda under controversial new deal. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/14/uk-­to-­sign-­deal-­to-­ send-­male-­channel-­refugees-­to-­r wanda-­reports Alkopher, T.  D., & Blanc, E. (2017). Schengen area shaken: The impact of immigration-­related threat perceptions on the European security community. Journal of International Relations and Development, 20, 511–542. https:// doi.org/10.1057/s41268-­016-­0005-­9 Al-Solaylee, K. (2021). Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From. Harper Collins. Baldwin, J. (1955). Notes of a native son. Beacon Press. Bøås, M., & Dunn, K. C. (2013). Politics of origin in Africa: Autochthony, citizenship, and conflict. Zed Books.

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Chavan, M. S. (2014). Knowledge diasporas: Narratives of transnational migration and higher education. In S. Sahoo & B. Pattanaik (Eds.), Global diasporas and development. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­81-­322-­1047-­4_10 Cohen, G. L. (2022). Belonging: The science of creation connections and bridging divides. W.W Norton & Company. Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM). (2018). Semira Adamu 1998: They killed a woman, not her fight. Retrieved June 2, 2022, from https://www.cadtm.org/Semira-­Adamu-­1998-­They-­killed-­a De Beauvoir, S. (2020). What is existentialism? Penguin Books. French, H. W. (2021). Born in blackness: Africa, Africans, and the making of the modern world, 1471 to the second world war. W.W Norton and Company. Geschiere, P. (2009). The perils of belonging: Autochthony, citizenship, and exclusion in Africa and Europe. University of Chicago Press. Geschiere, P. (2011). Autochthony, citizenship, and exclusion - paradoxes in the politics of belonging in Africa and Europe. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 18(1), 321–339. [H]ooks, [B]. (2001). All about love: New visions. William Morrow. Jallani-Rabbani, M. (2020). Solidarity in the age of globalization: Approaches from the philosophy for peace. Convergencia Revista de Ciencias Sociales, [S.l.], 27, 1–22. dic. 2019. ISSN 2448-5799. Disponible en: https://convergencia. uaemex.mx/article/view/12439. Fecha de acceso: 26 abr. 2022. https://doi. org/10.29101/crcs.v27i0.12439 Jones, R. (2019). Introduction. In R. Jones (Ed.), Open borders: In defence of free movement (pp. 77–88). University of Georgia Press. Kocijan, B., & Kukec, M. (2022). Immigration attitudes among Western and Eastern European MPs: Social identity, economic aspects and political ideology. Comparative European Politics, 20, 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41295-­021-­00254-­5 Kopytoff, I. (1987). Introduction. In The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MacGinty, R. (2019a). Circuits, the everyday and international relations: Connecting the home to the international and transnational. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(2), 234–253. MacGinty, R. (2019b). Circuits, the everyday and international relations: Connecting the home to the international and transnational. Cooperation and Conflict, 52(2), 234–253. McCarthy, T. (2009). Race, empire, and the idea of human development. Cambridge University Press. Mosin, H. (2018). Mohsin Hamid on the rise of nationalism: In the land of the pure, no one is pure enough. The Guardian, 27th January 2018. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/27/mohsin-­h amid%2D%2Dexit-­ west-­pen-­pakistan

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Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2017). Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the currency of conviviality. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 52(3), 253–270. Nyamnjoh, F. P. (2022). Incompleteness: Donald Trump, populism and citizenship. Langaa Research & Publishing CIG. Sacks, J. (2002). The dignity of difference: How to avoid the clash of civilizations. Continuum. Schiller, N. G. (2018). Theorising about and beyond transnational processes. In J.  Fossum, R.  Kastoryano, & B.  Siim (Eds.), Diversity and contestations over nationalism in Europe and Canada. Palgrave studies in European political sociology. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-­1-­137-­58987-­3_2 Short, N., & Kambouri, H. (2010). Ambiguous universalism: Theorising race/ nation/class in international relations. Journal of International Relations Development, 13, 268–300. https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2010.12 Williams, I. (2021). Disorientation: Being black in the world. Random House Canada. Wright, R. (2020). Black boy (75th Anniversary Edition). Harper Perennial.

PART I

Identity, Coloniality and Home

CHAPTER 2

Can We Forgo Our Attachments to Socially Constructed Identities? Sabena Singh

Introduction My journey as a Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) doctoral student has provided me with the opportunity to carefully consider the role that identity plays in conflict. In exploring this, I felt compelled to reflect on how I have interacted with and understood my own identity/ies and the extent to which I have been consciously and unconsciously involved in various identity-based conflicts. I realize that I had been systemically socialized to identify within the identity politics paradigm—a realization that has been deeply unsettling. Moreover, I felt the need to extricate myself from this

This chapter is dedicated to my grandmothers—Elizabeth and Somaria, and my daughters—Talisa and Maya.

S. Singh (*) Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice, St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_2

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trap without getting drawn back into the very narrative from which I was trying to release myself. This chapter is an account of how I have continued to navigate this process of understanding my identity with respect to the roles that these identities have confined me to and how I have been able to expand my identity beyond the limitations of these confinements. To do so, I begin with the query: Can we detach from our socially constructed identities? To answer, I first provide an overview of the Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) literature on identity and conflict, drawing attention to the narrative that situates identity as a crucial element in various conflicts. Second, I discuss how the contemporary use of intersectionality and the ethos of vulnerability are tools in the neoliberal project,1 pointing out that even when we think we are deconstructing systemic barriers with respect to identity, we might actually be maintaining or reinforcing the status quo of the neoliberal paradigm. Lastly, I offer a spiritual perspective from a Buddhist lens where we can examine our identities by focusing our attention to what is within rather than towards external distractions and activities. I hope that this chapter will offer an opportunity for the reader to reflect on their own experiences, perhaps become aware of their own inner conflict(s) and know that reconciling with themself is always a possibility.

Identity and Conflict: A Theoretical Insight After having been out of academia for almost a decade, I returned as a PhD student into the PACS discipline (which was new to me), keen and excited. In the first year of my coursework, I read all the assigned material and wrote reflection papers that supported the readings. I did observe that there was an absence of a spiritual component in the PACS literature. That is to say, I noted that attention was paid to how external factors such as history, religion, demographics, politics, economics, and psychocultural factors are conflated in conflicts (Byrne & Carter, 2002), but little or no attention was given to an internal knowledge system driven from a spiritual place. Nonetheless, I did not question the theories. In fact, I took them for granted and believed them to be true. In particular, I was 1  The neoliberal peacebuilding paradigm is formulated to encapsulate Western ideals of statism—constitutionalism, market freedoms, democracy, human rights and rule of law (Chandler, 2017; Richmond, 2010).

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intrigued by identity theory. The manner in which the theory was presented seemed logical and factual; it was relatable and at the time, it made sense. I was particularly drawn to discussions on the role that identity played in conflict, having experienced it myself. In this section, I present how identity conflict is framed from a PACS lens. I argue that the PACS lens focuses on structural and systemic barriers that underlie identity conflicts, and I contend that the proposed strategies to overcome these barriers have yet to be proven effective (Byrne et al. 2020; Chandler, 2017; Wolff, 2007). I discuss in detail needs-based identity theory and its limitations, attributing these limitations to the ineffectiveness of the strategies used to overcome identity conflicts. Finally, I suggest that there are reasons for this predictably ineffective outcome, the primary one being the focus on external and structural factors that lead to conflict and little or no attention given to a spiritual understanding of Self from where we can cultivate inner peace. What Is Identity Conflict? Conflict analysis and conflict resolution are complicated and daunting endeavours. Theorists and practitioners in the PACS discipline caution practising and aspiring peacemakers to carefully analyse conflicts from different perspectives—historical, regional, and local—in order to gain insight into the depth and scope of a conflict (Boudreau, 2011). One aspect of conflicts that has the PACS community’s undivided attention is the root causes of conflicts. The assumption is that if the root causes can be ascertained, they can be directly addressed and potentially result in peaceful outcomes (Cavanaugh, 2000; Wolff, 2007). Cavanaugh (2000), for example, points out that conflict can be viewed as dysfunctional and therefore finding the source of the defect can lead to correcting it. Cavanaugh (2000) is focused primarily on protracted social conflicts. From this lens, it is also assumed that a clear starting point or a terminal point has not been or cannot be determined (Azar 1990, as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). Therefore, the genesis of social conflicts is viewed to be structural (Cavanaugh, 2000; Jeong, 2020). Elaborating on the genesis of protracted social conflicts, Azar (1990) has made the claim that such conflicts are “rooted in religious, cultural, or ethnic communal identity” (as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000: 65). Protracted social conflicts require two preconditions: the first is a multi- or bi-­ communal composition and the second is a historical antecedent of

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colonial divide and rule legacy (Azar 1990, as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). Multi- or bi-communal means that the society is composed of at least two groups who consider themselves to be distinct from each other, for example Catholics and Protestants. Colonial divide and rule policy means that a colonizing power has exploited an actual or perceived difference between groups in a society to deliberately create division and conflict, as a means of controlling both groups. Azar (1990) also states that one or more dominant groups must emerge and coopt the state machinery, meaning that there is at least one or more dominant groups which holds hegemonic control over the minority group(s) (Azar 1990, as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). Azar (1990) ties these two preconditions with Burton’s (1987) basic needs theory and identifies three variables that must also be present: acceptance needs, access needs, and security needs (as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). Acceptance needs are the recognition of communal identity; access needs refer to effective participation in society; and security needs denote physical security, housing, and nutrition (Azar 1990, as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). The state, in principle, has the role of ensuring that all basic needs are met (Azar 1990, as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). However, according to Azar’s (1990) theory, when hegemonic control by one or more dominant groups denies the minority groups their basic needs, ethnic conflict is likely to ensue (as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). To put Azar’s theory into context, let us look at an example of an identity conflict. The example is taken from Polkinghorn’s (2000) research, in which he claims there is a link between identity and struggle over basic human needs within the contexts of environment, territory, and natural resources. Polkinghorn discusses the impact of pollution from chemical plants on some African American communities residing along the Mississippi River in the United States of America. Members of the impacted communities believed that race was a major variable in the placement of the plants as well as the “basis for the intention to harm African American people” (Polkinghorn, 2000: 86). One reason for this conclusion, pointed out by community members, is that the people who were usually hired to work at the plants were not from the community. However, when those from the community were hired, it was for unskilled and dangerous work (Polkinghorn, 2000). Community members also felt targeted because harmful and poisonous contaminants were released into the environment, which affected their health. The members of the community felt that their requests to improve their economic, environment, and subsequently health conditions were not taken seriously by authorities. Community

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members attributed the lack of response from authorities as racism (Polkinghorn, 2000), which in turn led to a “strong sense of community based identity and an almost paranoid focus on group survival by residents” (Polkinghorn, 2000: 85). Polkinghorn (2000) concludes that the root of the conflict could be found in the manner by which each party perceived the environment. He notes that the residents perceived the environment as a place they lived, and proprietors of the chemical plants perceived the environment as an economic resource (Polkinghorn, 2000). According to Polkinghorn (2000), perception plays a role in the construction of conflict and how events are interpreted. Perception is everything, he claims, and facts do not help (Polkinghorn, 2000). He further states that “groups need to have their perceptions, attitudes and beliefs recognized as legitimate” (Polkinghorn, 2000: 84). He also suggests that a process “to incorporate the meaning of perceptions, even if based on folklore and myth” (Polkinghorn, 2000: 84), ought to be developed and implemented into peaceful mechanisms. However, he does not propose a solid process or method for doing it. Polkinghorn’s research exemplifies Azar’s needs-based identity theory with respect to a colonial past, a bi-communal community and denial of basic needs. To begin with, there is a colonial divide and rule legacy, as well as a multi-communal societal composition in the United States. It can be argued that there is a hegemonic dichotomy among Whites and other “minoritized” and/or “racialized” groups in the United States, and that the state machinery has been coopted by the hegemonic group. Next, the state, also holding the authority to regulate the location of chemical plants, permitted the plants to be built nearby African American communities. Adding to this, residents in the area were not offered employment unless it was dangerous work and were exposed to additional health risks due to the contamination from the plants. The impediment to economic advancement and detrimental health conditions are both examples of the basic needs (as defined by Azar) of the residents not being met by the state. Given that these residents were predominantly Black, they viewed the circumstances around this situation as racially intended (i.e. race/identity conflict). Polkinghorn’s (2000) solution is to engage in a process to change how each group perceives the conflict. Azar’s (1990) solution points to the state, claiming that the responsibility for meeting all human needs lies with the state (as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). Are these viable and effective solutions? Put differently, would it be that simple for the African American

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residents in Polkinghorn’s study to change their perspective that racism was a factor in the placement of the chemical plants? And, how willing is the state to assume responsibility for ensuring the community’s basic needs (as defined by Azar) are met? In order to determine whether Polkinghorn’s (2000) and Azar’s (1990) proposed solutions are practical, it is necessary to examine both the theory (as presented by Azar) and the context/example (as presented by Polkinghorn) for any limitations. There are two factors which require a more in-depth analysis. The first is the impact of a colonial historical context and the second is the narrative that defines and frames the denial of basic needs as a result of one group oppressing another. Azar (1990) states that two preconditions—a multi- or bi-communal composition and a colonial divide and rule legacy—are necessary components, among others, to trigger an ethnic conflict. Azar seems to be saying that it is the outcome or aftermath of the colonial divide and rule legacy that results in conflict. He does not explicitly state that the colonial system was intentionally designed to overtly and psychologically pit different groups against each other. This system ensured that there is a dominant group and a non-dominant group. In other words, racial and/or ethnic groups have already been systemically “set up” for conflict by the existing colonial structure (Mamdani, 2001). What Azar (1990) fails to take into full consideration, although he hints at it, is the interest of the state in establishing and sustaining an identity conflict. As Wolff (2007) points out, one school of thought, the instrumentalists, sees ethnicity as a resource that leaders mobilize to advance political and economic gain. In fact, Wolff (2007) questions whether identity conflicts are really about identity? Azar’s (1990) analysis of the colonial context essentially places blame on the structure and its systems as the major cause for ethnic conflicts—a perspective that makes it more or less impossible to eradicate ethnic conflicts as this structure and its systems are deeply ingrained and not easily dismantled. Azar (1990) does present another factor—the denial of basic needs—that leads to identity-based conflict, but there are also limitations with this supposition. With respect to basic needs, it can be argued that colonial conditions have manufactured a social context where the three needs—acceptance, access, and security—are denied, presumably as a result of one group oppressing another. Arguably, these needs are important. However, labelling them as basic needs is in itself provocative. The most basic of human needs are food, water, and shelter. Framing acceptance, access, and

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security as “basic needs” creates circumstances whereby strong identity positionality can develop and subsequently produce a conflict. In other words, if one group believes their basic needs (i.e. food, water, and shelter) are being denied because of another group gaining more, then the outgroup can mobilize using their group identity as the common factor in attempts to attain equity. Furthermore, Azar (1990) contends that the ideal state is fair and just and has the role to ensure that all human needs are met (as cited in Cavanaugh, 2000). However, since the state is the entity responsible for upholding the divide and rule legacy, it is also complicit in upholding the narrative that the denial of needs is an identity issue. And if this is indeed the case, it becomes necessary to question the motive of the state in upholding a narrative that will encourage conflict. In other words, is this really an issue of identity or is identity being used as a “common denominator to organize conflict groups in the struggle over resources, land or power” (Wolff, 2007: 6)? Clearly, there are some weaknesses with needs-based identity theory. It appears that the state is upholding a system that perpetuates conflict rather than taking responsibility for meeting the needs of its population; the latter, according to Azar, is the state’s duty in principle. If the state is benefitting from perpetuating conflict, it seems unlikely that the very state will act in a principled manner. As such, Azar’s linking of the state’s positionality as a factor in needs-based identity theory is arguably inconsequential. That is, if Azar is saying that identity conflicts can cease if the state is fair and just, it is an expectation that is unlikely to be fulfilled. Furthermore, as a theoretical framework, needs-based identity theory has not led to the development of any viable solutions to existing identity conflicts (i.e. a sustainable peace). Why then do PACS scholars continue to categorize large numbers of conflicts as identity-based, if identity is not what is driving the conflict? Could it be argued that confirmation bias—placing trust in information that confirms our beliefs and positions (Yin et al., 2016)— is at work when writing about identity conflict from Western and/or colonial frames of references? Hegemonic ideologies of peacebuilding are embedded in Western research paradigms, which means that the manner in which peace research is conducted, in general, favours what Sandberg and Alvesson (2011) refer to as knowledge-confirming paradigms. Scholars who approach their work from a decolonizing lens refer to knowledge-confirming paradigms as deficit theorizing approaches (Chilisa, 2012; Chilisa & Ntseane, 2010; Smith, 2012). The argument here is that Western notions of peace are

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constructed to fit Western ontological and epistemological assumptions and these notions of peace dominate the PACS literature; as such views that differ from the privileged assumptions are either under-researched or lack empirical support altogether, for there has been limited, if any, space for such perspectives within Western paradigms (Bai et  al., 2016; Lin et  al., 2016; Sandberg & Alvesson, 2011). Therefore, it is necessary to carefully examine conventional theoretical assumptions because these assumptions inform practice, which ultimately impacts the lives of others. In other words, if we are not careful, and if we are not able to recognize our entanglements within knowledge-confirming paradigms, we will continue to develop and expand on theories that uphold the very injustices we set out to counter. One example, intersectionality, a popular analytical tool used in identity analysis, when coerced into knowledge-confirming paradigms, can be harmful. In the next section, I discuss the merits of intersectionality as well as how it has been used as a divisive tool.

Intersectionality and the Ethos of Vulnerability Identity is complex. There are layers and layers to our identities such as religion, profession, age, gender, etc. (Wolff, 2007). In addition, our attitudes, beliefs and values also contribute to our sense of identity. There is also an individual identity and group identity/identities. Often, we simultaneously straddle multiple identity groups. On a personal level, verification of one’s unique individual identity—name, address, etc.—has become essential for many day-to-day activities. For example, a common daily transaction such as purchasing goods require verification of identity. Initially, this verification may not seem obvious. However, in order to obtain a credit card or a debit card, a financial institution requires proof of identity. Identification is also sometimes required to enter some establishments, for travel and for receiving services such as healthcare. There is also an overall societal paranoia regarding identity theft resulting in people tightly guarding their personal information to prevent their identity from being stolen. Adding to the various identity groupings is the essentialist categorization of people’s identities on official documents that may not cohere with their own sense of Self. Why has the notion of identity become so pervasive? And why is the fear of losing our identity so insidious? In this section, I will discuss how the notion of intersectionality and the ethos of vulnerability—reducing people by observable and describable attributes

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which are then used to regulate these bodies (Brown 1995, as cited in Brunila & Rossi, 2018)—play into the pervasive identity narratives and paradigms. Intersectionality Intersectionality is an analytical tool used as a framework to address social issues/divisions (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016). Examples of these divisions include but are not limited to race, class, sexuality, ability, religion, etc. (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016). The term intersectionality was coined in the late 1980s by American civil rights advocate, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. However, Hill Collins and Bilge (2016) point out that such an analysis and interrogation of social issues have been around for a long time, just under different terminology. For instance, they provide an example of Indian feminist and activist, Savitribai Phule (1831–1897), who “confronted several axes of social division, namely caste, gender, religion, and economic disadvantage or class” (Sarma 2015, as cited in Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016). Intersectionality, when used appropriately, essentializes particular aspects of identity to highlight inequitable social practices (Paul, 2015). Essentializing identities is purposeful in order to bring attention to a specific cause (Paul, 2015).2 For example, Crenshaw and Lorde used intersectionality as a tool to emphasize the difference between Black women and middle-class White women in civil law in the United States at a specific time (Paul, 2015). It was necessary to essentialize the two groups in order to bring attention to broader and more specific circumstances which were the limitations of mainstream feminism in civil law (Paul, 2015). Even though there is a strategic place for essentializing identities, using intersectionality as a shorthand diagnosis of difference is another colonial endeavour (Paul, 2015). That is, itemizing all the possible intersections in a person’s life (e.g. sexually abused, divorced or abandoned, migrant women of colour) is a practice which serves to reinforce who should be labelled as oppressed but does little, if anything, to dismantle normative identity constructions (Paul, 2015). The current widespread and liberal use of the term intersectionality has failed to recognize that it is artificial to essentialize numerous aspects of identity particularly when used in very specific and deliberate contexts. Such practices actually serve to incite divisiveness and potentially conflict. I provide my own story as an example.  A move Gayatri Spivak refers to as “strategic essentialism” (Paul, 2015: 173).

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Drawing from my own experience, the contemporary lens of intersectionality has me categorized as a minority on many counts—class, race, religion, age, gender, to list a few. From this perspective, it is assumed that my life has been one of oppression and marginalization, based on my very existence in this particular space/place and time. These labels shaped how I saw myself and led to an entailing internal conflict. My family immigrated to Canada from Guyana when I was a teenager. From my early days here, I was warned about how my race would limit my life chances. In fact, I recall my father’s advice in junior high school to do better than my White counterparts in order to be competitive in the future job market. Although subtle, this was a very powerful message. First, it informed me of racial, social, and economic divisions and secondly, indicated a struggle was inevitable. I was a teenager at the time, and my only interest was to be “cool.” Getting good grades was not cool. I wanted to please my father (and was also aware that it was important to do well at school) and I also wanted to impress my classmates so they would befriend me (and that meant performing mediocre at school or at least not doing better than my classmates). These circumstances created an internal conflict that continued for decades, although in slightly different contexts. I wanted to belong, and I contorted myself to fit into different spaces—a contortion that led to a fragmentation of Self. The years in junior high school, high school and university in Canada were confusing. These were the spaces of my socialization in Canada, and I was uncertain about how to navigate them. At some point, I made the decision that it would be beneficial to abandon my Guyanese roots and embrace a Canadian identity—in other words, I did everything I could to be “White.” Needless to say, this was a fruitless endeavour. It was during my post-graduate studies that I learned about structural racism, oppression, and internalized racism. I began to use these frameworks as my tools of resistance as I worked towards asserting my identities (being an immigrant woman of colour and a single parent). At the same time, I also began to identify with the vulnerabilities described in the anti-racism academic literature. That is, I began to embrace my oppression, marginalization, and vulnerability—and worse yet, I raised my children to see themselves that way. My advice to my children did not differ from my father’s advice to me as a teenager. The dynamics of this interplay is astounding. Identifying with the intersectionality narrative, I believed that my race, gender, and religious affiliations were hindrances to achieving both material and social success. I assumed what Paul (2015) refers to as an

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authentic victimhood identity. The impact of living with this mindset has been exhausting. Moreso, it has been unsettling to “learn” that my mind has been colonized. It is a label that induces more internal conflict that is further compounded with the external conflicts I already face. That is to say, the use of language such as Other, marginalized, oppressed, vulnerable, etc., (which is labelling) is contextualized within a colonial framework which is grounded in a deficit theorizing narrative (Kovach, 2021). The use of such vocabulary and theories brings disharmony and slowly erodes one’s sense of belonging. In other words, if you are “less than,” how can you possibly belong/fit in? Whether we have internalized these narratives and are living within the limitations they impose, or we are consciously aware of the narratives and are actively engaging in efforts to dismantle colonial legacies—both experiences are taxing to our minds and our spirit. Put differently, if you are the “Other”—a label you are both consciously and subtly aware of—how challenging would it be to live with yourself? How do you free yourself from this psychological bondage? In Redemption Song, Bob Marley sings compellingly to his audiences: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds” (Marley, 1980). The message in these lyrics is powerful, timeless and above all fervent. Marley’s words also bear similarities with Buddhist teachings which state that our suffering comes from within and therefore we are the only ones who can transform this suffering. Having known what it is to identify with the suffering of internalized racism and the oppression narrative, Marley’s words resonated with me profoundly, although it took years to really understand the courage it would take to put his appeal into practice. That is, knowing what you need to do and actually doing it are not one of the same. At some point though, it is necessary to stop trying and actually do. Ethos of Vulnerability Bernstein (2005) provides an overview of identity politics, illustrating the broad range of interpretation of the term and what it means in practice. The concept initially rose out of disability studies in the 1970s in order to change both self and societal perceptions of people living with disabilities, and has since evolved to include multiculturalism, civil rights and women’s movements, to list a few (Bernstein, 2005; Dege, 2014). Brunila and Rossi (2018) point out that even though different forms of identity politics in social movements have been effective in raising self-awareness in

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some groups, as well as raising awareness in privileged groups that others experience less privilege, they also highlight that “certain forms of identity politics have a tendency to enforce the ethos of vulnerability” (Brunila & Rossi, 2018: 288–9). The ethos of vulnerability focuses on self as well as on specific cultural and ideological identity groups by making their claims on “rights, status, and privilege on the basis of a victimized identity” (Brunila & Rossi, 2018: 288). It is common in Western societies to manage, classify, and categorize groups of people such as sex workers, asylum seekers, refugees, as well as disabled and homeless people using the concept of vulnerability (Brown 2011, as cited in Brunila & Rossi, 2018). In its contemporary use, it can be argued that the notion of intersectionality is being used as a tool to exacerbate identity issues as it piles on the deficiencies (Paul, 2015) and arguably also indirectly reinforces the White supremacy narrative. One example is the use of the acronym BIPOC. Most recently, the term BIPOC has been used to group Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour into one category. This acronym is dehumanizing as it groups the majority of the people on the planet into an acronym. The use of this terminology automatically makes a comparison between BIPOC and Whites which indirectly, subconsciously, and more so subtly reinforces the White supremacy narrative by Othering. The term literally lumps the majority of the world’s peoples (Lee et al., 2021) who are so distinctly and uniquely diverse into a single grouping, while Whites stand alone. Therefore, essentializing BIPOC actually reinforces the vulnerability narrative. Intersectionality privileges ontologies, permits deterministic identities and renders people as collections—all of which enables academics to form and expand knowledge using these categories (Paul, 2015). These are some of the weaknesses of contemporary intersectionality (Paul, 2015). Hill Collins and Bilge (2016) point out that since human groups change historically and since all identities are intersectional and not based on one single aspect, dynamic theorizing of group identities should take this malleability and multifacetedness into account (Brunila & Rossi, 2018). However, Lee et  al. (2021) argue from a different viewpoint claiming that theorizing about group identities based on harm caused by different forms of oppression is out-dated. Instead, they assert that we “uplift and recognize the intrinsic power, wisdom, and strength that the GM [Global Majority] draws upon as methods of survival and healing” (Lee et al., 2021: 1–2). Healing is the process of becoming whole in the face of multiple forms of oppression (Lee et al., 2021).

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In sum, it is important to recognize that what lies at the heart of intersectionality is “what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is” (Cho et  al. 2013, as cited in Collins & Bilge, 2016: 3). In its contemporary form, intersectionality exacerbates already divisive societies, leaving those who have been Othered in a state of disharmony. Attempts to harmonize and find balance are often futile or insufficient as the strategies to bring peace focus on external factors that reinforce the vulnerability narrative and neglect to look at what may be happening within the person. The notion of inner peace has been overlooked in identity conflicts and politics, yet it is necessary to heal from the suffering by separating that which has been imposed externally from that which we have created internally. In the next section, we take a look at what it could mean to cultivate inner peace as a strategy to detach from the identity politics paradigm in order to heal and live in harmony.

Inner Peace The notion of cultivating inner peace as a way to resolve conflict has received little attention in PACS.  Instead, attention has been given to external factors that contribute to conflict. Discussed throughout this chapter is the emphasis placed on a colonial historical context which, it has been noted, has set up conditions for identity conflicts. It could be argued, however, that a “colonial historical context” has become somewhat anthropomorphized, meaning that a 500-year political, social, and economic project has been reduced to a character of sorts which can be blamed for an array of identity conflicts (which has cost the lives of millions of people). Entrapment in this narrative victimizes the Global Majority as well as provides a landscape where it would be impossible to dismantle the political, social and economic barriers. These circumstances which focus on external matters can create a constant unsettled or conflictual internal state on all members of society. In this state, we navigate between internalized oppression and wanting to make systemic changes— but most of all, our inner being simply desires to be at peace, to be intoxicated with love and to be in an infinite state of happiness/bliss. However, it is not possible to do so when we are in a state of disharmony. As such, when the focus is on external factors of conflict, there is little or no focus on peace; therefore, the conflict-based narrative must be changed to a peace-based narrative. In the next section, I discuss how it is possible to change one’s perception of anything—an experience, a thought, a

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moment—as learning to do so is the start of a journey which can teach us how to detach from conflict-inducing narratives (such as identity conflicts) and instead cultivate inner peace. Changing Perception Perception is defined as the processing of one’s ultimate experience of the world which also involves further processing of sensory input (Divito 2009, as cited in Definition and the five stages of perception, n.d.). Western psychology organizes perception into five stages: stimulation, organization, interpretation-evaluation, memory, and recall (Divito 2009, as cited in Definition and the five stages of perception, n.d.). Stimulation refers to the use of the senses to attract our attention. Organization is our schemata or how we categorize things when we encounter them. Interpretation-­ evaluation refers to how we view things based on our values and schemata. Memory is the storing of the perception of the interpretation-evaluation (not the experience itself). And recall refers to reconstruction of the memory (Definition and the five stages of perception, n.d.). Buddhist teachings inform us that perception is one of the five aggregates that comprise each moment of experience (Moffitt, 2011). The five aggregates are matter (material form), sensations (feeling—pleasant, unpleasant or neutral), perceptions (sensory or mental process that recognizes and labels), mental formations (mental imprints and conditioning) and consciousness (discernment) (Moffitt, 2011). The integration of the aggregates in a moment can create or uncreate suffering (Moffitt, 2011). The teachings also claim that one can change suffering by developing new habits of perception (Moffitt, 2011). In other words, it is the clinging or attachment to the aggregates that causes the suffering, and releasing these attachments will end the suffering. The similarities between Western psychology and Buddhist teachings are noteworthy. For instance, both assert that we see an object, interact with it through our senses and categorize it. However, where the two schools of thought differ is equally interesting. While Western psychology presents perception as stages and in a linear manner, Buddhist teachings view this interaction holistically—that is, perception does not occur in isolation as it is a part of every moment, alongside the other four aggregates. Buddhist teachings also point out the importance of discerning our attachment to our perception, something that is absent from the Western notion of perception altogether.

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Can we apply the Buddhist teachings as a viable option in a protracted social conflict context? Is it reasonable to expect one to relinquish their attachment to their identities? After all, without our identities, who are we? Am I still “me” irrespective of being a woman, a mother, and a teacher? What or who is “me”? Is there a “me” without those other facets? In other words, do the agents of socialization reinforce my gender and occupational roles and thus my identity, or does the internal “me” inform who I am? I believe it is possible to detach from our socially constructed identities. One reason for this is because groups of different identities coexist peacefully in some parts of the world, while the same groups are in conflict in other parts of the world. For example, assuming that the conflict in Northern Ireland had been a religious one, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had been engrossed in a protracted conflict for decades while members of the same groups coexist peacefully elsewhere (e.g. inter-marrying) (Wolff, 2007). It is the attachment to our identity which creates entrenched positionality that can lead to conflict, and therefore, it is this narrative that we must detach from. If we were able to detach from our socialized identity narratives, it then becomes possible to live harmoniously. Detaching from Our Socialized Identities Given the complexities of history, politics, society, and just life in general, is it possible to detach from our identities? This might seem like an unreasonable idea; after all, who are we without our identity? Are our respective identities not the very components of our being that make us unique? And if so, why would we want to detach from them? It is the narratives of our identity, the socially constructed identity, that we need to detach from. We all hold internal narratives of who we are. For example, one may identify as being a cat person or a pacifist or an artist. Then we take these identities and attach attributes to them and behave accordingly. The same can be said for attaching attributes to race, gender, age, etc., and when we begin to believe these narratives, we behave accordingly, whether consciously or not. For example, Whites always get the message that they are better and superior, and so they behave as such (DiAngelo, 2011), and the Global Majority receives the message that they are less than and carry out their lives from this limited stance. These are all performative roles, and whether we are conscious of it or not, they entrap us.

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According to Buddhist teachings, these narratives to which we are attached are in fact an illusion. The illusion is driven by the Ego and its need to be at the centre of attention. The Ego coerces us into believing that what we think about ourselves and others is real. Becoming attached to the Ego’s narratives, not recognizing that they are false, we then bring suffering to ourselves and to others. Using myself as an example, when I attach to the narrative that I am oppressed, I also believe that I am unable to freely engage in society—politically, socially, economically, religiously, etc.—because there is a dominant group which holds power over me which denies me access to these engagements. Let us say that my emotional reaction at this injustice is to be angry, and my behaviour is to hold those in the dominant group in contempt. Arguably, both my emotion and behaviour are generated by my thoughts; therefore, my thoughts are causing my suffering, as well as the suffering of others. According to Hanh (2017), our body is a collective, as is the body of our ancestors, our parents, our nation, our culture and the whole cosmos; therefore, “when we are able to transform our suffering, we do so not only for ourselves but also for all of our ancestors and descendants” (p. 170). So how does one transform one’s suffering? Hanh (2017) states that handling our suffering is an art, meaning that if we know how to suffer, we will suffer much less. Therefore, we must bring our suffering to the surface in order to identify and embrace it (Hanh, 2017). To practise the art of suffering, there are three steps (Hanh, 2017). The first step is being mindful and present for your suffering (Hanh, 2017). The second step is recognizing your suffering just as it is without exaggerating or amplifying it with other worries (Hanh, 2017). And the third is identifying the roots of the suffering and being attentive to not feeding it with cravings (consuming or engaging in other toxic activities) (Hanh, 2017). Hanh (2017) recommends changing our habits of thinking, speaking, behaving, and consuming in order to uproot and cut off the sources of our suffering (Hanh, 2017). These are the actions that will cease our suffering (Hanh, 2017). Even though we may be inclined to ignore or avoid our suffering, Hanh (2017) insists that we need to experience it, which will teach us to generate understanding and compassion, and in turn transform pain and suffering to happiness and peace. As we are not separate from the world, we have to make peace and reduce suffering in ourselves (Hanh, 2017). Peace, compassion, and well-being begin with ourselves (Hanh, 2017). When we know how to handle and embrace our own suffering, only then can we also help someone who is experiencing

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pain. However, if we are not peaceful, we cannot be of much help (Hanh, 2017). Peace begins with me (Chopra, 2005; Hay, n.d.; His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 2008). Until a person is able to create inner harmony, only then can that person be peaceful (Burrowes 1996, as cited in Byrne & Senehi, 2012). A non-violent practitioner must “transcend and transform selfish individualism, ego, and other troublesome attachments” (Barash 1991, as cited in Byrne & Senehi, 2012: 222) to reach a level of spiritual transformation to work to create a society based on truth and political morality (Barash 1991, as cited in Byrne & Senehi, 2012). One difference between Western understanding and approaches to peace (such as Azar’s needs-­ based identity theory) is that the focus is on external aspects of conflict compared to an Eastern approach which brings attention to the internal conflict (suffering) and the importance of inner peace. This is a stark difference. Hanh’s approach does not ask us to deny, negate or dismiss discriminations, racism, and injustices. Rather, he states that we must first look at ourselves and how we are participating in these practices and make the changes in ourselves first before moving outwards. When I am peaceful inside, I will approach everyone and everything with love, compassion, and harmony. This is what will cultivate peace externally. The only way to know if this holds true is to practise it for yourself (Ruiz & Hernandez, 2011). The comparison between a Western/neoliberal notion of peace and an Eastern/Buddhist notion of peace is an ontological one. Ultimately, it is at the reader’s discretion to determine if one or the other approach is more suited to their beliefs and values or if there is a way to blend the two. In other words, what do you need to do to become a peace(ful) practitioner?

Conclusion This chapter investigated the role that identity plays in identity-based conflicts. Given that many conflicts around the world are categorized as identity conflicts, I was curious as to what some of the factors might be that contribute to said conflicts. I was also interested in learning more about why strategies to bring sustained peace in these circumstances have not been successful. To answer my queries, I examined Azar’s (1990) needs-­ based identity theory which states that a colonial historical context and a bi- or multi-communal society are preconditions for identity conflicts. Within this context, when the basic needs of a non-dominant group are

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denied by a dominant group, conflict is likely to ensue (Azar, 1990). I have argued that linking identity to basic needs is provocative and aspects of identity such as ethnicity may not really be at the root of identity conflicts. I also pointed out that Azar’s assertion that a colonial historical context as a precondition for identity conflict is weak and likely stems from a knowledge-confirming paradigm. I argue that it is the construction of identity/identities which can trigger an ethnic conflict. We have fallen prey into narratives that tell us we are oppressed and oppressor, which typically plays out along racial lines. At the same time, contemporary use of intersectionality brings in other axis of identity such as age, gender, and sexuality which layers the oppressed and oppressor narratives. Identifying with these narratives, I have argued, is what sustains identity conflicts. Drawing from my own experience, I shared how my attachment to the narratives that I was oppressed created inner conflict. That is, seeing myself as the Othered, I contorted myself so I could fit in and simultaneously tried to assert an identity to highlight my uniqueness. The latter was a calling from my True Self. What is the True Self? The True Self is the one that comes from within. It is the Self that connects us to others (without Othering). It connects us to the elements, plants, and animals, and everything that is naturally in existence. This is the Self that speaks to us when we are listening in silence. It is the Self that breathes. The Self that causes our hearts to beat. It is the one that guides us to act from a place of love and compassion. Over the years, it has been a constant inner struggle trying to define and identify myself. For example, being born in Guyana of East Indian ancestry, I wondered, am I Indian? Am I East Indian? Am I West Indian? Am I Guyanese? Am I Indo-Guyanese? Am I Indo-Guyanese Canadian? Trying to establish an identity based on any of the aforementioned criteria is an imposition on the True Self and therefore unnecessary. Thus, my assertion that detachment from the identity narratives and paradigms just might be a step in the right direction towards resolving identity conflicts. Who am I then? This is a personal and unique exploration that continues throughout our lives. For now, I am a spiritual being, creating my own story and my own destiny, living in the light of love in a collective space, sharing the planet and the universe, coming from a place of inner peace and love.

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References Azar, E. (1990). The management of protracted social conflict: Theory and cases. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Bai, H., Morgan, P., Scott, C., & Cohen, A. (2016). Prolegomena to a spiritual research paradigm: Importance of attending to the embodied and the subtle. In J. Lin, R. L. Oxford, & T. Culham (Eds.), Toward a spiritual research paradigm: Exploring new ways of knowing, researching and being. Information Age Publishing. Bernstein, M. (2005). Identity politics. Annual Review of Sociology, 31(1), 47–74. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100054 Boudreau, T.  E. (2011). Human agonistes: Interdisciplinary inquiry into ontological agency and human conflict. In D. J. D. Sandole, S. Byrne, I. Sandole-­ Staroste, & J.  Senehi (Eds.), Handbook of conflict analysis and resolution (pp. 131–143). Routledge. Brunila, K., & Rossi, L.-M. (2018). Identity politics, the ethos of vulnerability, and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(3), 287–298. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1343115 Byrne, S., & Carter, N. (2002). Social cubism: Six social forces of ethnopolitical conflict in Northern Ireland and Quebec. ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law, 8(3), 741. Byrne, S., Matyók, T., Scott, I. M., & Senehi, J. (2020). Peace and conflict studies in the 21st century: Theory, substance, and practice. In S. Byrne, T. Matyók, I. M. Scott, & J. Senehi (Eds.), Routledge companion to peace and conflict studies (pp. 3–21). Routledge. Byrne, S., & Senehi, J. (2012). Violence: Analysis, intervention and prevention. Ohio University Press. Cavanaugh, K. A. (2000). Understanding protracted social conflicts: A basic needs approach. In S.  Byrne & C.  Irvin (Eds.), Reconcilable differences: Turning points in ethnopolitical conflict (pp. 65–78). Kumarian Press. Chandler, D. (2017). Peacebuilding: The twenty year’s crisis, 1997–2017. Palgrave Macmillan. Chilisa, B. (2012). Participatory research methods. In Indigenous research methodologies (pp. 267–292). Sage. Chilisa, B., & Ntseane, G. (2010). Resisting dominant discourses: Implications of indigenous, African feminist theory and methods for gender and education research. Gender and Education, 22(6), 617–632. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09540253.2010.519578 Chopra, D. (2005). Peace is the way: Bringing war and violence to an end. Harmony Books. Collins, P.  H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

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Definition and the five stages of perception. (n.d.). https://www.ukessays.com/ essays/psychology/definition-­and-­the-­five-­stages-­of-­perception-­psychology-­ essay.php#citethis Dege, M. (2014). Identity politics. In T.  Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of critical ­psychology (pp.  936–941). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­1-­4614-­ 5583-­7_586 DiAngelo, R. (2011). White fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3), 54–70. Hanh, T. N. t. (2017). The art of living: Peace and freedom in the here and now. Harper Collins Publishers. Hill Collins, P., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Polity Press. His Holiness the Dalai Lama. (2006). How to see yourself as you really are (J. Hopkins, Ed. & Trans.). Atria Books. His Holiness the Dalai Lama. (2008). In R. Mehrotra (Ed.), In my own words: An introduction to my teachings and philosophy. Hay House. Jeong, H. W. (2020). Conflict transformation. In S. Byrne, T. Matyók, I. M. Scott, & J.  Senehi (Eds.), Routledge companion to peace and conflict studies (pp. 25–34). Routledge. Kovach, M. (2021). Indigenous methodologies : Characteristics, conversations, and contexts (2nd ed.). University of Toronto Press. Lee, B. A., Ogunfemi, N., Neville, H. A., & Tettegah, S. (2021). Resistance and restoration: Healing research methodologies for the global majority. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, 29, 6. https://doi.org/10.1037/ cdp0000394 Lin, J., Oxford, R. L., & Culham, T. (2016). Introduction: The urgent need to develop a spiritual research paradigm. In J. Lin, R. L. Oxford, & T. Culham (Eds.), Toward a spiritual research paradigm: Exploring new ways of knowing, researching and being. Information Age Publishing. Mamdani, M. (2001). Beyond settler and native as political identities: Overcoming the political legacy of colonialism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43(4), 651–664. Marley, B. (1980). Redemption song. On Uprising. Island Records. Moffitt, P. (2011). How preferences prejudice your perceptions. Retrieved February 9, 2019, from http://dharmawisdom.org/teachings/articles/how-­preferences-­ prejudice-­your-­perceptions Paul, K. (2015). Moving beyond intersectionality in development studies. St. Antony’s international review, 10(2), 168–191. Polkinghorn, B. D. (2000). The social origins of environmental resource conflict: Exposing the roots of tangible disputes. In S.  Byrne & C.  Irvin (Eds.), Reconcilable differences: Turning points in ethnopolitical conflict (pp.  79–95). Kumarian Press.

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Richmond, O.  P. (2010). A genealogy of peace and conflict theory. In O.  P. Richmond (Ed.), Palgrave advances in peacebuilding (pp.  14–38). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230282681_2 Ruiz, M., & Hernandez, L. (2011). The mastery of love: A practical guide to the art of relationship. Amber-Allen. Sandberg, J., & Alvesson, M. (2011). Ways of constructing research questions: Gap-spotting or problematization? Organization (London, England), 18(1), 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508410372151 Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books. Wolff, S. (2007). Ethnic conflict: A global perspective. Oxford University Press. Yin, D., Mitra, S., & Zhang, H. (2016). When do consumers value positive vs. negative reviews? An empirical investigation of confirmation bias in online word of mouth. Information Systems Research, 27(1), 131. https://doi.org/ 10.1287/isre.2015.0617

CHAPTER 3

On Names, Labels, and Colonial Amnesia Christiane Ndedi Essombe

Introduction In a colonial supremacist capitalist world (Robinson, 2021), biological and physical characteristics remain the main criteria to engineer social orders (Oyewumi, 1997) and their unequal, exploitative relations of power. People who do not resemble colonial masters—be it in their skin color or gender identity—are denied the courtesy of being acknowledged as people with any authority. Deprived of any sovereignty over their body, home, and political status (Mbembe & Meintjes, 2003), bodies that are marked as ontologically inferior unsurprisingly end up dehumanized, objectified, enslaved, and instrumentalized to fuel the racist, capitalist supremacist project of Modernity (Robinson, 2021). This project has been running ever since European voyages and pillages in the fifteenth century CE, redeploying, and sophisticating itself in virtually all societies to maintain patriarchal (Oyewumi, 1997), White supremacist (Christian, 2019) hierarchies.

C. Ndedi Essombe (*) Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_3

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Within western paradigms, “the Other is a body” (Oyewumi, 1997: 3); however, this body is not a physiological vehicle that accompanies an intellect, a mind, or a soul, for those very elements are thought to be inexistant in those seen as Others, particularly in people of African descent. Voltaire famously stated that Africans were “not men, except in their stature with the faculty of speech and thought at a degree far distant from [Europeans’]” (Voltaire & Woolf, 1929). He unsurprisingly also assessed “Negroes” as “[occupying] a median position between Europeans and apes” (Harrison, 2020). As illustrated in such affirmations, the Other is commonly approached as an object that is either anthropomorphized or animalized. Labels used to refer to the Other often betray a dehumanizing premise, including whenever so-called objectivity is used (Fanon, 1968). The lack of connection to Christian White European men has implied that people who do not have such social markers have been conceptualized as further removed from the perfect design of a human being in a heteronormative patriarchal White supremacist world (i.e., Caucasian heterosexual men) (Lipko & Di Pasquo, 2008; Muiga, 2019). Particularly, within such a White supremacist paradigm, people who do not have European ancestry are essentially understood as ontologically un-human: backward, barbarian, and closer to animals (Christian, 2019). That racist logic seems to translate into the preferred use of specific labels. For example, it appears that polities on the African continent have historically been commonly referred to as “tribes”, while similar polities have been labelled “nations” in Europe.1 At a practical level, all such groups are organized around a common language, common cultural practices, shared ancestry, and a shared specific geographic location. And yet, the racialized groups had to be associated with a label that evokes the racist imagery of a “dark continent” (Conrad, 2007). White supremacy and White normativity could also explain why White Canadians are often simply called “Canadians”, while racialized Canadians are commonly labelled with their ethnicity or racial identity as a first identifier before the word “Canadian”. In a world of White normativity, it might indeed be redundant to highlight that the standard idea of a 1  As Chris Lowe (2001) wrote, “‘Tribe’ promotes a myth of primitive [racialized] timelessness”. The connotations associated with the word are those of peoples that are “savage”. Since in a White supremacist world, only White people can be civilized and deprived of any savagery (allegedly), “tribe” is reserved to those who are not White (physically, politically, or socio-culturally). One needs only to look at the images that appear for each of these queries (“tribe” and “nation”) in any search engine.

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Canadian individual remains somebody of European ancestry. Instead, it is critical to signal the Other, by using their non-White body and non-­ European ancestry as prefixes. Such a reflection on common naming conventions is not an invitation to color-blindness (Neville et al., 2013) or color-silence (Tatum, 2017: 24), as both have been identified as forms of ultramodern racism (Neville et al., 2013). Instead, it is an invitation to extend such labelling conventions to people of European ancestry rather than using a Eurocentric lens to navigate the world. Indeed, why else would labels such as “Euro-Canadian” or “British-Canadian” be so sparsely used when discussing racial identities, if not for White normativity and the acceptance of whiteness2 as a social norm? This chapter seeks to examine the hegemonic social orders and colonial narratives embedded in commonly used labels to refer to the Other, whether it be a gendered female body, a colonized and racialized body, a non-western body, or any body trapped at any intersection of physiological and social markers used to normalize supremacist orders. The chapter first presents some meaning and functions attached to the practice of naming in both African philosophical thought and western psychology. It then discusses how labels and names can influence self-perceptions, stereotypes, and othering practices. The chapter then centers on colonial labels and racist stereotypes deployed against people of African descent and the continent of Africa. It concludes with a reflection about what the exercise of renaming the continent and its people could unveil. Doing so, it convenes readers to a reflection about the new paradigms and imaginary that could be unlocked if labels, names, and narratives assigned to people of African descent and the continent itself were re-thought outside of a colonial matrix of power.

What Is in a Name? To some, it could be tempting to dismiss any conversation about labels and names and conclude that this is all semantics deprived of any real impact or signifiers. It might even be easier to do so when one’s identity 2  Whiteness is understood here as: “a social positioning from which the White subject experiences race as comfortable and projects onto others what it will not project onto itself” (Frankenberg, 1993). Whiteness and the positioning of White people as the norm explain the racialization of non-White individuals and the convenient omission of racial labels when discussing White people, in this case, Canadians of European ancestry.

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or biological markers are considered standard and thus never mentioned, or alternatively, have never been turned into a derogatory name or an insult. While labels used to refer to social groups do not (or at least, should not) replace individual names, it remains that social labels, including racial labels, mirror functions of first names. They are assigned to groups of individuals and hold historical, social, cultural, and political connotations that inform the way one might be received in a specific space (Twenge & Manis, 2006; Bushing & Lutz, 2018). They are also contextual (Kamenka, 1965): the way two individuals of an in-group might refer to each other, might differ from the way a member of an out-group might be expected to refer to these two individuals.3 Similarly, the way one might be called by their family or childhood friends might differ from the name they expect an employer or a government official to use when addressing them. Western psychological studies indicate that names and labels used to refer to individuals are far from insignificant. Gordon Allport (1937) describes an individual’s name as the most critical anchor of their self-­ identity (Joubert, 1993), while William E. Walton concludes that a first name could have profound impact on an individual’s personality as well as their success or failure in any endeavor (Walton, 1937: 396). Among the Ndebele in Zimbabwe, naming is likened to “bestowing an identity” upon an individual (Dhlamini et al., 2013: 1725). Naming also appears to play a critical role in self-definition (Mazama cited in Okafor, 2014: 211–212) and functions as a “public statement” among the Zulu (Koopman, 2002: 33). Interestingly, in African philosophical thought, names are conceptualized as crystallizing any aspirations an individual might seek to achieve in their lifetime, as well as specific social orders, and pertaining relative access to or lack of power (Penzura, 2021; Tonkin in Sengani, 2015: 2). It thus appears that names and labels hold more than a descriptive function and can influence one’s beliefs and actions, whether that is due to self-perception or to the treatment experienced at the hands of others. The stereotype threat, or the risk of being judged based on existing negative 3  I believe it would be interesting to analyze the extent to which in-group naming practices indicate elements of appropriated racial oppression and the upholding of whiteness. For some reflections on such labelling practices as it relates to the Euro-American and African American communities specifically, I recommend Ta-Nehesi Coates’ answer to a question about a racial slur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO15S3WC9pg

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stereotypes (Spencer et al., 1999), is an example of the impact of negative self-perceptions. The stereotype threat essentially indicates that individuals’ perception of their own abilities (or lack thereof) is influenced by negative stereotypes about the social group they belong to, that is, negative stereotypes commonly associated with the name or social label used for them. In 1999, Spencer et al. examined the impact of the stereotype threat on women’s performance in math. The common sexist narrative that women had lower abilities than men in mathematics was evidenced as negatively influencing the performance of women in their math tests. In that study, the stereotype threat could be avoided by prefacing the test with an announcement that no gender differences were observed in results associated to that specific type of test. Within such a setting, the same women— who were intentionally exposed to counter-narratives rather than stereotypical sexist ones—scored higher than they did in the first experiment (Spencer et al., 1999). Such findings appear to indicate that female respondents created a correlation between the label “woman” and poor performance in math tests. They acted according to who they were told they were and what they were allegedly capable of doing (or not) in relation to men, even when they had the skills to perform well in all tests (Spencer et al., 1999). As social settings involve more than one party, it would be incorrect to conclude that reactions to stereotypes boil down to individual reactions and self-perceptions. Indeed, stereotypes influence both the behavior of those they are about and those who engage with the stereotyped population. In a study conducted in 2019, participating teachers were assessed as showing bias against the mathematical abilities of female students, particularly of Black and Hispanic female students (Copur-Gencturk et al., 2020). The labels “Black”, “Hispanic”, and “girl” were enough for professional teachers to assume that people labelled that way could not perform well in mathematics. In other words, despite the multiple students they had been exposed to, these teachers held the bias that any student who is racialized, specifically, Black, or Hispanic, and gendered “female”, ought to perform worse than the standard idea of a student in a patriarchal and White supremacist paradigm, that is, a White male student. There are consequently expectations (or lack thereof) and social hierarchies embedded in such gender and racial labels. In a racist, capitalist, and supremacist world, what are the expectations and social hierarchies embedded in labels used to refer to people of African

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descent? What stories have been engineered and neatly packaged in labels that maintain stereotypes and falsehoods? When I was younger, I remember being particularly aggravated whenever French-speaking people would pronounce Cameroon as “Camehroon”. At that time, I was not yet aware of the etymology of the name. I only thought it was rude to dismiss the pronunciation commonly used by the very citizens of that country. Now that I am aware that the name “Cameroon” comes from “camarões” which means “prawns” in Portuguese (Commonwealth, n.d.) and referred to the sea life of the Wouri river (Rubin, 1994) used by colonists to enter uninvited into the area, I do not know whether I should feel aggravated by the unmistakably condescending attitudes of European colonists toward Africa, or because over a century later, the country and anything related to it are still named after a crustacean. What does it say that a supposedly independent country still claims and answers to a name that illustrates the exploitative mindset of colonists and their utter disregard for the history, people, polities, and cultures of that region? What does the attachment to such a name indicate about any self-­ perception and how does it influence external expectations?

The A-word I once had an interaction with an academic that I can only describe as a textbook case study of critical whiteness (Cardoso, 2010): a reminder of the swiftness with which western people of European ancestry, although claiming to challenge racism, can and often do default back to their sense of superiority. The situation had a very unsuspecting start: that person had asked me to provide feedback and suggestions ahead of a project they had invited me to co-lead with them. When I produced the requested feedback and suggestions, they entirely dismissed it without a single explanation or counterpoint. Not a single piece of my feedback was assessed as relevant by that person. None of my changes and suggestions were integrated, and yet I was still expected to engage in the project. When I shared that I felt instrumentalized and would consequently not dedicate any additional time to a project that discarded all my intellectual contributions yet sought to name me as a contributor, they asked for a conversation. In keeping with the hypocrisy of critical whiteness, that

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individual tried to acknowledge my expertise while also admitting that they “did not expect so many comments”. In other words, although my experience and viewpoints were supposedly relevant and although they had invited me to comment, I was not actually expected to question their work. Furthermore, if I had the audacity to believe that I could make any valuable contributions, I had to do so according to their standards and liking. They had placed themselves as the unquestionable norm, the highest standard, even as they were supposedly trying to challenge racist dynamics by implementing a project whose whole purpose was to present and deconstruct whiteness to a White audience. In a sense, that objective was partially reached: their reaction and fragility was truly an admirable display of the internalized superiority which characterizes whiteness. Of particular relevance for the present chapter is how they mentioned that they “[knew] about my work in Africa”. It seemed that it was their way to acknowledge my expertise while simultaneously refusing to accept the feedback that stemmed from that very expertise. Something about it, coming from a White person who was so oblivious to their internalized sense of superiority and their partaking in racist dynamics, yet portrayed themselves as an ally, was utterly maddening. Maybe it was the drawl that carried that last “a”; or maybe it was the friction at the end of the first syllable. It also could have been the combination of their insincerity and my own frustration that I had let them that close to me, but their mention and pronunciation of “Africa” irritated me to no end. They obviously knew nothing about the continent or about my ties and work experience there. It was consequently not clear to me why they deemed it necessary to mention Africa to acknowledge my expertise instead of centering on the matter at hand, right then and there, in so-­ called North America. Their tokenistic ways, racist ideology, and how they were upholding critical whiteness—three elements that I had identified in a matter of seconds following their dismissal of my feedback—were what required attention. Unsurprisingly, they were not ready to question themselves. I guess it is only in “Af-furi-kaah” (as they pronounced it) that my expertise is valid and relevant. What stories did this person associate with Africa and why did they conclude it was appropriate in that moment to tie their Black interlocutor to that continent? It is my belief that in a White supremacist world, “Africa” in the mouth of European people who abide by whiteness, can be an insult. Such people seem to charge the word “Africa” with racist stereotypical

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representations of malnourished children, all sorts of uncurable diseases, (Mabry, 2016), supposed “tribes” (Lowe, 2001), poverty (Merab, 2020), and never-ending humanitarian interventions which most often than not reinforce a savior-complex rooted in a White supremacist ideology (Pallister-­ Wilkins, 2021). There does not seem to be any reflection about the accuracy of these depictions or what might have caused them to occur if they are indeed a reality. For people who hold such beliefs, whether consciously or not, “Africa” appears to be a shorter phrase to imply the “uncivilized, primitive, savage underdeveloped Other world that needs salvation”. That label does not care to distinguish or acknowledge historical periods, the plurality of social models, the abundance of natural resources, the diversity of people, the resilience of populations, nor any type of epistemology and knowledge produced on the continent. It is “Africa”: a place that supposedly has not entered history yet (Ba, 2007), or worse still, a place that supposedly has no history. Unsurprisingly, “go back to Africa” is an exhortation (or possibly a threat?) commonly thrown whenever an individual with African ancestry has the audacity to stand for themselves and demand their viewpoints be acknowledged and their rights be respected (Al Jazeera, 2022). In hindsight, that academic’s mention of my “work in Africa” might have well been their way to tell me to “go back to Africa”. More recently, the 2022 FIFA world cup reminded whoever had been oblivious to the racist dynamics of professional European soccer, that black-­skinned European players’ identity is conditional to their performance. Whenever they perform well, in the case of the French national soccer team, they are “les bleus” and French is the only adjective used to describe their nationality: no single mention of any player’s ancestry is to be found anywhere (Hernandez, 2018). Whenever they do not and miss penalties, “torrents of racist slurs” surface back leading some players to deactivate comments on their social media accounts (AP sports, 2022) and forcing the French Football Federation (FFF) to publicly condemn such hateful rhetoric (Reuters, 2022). In typical fashion, some comments included the infamous invitation to “go back to the jungle” and referred to players as “slaves” (AP sports, 2022). Such players were no longer French in that moment: they were Black bodies in a White supremacist post-transatlantic slave trade world, a world which France, as a colonial empire, has certainly been a key architect of. Whichever White soul fanatic of soccer felt betrayed for having trusted a being who they may have never fully accepted as equal in the first place, and whose only redeeming quality

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according to them was their athletic skills, likely sensed the urge to spread their racist belief: to them Black people will always be inferior and on perpetual trial to prove their worth to White European people. Any shortcoming will be used to remind that in the eyes of such White people, Black people are intrinsically savage and supposedly incapable of any accomplishment. They are an oddity of nature who, in a White supremacist world, ought to be grateful for benevolent White people who tolerate their sight and to whom they should supposedly aspire to assimilate. As has become common, hyphenated nationalities also surface in times of defeat (Gastellum, 2022). Shortly after the loss of the French national soccer team in the World Cup Finals in December 2022, pictures of the national team with flags above players’ face circulated on social media to indicate where these players were “really” from—because losing can certainly not be something that French people partake in, apparently. These pictures aimed to illustrate that few players were “really French” (i.e., white-skinned people whose ancestry can only be traced to France), although all players were born on French soil and claim it as their country. What does such a behavior reveal? It is certainly a reminder that citizenship does not imply belonging or membership into a nation. It is also a reminder that whiteness is the premise of such societies where only White European people are considered the norm. Whenever the racialized Other win they are French, whenever they do not, they are back at the margins and a fair target of hatred for having been allowed out of their out-group and into the French in-group only to soil what many still see as an honor reserved for ontologically worthy people in a racist paradigm (i.e., White people of European ancestry). Whiteness is back on at full speed to remind the Other of their ancestry and its immutable nature, and to refresh their memory about what they are not in such societies: unconditionally worthy, valid, and valuable. It is explicitly unleashed to leave bare that the Others are only tolerated as citizens of a European country so long as they do what is expected of them. It would be quite ignorant and simplistic to limit racist anti-African sentiments to European people who abide by whiteness. Fanon (1968) famously wrote about anti-African narratives in Martinique. Recently my own visit of a memorial site about the transatlantic slave trade and its impact in Martinique led me to hear some puzzling affirmations according to which all Martiniquais were mixed and were not Africans. The Pan-­ African in me actively sighed in disappointment. My references in critical race theory immediately identified a potential redeployment of White

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supremacist ideology and a possible need to distance oneself from those placed at the bottom of humanity and of the global critical framework of race: Africans south of the Sahara (Christian, 2019). What is it about Africa that makes it such a dreaded label or a triggering epithet when in the mouth of those who abide by whiteness?

Inventing “Africa” There is no evidence that “Africa” as a term was ever used to refer to the entire continent prior to European contact. It is believed that “Africa” was originally the name of an indigenous Amazigh nation that lived on the Mediterranean shores of the continent: the Aourigha (possibly pronounced “Afarika”) (Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Chambati, 2013). The term was coined in the Roman Empire to refer to the Other, in a spatial, social, and ontological way. Africa became the land south of the Mediterranean, the society that was not the Roman Empire, and the people who were not Romans. Africa is in its essence a label used to create an in-group out-group dynamic with Europeans as the in-group and “Africans” as the out-group. Hence, in a Eurocentric White supremacist world, the odds of Africans ever being accepted as equals to those who have self-assessed themselves as the original and most beautiful race (Lipko & Di Pasquo, 2008) are inexistant. There needs to be an out-group for the in-group to exist. That need is so urgent that out-group identities have been engineered to meet that purpose. So-called tribal identities on the continent are examples of such engineered identities (Muiga, 2019)—tokens on the real size checkboard of the colonial game of rule-and-conquer. It has been documented that such identities had to be reimagined or as Muiga, quoting Mamdani (1996), wrote: “Ndebele had to be taught how to be Ndebele by Europeans; Kikuyu had to be taught how to be Kikuyu; Igbo had to be taught how to be Igbo” (Muiga, 2019).4 4  This is the correct spelling of the name. However, it is common to see it written as “Ibo” and mispronounced accordingly. Misnaming and renaming indigenous names on the continent appears to be a key trait of colonial encounters. Such transformations usually take place to accommodate colonizers’ languages and further erase the sovereignty of indigenous people over their own names. For example, the name “Kenya” comes from “Kirinyaga”, “Mandingo” is a westernization of “Mande nko” and “Mozambique” comes from Sultan Musa Bin Bik’s name.

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It is ironic and quite sobering to think that manufactured expectations associated with often equally manufactured labels have had real-life consequences on people, territories, cultures, and resources for decades. Whenever people from the continent call themselves African, they employ and legitimize a Eurocentric worldview. Whenever people from the continent call themselves using their country’s name, they often also employ and legitimize a colonial exploitative Eurocentric worldview. Whenever people from the continent refer to themselves using their traditional or ethnic identities, they also often end up mobilizing and legitimizing colonial constructions. Centuries later, it appears that wherever people of African descent look, they are met with the everlasting colonial White supremacist gaze that objectifies, enslaves, and denies sovereignty. What is our name? The name that people who actually cared for us and respected us, gave us: what is it? Has there ever been one? Could claiming “Black” as a group label positively influence self-esteem (Joubert, 1993), a sense of public mandate (Koopman, 2002), and any aspirations (Tonkin in Sengani, 2015:2; Penzura, 2021)? Any informed answer to this question requires some nuances. “Black” ought to be understood as an out-group identity within a White supremacist paradigm. Robinson (2021) argued that “Black” like “Negro” deprives one of any spatial or temporal references and reduces them to be a body that is exploited for racist capitalism. While it is indisputable that “Black” in the mouth of a White supremacist, capitalist individual is a signifier of inferiority and dehumanization, it is worth highlighting that “Black” could also be a political identity that signals a crude awareness of the violence of racist capitalism and a refusal to partake in it. “Black” could be a call of solidarity that resonates across borders and oceans against White supremacy and racial hierarchies however they are reimagined and redeployed. Furthermore, “black” as a word has a history that predates colonial ventures into the continent. Indeed, there are positive connotations associated with black skin and blackness that predate the globalization of the exploitative enslaving, colonial, European gaze. Ancient Egypt was called Kemit (or Kemet), a word that means black in ancient Egyptian (Diop, 1974: 7). Black as a color was used in representations in ancient Egypt to depict ancient Egyptians, from kings and queens to regular people and people in state of servitude. Black in and of itself was thus not reserved exclusively to indicate any sort of ontological inferiority

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(Diop, 1974). To this point, even Egyptian gods which were all highly venerated were commonly painted “coal black” in Ancient Egypt (Diop, 1974: 58). That fact (which can still be appreciated whenever one looks at statues, statuettes, and paintings from Ancient Egypt) is a reminder that colors, in and of themselves, do not have any meaning. The connotations that people project onto them capture the social order of a specific time and society. As such, colors (specifically skin colors in this case) only become social markers associated with or deprived of power whenever there is a pre-existing racist ideology at play. Thus, the absence of an exclusive negative framing of black as a color and as a label in the early Egyptian civilization is a reminder that White supremacy has not always existed and can be challenged. Unfortunately, the convenient global amnesia about these facts captures the ubiquity of whiteness in contemporary societies, including among people of African descent. Although “black” can be understood from a decolonial perspective as hinted above, it must be acknowledged that it is difficult to do so when one is constantly faced with relentless, suffocating, deadly White supremacist violence. “What happens when that label [i.e. Black] is taken away?” a brilliant mind asked me once. I was caught off guard. What happens indeed, when neither the name of a continent, the name of a country, the name of an ethnicity or a political identity can be claimed? (See Maiangwa in the introduction to this volume). What is our name? Have we ever had a name that was not connected one way or another to colonial domination or to markers that have been instrumentalized for colonial domination? I pondered on this, my eye movements accelerating, bouncing from one corner of the room to another, as I stared at the emptiness of the realization that I had never had access to a vocabulary to define myself that had not held in recent times some colonial Eurocentric and/or White supremacist connotations. There is a certain feeling of emptiness and void that seeps past the mind into the soul and stagnates as a cold numbing sensation over one’s being once they realize that their existence has only been defined through the prism of exploitation and Othering. There is an even deeper sorrow that settles in once one realizes that such framing has been accepted as the norm for the last centuries.

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This is not to dismiss countries on the continent that have chosen to change their name by either using precolonial references of existing empires (e.g., Gana empire and Ghana—Ghanaweb, 2012) or geographic landmarks such as rivers (e.g., Zambezi and Zambia—Lusaka Times, 2018) and deserts (Namib desert and Namibia—Goudie, 2010). There are however only a handful of countries on the continent that have changed their name and even less that have done so without further legitimizing colonial labels or traditional identities with questionable premises. While simplistic conclusions are unhelpful in addition to usually being wrong, it remains that when it comes to colonial stereotypes and colonial labels, they appear to have established a colonial essentialism where many African countries seem resistant to imagine themselves outside of the exploitative racist, capitalist White supremacist colonial paradigm. Is it surprising that Africa remains trapped in colonial matrixes of power that suffocate it, when Africa as a label and a colonial project was never intended to benefit Africans?

What If People of African Descent Named Themselves? This suggestion does not refer to renaming streets or monuments, although those changes have their place and can positively affect identity and contribute to a sense of indigeneity (Wanjiru & Kosuke, 2014). It does not refer to renaming countries either, although doing so would logically be on the roadmap of any decolonial self-identification endeavour. I am referring to picking a name for the continent and for its people. Such an exercise would unquestionably be tedious, but it might very well need to be so to be meaningful. Such an endeavor could give birth to a long overdue historical exercise of retrieving, reviving, and spreading education about the continent before it became “Africa”. It would also be a fundamental step in the equally long overdue exercise of truth and reconciliation that ought to happen between the continent and its diaspora to acknowledge and heal the deep wounds, incomprehension, and disavowals created by the trans Saharan slave trade, trans Red Sea/Indian Ocean slave trade, and the transatlantic slave trade (Fomin, 2012). Fundamental to this exercise of self-identification and self-labelling would be to highlight that the continent had the first civilization ever

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documented and that in that civilization, black was not a curse but a godly attribute (Diop, 1974). Presenting and disseminating the contributions of Kemet to the rest of the continent via its links with other empires and polities could be the most convincing illustration of how grandiose achievements and multi-pluralism have been possible outside the framework of coloniality. That exercise would also help decolonize the contemporary framing of cultural, genealogic, linguistic, and spiritual artifacts. Indeed, those are often presented as irrelevant within a colonial paradigm when they could be appreciated as living proofs of the possibility of an existence outside colonial exploitation. Although referring to Kemet as an example of precolonial civilization on the continent is unavoidable, this should not lead to recreating hierarchies and dismissing any precolonial models that are not Kemet as irrelevant. The driving force of such an exercise of self-labeling should not be to homogenize an entire continent or rename it as “Kemet” without further thought. Instead, I believe that exercise should be guided by a willingness to center and highlight common characteristics that speak to the greatness of the continent prior to colonial pillage and signals an aspiration to maintain such greatness, rather than invite more othering and exploitation. It will also be critical for any self-defined name to acknowledge the diversity and pluralism of societies on the continent since the homogenizing label of “Africa” certainly did not do that. What will a new name change? How does a new name solve conflicts and drought?—one might wonder. A new name cannot do such things. However, the process that accompanies such an effort might reveal new paths to potential solutions. A retrieved history and revived cultural practices, reframed identities that destabilize the colonial game of rule-and-conquer, redefined territories that are informed by a deep awareness of precolonial socio-spatial organization, new currencies that rely on a paradigm that cuts all dependency from colonial powers may all be useful tools to face current challenges such as negotiating lasting peace accords and mitigating the impact of climate change (UN, 2022). That self-naming exercise could help break or at least weakened the amnesia of colonial domination that presents people as colonial subjects and makes them believe they did not have an identity prior to colonial domination and cannot have a future outside of colonial subjugation. A self-naming exercise could bring together people who claim a shared

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ancestry and hold a shared commitment to the continent in a way that has never been done in history. Indeed, it might very well be that to fulfill the continent’s highest ambitions, those who identify as hailing from it might first need to undertake the first step of naming themselves and releasing any trauma bond with fabricated colonial labels. Legend has it that President Sukarno of Indonesia told Mburumba Kerina of Namibia, “[Enslaved people] and dogs are named by their masters. Free [people] name themselves” (The Namibian, 2020). If we aspire to control our trajectory instead of letting the colonial status quo define it, it becomes increasingly urgent to answer the following: who are we when we are free? Who were we prior to the colonial gaze? What is our name?

References Al-Jazeera. (2022). ‘Back to Africa’: French MP’s racist remarks spark outrage, November 4, 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/4/back-­to-­ africafar-­right-­mp-­causes-­turmoil-­in-­french-­parliament Allport, G. W. (1937). Personality: A psychological interpretation. Holt. AP Sports Writers. (2022). ‘Torrents of racist slurs’ aimed at French World Cup stars. Stuff, December 21. https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/football/world-­ cup/130827155/torrent-­of-­racist-­slurs-­aimed-­at-­french-­world-­cup-­stars Ba, D. (2007). Africans still seething over Sarkozy speech. Reuters, September 5. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-­africa-­sarkozy-idUKL0 513034620070905 Bushing, R., & Lutz, J. (2018). The influence of first name valence on the likelihood of receiving help: A field experiment. PsyArXiv Preprints. https://psyarxiv. com/nd527/ Cardoso, L. (2010). Branquitude acrítica e crítica: A supremaciaracial e o branco anti-racista. Revista Latinoamericana De Ciencias Sociales, Niñez Y Juventud, 8(1), 607–630. https://revistaumanizales.cinde.org.co/rlcsnj/index.php/ Revista-­Latinoamericana/article/view/70 Christian, M. (2019). A global critical race and racism framework: Racial entanglements and deep and malleable whiteness. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(2), 169–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649218783220 Commonwealth. (n.d.). Cameroon. https://thecommonwealth.org/our-­ member-­countries/cameroon Conrad, J. (2007). Heart of darkness (R.  Hampson & O.  Knowles, Eds.). Penguin Classics. Copur-Gencturk, Y., Cimpian, J.  R., Lubienski, S.  T., & Thacker, I. (2020). Teachers’ bias against the mathematical ability of female, black, and Hispanic students. Educational Researcher, 49(1), 30–43. https://doi.org/10.3102/ 0013189X19890577

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Diop, C. A. (1974). The African origin of civilization: Myth or reality. L. Hill. Dhlamini, N., Moyo, T., & Ncube, B. (2013). The philosophy of naming among the Ndebele of Zimbabwe. A study of children names born between 1970-1982. International Journal of Asian Social Sciences, 3(8), 1725–1731. Fanon, F. (1968). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press. Fomin, E.  S. D. (2012). Slavery in Africa. obo in African studies. https://doi. org/10.1093/obo/9780199846733-­0085 Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. University of Minnesota Press. Gastellum, A. (2022). When you win, you’re a French player. When you lose, you’re not. SI.  November 22. https://www.si.com/soccer/2022/11/22/ france-­world-­cup-­2022-­laicite-­daily-­cover GhanaWeb. (2012). What is the meaning of Ghana and where did we come from. https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/What-­i s­the-­meaning-­of-­Ghana-­and-­where-­did-­we-­come-­from-­230039 Goudie, A. (2010). Namib Sand Sea: Large dunes in an ancient desert. In P. Migoń (Ed.), Geomorphological landscapes of the world (pp. 163–169). Springer. ISBN 978-90-481-3054-2. Harrison, P. (2020). ABC religion & ethics. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ peter-­harrison-­enlightened-­racism/12341988 Hernandez, A. (2018). La France remporte la Coupe du Monde 2018: vingt ans après, les Bleus de nouveau sur les toits du monde, July 15. Le Monde. Joubert, C.  E. (1993). Personal names as a psychological variable. Psychological Reports, 73(3_suppl), 1123–1145. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1993.73. 3f.1123 Kamenka, E. (1965). Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Political Science, 17(1), 3–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/003231876501700101 Koopman, A. (2002). Zulu Names. University of Natal Press, Scottsville. ISBN 18691400 3. Lipko, P., & Di Pasquo, F. (2008). De cómo la biología asume la existencia de razas en el siglo xx. Scientiae Studia, 6(2), 219–233. Retrieved from https://www. scielo.br/j/ss/a/8hkbrD6YqcrwZCrkFRmWHFF/?lang=es&format=pdf Lowe, C. (2001). The trouble with tribe. Teaching Tolerance, 19. https:// cfas.howard.edu/sites/cfas.howard.edu/files/2020-­0 7/Ar ticleThe TroublewithTribe.pdf Lusaka Times. (2018). Zambia got its name from… Lusakatimes.com. https:// www.lusakatimes.com/2018/10/24/zambia-­got-­its-­name-­from/ Mabry, H. (2016). Photography, colonialism and racism. University of San Francisco (USF). Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press.

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Mbembe, J.  A., & Meintjes, L. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39984 Merab, E. (2020). African scientists, social media users, express dismay over BBC’s Covid-19 article. Nation, September 4. https://nation.africa/kenya/news/ african-­s cientists-­s ocial-­m edia-­u sers-­e xpress-­d ismay-­o ver-­b bc-­s -­c ovid-­1 9-­ article-­1931216 Muiga, K. (2019). African homophobia and the colonial roots of African conservatism. Africa is a Country. https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/ african-­homophobia-­and-­the-­colonial-­intervention-­of-­african-­conservatism Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J., & Chambati, W. (2013). Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: Myths of decolonization. CODESRIA. Neville, H. A., Awad, G. H., Brooks, J. E., Flores, M. P., & Bluemel, J. (2013). Color-blind racial ideology: Theory, training, and measurement implications in psychology. American Psychologist, 68(6), 455–466. https://doi.org/ 10.1037/a0033282 Okafor, V. O. (2014). Africology, black studies, African American studies, Africana studies or African world studies? What’s so important about a given name? The Journal of Pan African Studies, 6(7), 209–224. Oyewumi, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of Western gender discourses. University of Minnesota Press. Pallister-Wilkins, P. (2021). Saving the souls of white folk: Humanitarianism as white supremacy. Security Dialogue, 52(1_suppl), 98–106. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/09670106211024419 Penzura, C.(2021). The African philosophical conception of personal naming among the Shona speaking people of Zimbabwe. Master of Philosophy. University of South Africa. https://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/27843/dissertation_penzura_c.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Reuters. (2022). French Federation condemns racist abuse of players after World Cup final loss. December, 21. https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/ french-­f ederation-­c ondemns-­r acist-­a buse-­p layers-­a fter-­w orld-­c up-­f inal-­ loss-­2022-­12-­21/ Robinson, C. J. 2021. Black Marxism revised and updated third edition: The making of the black radical tradition (Rev. and updated 3rd ed.). The University of North Carolina Press. Rubin, D. (1994). The world encyclopedia of contemporary theatre: Africa. Taylor & Francis. ISBN: 9780415059312. Sengani, T. (2015). Emancipatory discourse in the names of children of the present generation: Some attempts of balancing power relations with special reference to Tshivenda naming practices. Literator, 36(1), 1–10. Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35(1), 4–28. https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1998.1373

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Tatum, B. D. (2017). Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria: And other conversations about race. Basic Books. The Namibian. (2020). 12 June 1968: South West Africa renamed to ‘Namibia’. June 12. https://www.namibian.com.na/201642/archive-­read/12-­June-­ 1968-­South-­West-­Africa-­renamed-­to-­Namibia Twenge, J. M., & Manis, M. (2006). First-name desirability and adjustment: Self-satisfaction, others’ ratings, and family background. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28, 41–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1998. tb01652.x United Nations. (2022). WMO: Climate change in Africa can destabilize ‘countries and entire regions’. UN News. September 8. https://news.un.org/en/ story/2022/09/1126221 Voltaire, V., & Woolf, H. I. (1929). Voltaire’s philosophical dictionary. A.A. Knopf. Walton, W.  E. (1937). The affective value of first names. Journal of Applied Psychology, 14, 396–409. Wanjiru, M., & Kosuke, M. (2014). The perception of identity through the street nomenclature of Nairobi CBD. Proceedings of international symposium on city planning 2014. https://www.cpij.or.jp/com/iac/sympo/ Proceedings2014/67-­fullpaper.pdf

CHAPTER 4

The Unresolved Crisis of Belonging in African Literature: A Reflection Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba

I Were you to ask any of these beautiful, brown-skinned people that basic question—‘where are you from?’—you’d get no single answer from a single smiling dancer. This one lives in London but was raised in Toronto and born in Accra; that one works in Lagos but grew up in Houston, Texas. ‘Home’ for this lot is many things: where their parents are from; where they go for vacation; where they went to school; where they see old friends; where they live (or live this year). Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many (Selasi, 2005). It is this cultural, historical, and aesthetic sensitivity that underlies the term “Afropolitanism”—awareness of the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa, the relativization of primary roots and memberships and the way of embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness, and remoteness, the ability to

C. A. Anyaduba (*) The University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, MB, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_4

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recognize one’s face in that of a foreigner and make the most of the traces of remoteness in closeness, to domesticate the unfamiliar to work with what seem to be opposites (Mbembe, 2018).

Contemporary discussions of African migration stories have been largely informed by the discourse on that numinous concept called Afropolitanism. I describe Afropolitanism as numinous in part because the cultural and other projects it is often enlisted to describe have remained consistently vague. The concept is often traced to a dual discursive history. The first recalls the writer Taiye Selasi’s, 2005 online essay titled, “Bye-­ Bye Babar,” which reflects on the experiences of a generation of contemporary African migrants with multiple connections to different parts of the world. Selasi names this generation Afropolitans because they embody, according to Selasi, the trappings of transcontinental cultural hybridity. As indicated in the first epigraph of this section, the Afropolitan by virtue of their assumed worldliness “feel[s] at home in the world” (Selasi, 2005). The Afropolitan is not culturally, socially, and even politically speaking a citizen of any one country, especially any African country, but instead must be regarded as “Africans of the world” (Selasi, 2005). For those swayed by the sentiments expressed in Selasi’s essay, the Afropolitan represents the positive aspects of globalization upon which a new ethics of belonging should be erected. In this view, the Afropolitan is often invoked as a critique of essentialist, purist, and nativist ideas of identity, nation, culture, and belonging (Eze, 2014, 2016; Haensell, 2021; Knudsen & Rahbek, 2016; Wawrzinek & Makokha, 2011; Wawrzinek, 2019).1 The second discursive history of the concept is generally traced to Achille Mbembe who coined the term “Afropolitanism” (also in 2005) to describe the complex histories and realities of movements and mixings occurring on the African continent (Mbembe, 2007). Unlike Selasi’s focus on the experiences of hypermobile, diasporic Africans—that is an Afropolitan consciousness or subjectivity that emerges from and resides within the diasporic world—Mbembe’s focus is more on the mixings and mobilities shaping subject formations on the African continent. He uses his notion of Afropolitanism to critique what he claims was a nativist, 1  The generously positive discourse on the concept in these works is underpinned by the kind of claim expressed by Eze (2016) that “the concept points to a fundamental shift in conceptions of African identity, especially in the twenty-first century, a shift that highlights the fluidity in African self-perception and visions of the world” (p. 114).

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race-centric impulse, or reflex in Africa’s intellectual history that “hinder[s] the renewal of cultural criticism, stifle[s] artistic and philosophical creativity, and reduce[s] our ability to contribute to contemporary thought on culture and democracy” (Mbembe, 2018: 102). As noted in the second epigraph of this section, for Mbembe, our understanding of Africa and the question of who an African is must change to acknowledge the complex “cultural mixing” or “the interweaving of worlds” (Mbembe, 2018: 105) that are constantly creating and renegotiating what it means to be African-in-the-world. In both Selasi’s and Mbembe’s iterations of the Afropolitan, the impulse is to cosmopolitanize the African subject—or to emphasize the cosmopolitan character of the subject as the basis to affirm the subject’s belonging (or sense thereof) in the world. This impulse—expressed with a celebratory tone—enlists what it describes as cultural hybridity to, on the one hand, critique notions of identitarian essentialism, authenticity, and nativist nationalism, and, on the other, to preach notions of multiculturalism, difference, tolerance, hybridity, and worldliness. This impulse is what seems to underpin extant discourses on African migration narratives. In these discourses, stories of African migration to different parts of the world (mostly to Europe and North America) provide the basis for the critique of racial nationalisms and the violence of apartheid borders (see Maiangwa in the introduction). So-called Afropolitan characters serve in the discourses as figures whose experiences demand that the world becomes borderless; their exposures to and relative fluency in different cultures and languages serve as a basis to advocate for a new social and political vision guided by what Appiah (2007) has described as a “cosmopolitan ideal” (p. 153), an ethical form of living directed by an obligation to strangers. It is important, as several critics of Afropolitanism have suggested, to not be blinded by what the concept seems to gloss over in the celebration of hybridity and cosmopolitanism: to wit, the precarious experience of marginality and wretchedness that continues to shape what it means to be African—be it in Africa or elsewhere in the world, be it among those who identify as African or those with ambivalent feelings towards a continental African identity. I agree with Gbogi’s (2022) critique when he argues that “Afropolitanism presents a chain of fantasies as facts. In taking for granted the openness of movement as well as rapid, convivial constitutions of multiple identities, its discourse overlaps with the jarring claims of a post-­ racial, post-national order in which ‘colour’ matters less and less” (p. 3).

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In other words, the Afropolitan impulse seems to be in a haste to move away from the pressing concerns that some other discourses (especially those often derided in certain Afropolitan discourses such as Pan-­ Africanism, Negritude, and so-called nativism) insist on centring: the crisis of belonging that the histories of slavery and colonialism have thrust upon the African subject. Unlike these other intellectual movements—for example Pan-­ Africanism, Negritude, nativism—whose anticolonial and antiracist projects address (even if unsatisfactorily) the question of how to liberate the African subject, restore the dignity of the dehumanized African subject, and fashion the conditions for this subject to regain a viable sense of belonging in Africa and elsewhere in the world, it has remained unclear what the project(s) of Afropolitanism is, exactly, and to what end. Besides its celebration of cultural hybridity and prompts for “us” to acknowledge, as Mbembe (2018) would have it, that “our way of belonging to the world, of being in the world, and of inhabiting the world, has always been marked if not by cultural mixing, then at least by the interweaving of worlds” (p. 105), it is unclear what the goal is. This lack of clarity of the goal and end of the concept became even more apparent when the concept is enlisted as a heuristic paradigm for illuminating the large corpus of past and contemporary African migration narratives that chronicle the conditions of African transnational mobilities and movements and the questions of African belonging. Consequently, this chapter presents a sideways reflection on the crisis of belonging in African literature. While I take my cue from African literary and cultural studies, my reflection is essentially based not so much on literary analysis as it is on observations from teaching a second-year African literature course at the University of Winnipeg titled, “African Migration Narratives.” It should, therefore, not come as a surprise if my reflection on the subject hangs in the unsteady balance between literary/cultural criticism and pedagogy. My goal is to share some anxieties and thoughts on what I will elaborate subsequently as the unresolved crisis of belonging in African migration literature that a certain extant criticism tends to gloss over. Following, I describe the objectives and design of my African migration narratives course and my observations of the trajectories of students’ engagements with the texts studied in the course.

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II Recently, I taught a second-year introduction to African literature course titled, “African Migration Narratives.” I designed the course to guide my students and I in exploring fictional narratives dealing with African migrations from, to, and within the African continent. My aim was for us to examine some of the major thematic thrusts of African migration stories from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary times. Selecting texts posed some challenges because virtually all the works available in book and film deal with the vagaries of transnational migrations out of Africa. The few that deal with migrations within Africa (e.g. Yewande Omotoso’s Bom Boy [2011]) proved difficult to acquire before the start of classes. It was around the onset of covid pandemic time and things were understandably awkward. I ended up selecting a list that I considered to be thematically representative and narratively distinctive which included Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2014), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2014), Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2017), Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), and M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land (1997).2 Vassanji seemed like an outlier, but I wanted to use both the author and his work to introduce the plight of a certain African community of Indian/ Pakistani descent (specifically the Khoja Ismailis) in East Africa and their migration to Canada.3 What seems to connect all the selected narratives is that they mostly present transnational journeys as a process of social and psychological dislocation and alienation. I sensed in nearly all the texts a troubling crisis of belonging and a sense of loss—of lost home, time, intimacy, 2  Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) proved difficult to drop. The main reason I decided against using it was because I did not want to have two Nigeria-connected authors on the list and because Adichie’s Americanah offered more in terms of studying character, setting, and narrative. Several other good options I considered included Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016), Helon Habila’s Travelers (2019), Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street (2007), Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013). In the past when I taught a related topic but as a full-year course, I used works such as Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish (2005), Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose (2018), Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home (2018), and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015; the first in the series), and considered works such as Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011), Yewande Omotoso’s Bom Boy (2011), Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This (2007), Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s In Dependence (2008), and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005). 3  I also thought that Vassanji’s work seemed to offer more variation for the course than, say, Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004).

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estrangement, search for community—saturating their stories. With these observations in mind, I tried setting up the course to interrogate the conditions giving rise to African migrations in the contemporary global world order. The objective was for the class to probe the complex moral, emotional, social, political, and cultural dimensions of African migrations as represented in stories. As might be expected, we situated our readings of these texts within such concepts as slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, exile, alienation, double consciousness, hybridity, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and Afropolitanism. Some secondary texts guided our engagement with the primary readings throughout, mostly drawn from scholarly works, interviews, speeches/ lectures, music, and even stand-up comedies such as the migration jokes of two South African-born comedians, Loyiso Gola and Trevor Noah. The introduction to African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, Space (2018), edited by Iheka and Taylor titled, “Introduction: The Migration Turn in African Cultural Productions,” was a helpful resource for surveying the field and supplying a broad contextual understanding of contemporary African migration and literatures of African migration. Even though I felt some students read this work as a textbook on the subject rather than more critically as a scholarly (yet potentially flawed) perspective on it, as I often encouraged, the course nonetheless took off on the already expressed assumption most notably expressed by Iheka and Taylor (2018), thus: Despite the complexities and divergences in the works of [African migrant writers], we can outline some features of the migration narrative, including: the portrayal of the debilitating conditions that propel migrants to leave the continent, the experiences of migrants abroad, their relationship to the homeland, and the negotiation of a possible return, be it physical or psychological. The longing or yearning for return is often connected to migrants’ exclusion or limited access to the social and economic resources of their new environment. (pp. 5–6)

Our conversations progressed through an interrogation of the conditions giving rise to African migrations and dispersions to different parts of the world (including in Africa) and the alienating circumstances that impel migrants’ and other dispersed African people’s different returns (physical/ spiritual/psychological) or desires to return. Such alienating circumstances provoked the patterns of affirmations of self/home/nation that came to define some anticolonial struggles of the mid-twentieth century.

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The impetus for these affirmations of homes and homelands was often traced by the students to the feelings of uprootedness and alienation that Africans experienced during their dispersions to different parts of the world through slavery and colonial forms of population transfers. In response to these experiences, it is believed, writers produced stories that sought to articulate not only the emotional and psychological dimensions of dispersion and migration but also stories marked by a nostalgia and a desire for home and belonging. These kinds of stories (often dubbed the literature of homelessness) were often marked by their thematic preoccupations with quests/cravings for a home, a stable identity, a community, a spiritual and social connection. This was the general sense that conversations on Gyasi’s Homegoing seemed to elicit for the class. Yet this general sense is immediately counterpointed by queries about the ideas of home and belonging evoked in such narratives. How do people come to belong in communities and with other people? As some students probed during class discussions, why is belonging or a search for home necessarily linked to blood connections to places? That is, as some critics have observed, it is, precisely, “the notion of home as an irrevocable filial tie and immutable sense of belonging to a national homeland” (Coly, 2010: xi), or the idea of home as a belonging to a nation, a race, an ethnic group, or a people that raises some anxieties for some students. One answer to the anxieties raised in the questions is that such constructions of belonging were, among other things, a strategic political, psychological, social, and cultural act put in the service of liberation struggles of different kinds. In the context of African anticolonial struggles, critics (in the social sciences as well as in postcolonial African migration studies) often refer to this notion of home/belonging that defers to the nation/the ethnic/the race as methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism, as it has come to be understood, assumes that the nation, for example, is the primary, natural unit for making sense of social reality in the modern world. So, when people sought a way to mobilize a sense of belonging in order to fight their common freedom, they tended to become methodological nationalists. However, the senses of belonging fashioned on the backs of methodological nationalisms of varying forms unravelled following formal independence of African countries from the late 1950s onwards. The failures of post-independent African states ensured that the framework of methodological nationalism lost its rhetorical and cultural currency. Many wars, mass atrocities, dictatorships, abuses, and corruption were largely enacted

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in the name of nationalism, creating their own experiences of exile that forced writers/artists to reject the postcolonial nation as a place/space of emotional, social, political, psychological, and economic succour—that is the nation as anything but home or a mobilizing force of belonging. Was this attitude (that rejects the postcolonial African nation-state as a place of home/belonging) what one discerns from Diouana’s suicidal act (put in the work of her resistance against enslavement) in Sembène’s canonical film, Black Girl? In Black Girl, Diouana appears to take her own life in an act of defiance and resistance not only against her enslavement in France but also against a return to Senegal. Most students in the class could not understand why Diouana does not fight to go back home but instead chooses suicide. Her relationship to her boyfriend was always the focus of the argument. For some members of the class, though, Diouana’s suicide is not only directed against her neocolonial enslavement in France but also against the prospect of what she might be returning to in Senegal, at least, based on the little bit of hint the students claimed are revealed in the film. As the argument went, it is most likely that returning means reuniting with her boyfriend and the prospect of marriage and becoming the domesticated maid she is trying to escape. This prospect—informed by a gendered reading of Diouana’s plight—is what Diouana seems to have earlier rejected when she goes to work for the French couple while in Senegal. Her admiration for what white France promises is based on a desire to escape the enslaving conditions of her home. And these enslaving conditions are based in part on colonial despoilation of Senegal but also on the emergent patterns of militant, masculinist system that her boyfriend represents, which is equally a product of colonization (see Chap. 5). Calhoun’s (2020) words summarize the spirit of this perspective from my students’ discussions, thus: In taking her life, Diouana radically rejects neocolonial enslavement while simultaneously signaling her unwillingness to rehearse a different, but perhaps equally undesirable, form of subjugation: an unwillingness, in other words, to trade one model of servitude for another. Her death reveals the extent to which the female postcolonial subject finds herself impossibly positioned at the untenable intersection of two oppressive regimes that make overlapping claims on her body (p. 109).

The resulting question then becomes: If Africans are not at home in Africa and elsewhere in the world, what then does home/belonging mean?

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What is the work of migration narrative beside telling “us” about the loss of home and Africans’ inability to find an enduring sense of belonging in the world? The other narratives on the primary reading list seemed to provide different yet similar considerations to these questions. The students’ readings insist that these narratives present varying situations of the conditions of African peoples’ homelessness, mostly occasioned by their experiences of racism and marginalization in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Vassanji’s No New Land, Adichie’s Americanah (to some degree), and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names were read and discussed, in parts, as chronicles of the processes and implications of African conditions of homelessness in the contemporary world order. Yet it is also at this point that some students began to be swayed by the kinds of sentiments often presented as the only viable alternative to the failures of methodological nationalism. At this stage in the course, students had begun leading class discussions through group presentations. In their research on the narratives, they encountered several scholarly works pointing to Afropolitanism as a more acceptable paradigm to illuminate these migration narratives. Mostly swayed by these critics, some students began deploying the language of Afropolitanism (many of the invocations seemed more indebted to the diasporic qualities expressed by Selasi) to read the narratives as exemplars of the literature of postnationalism: literature that chronicles, on the one hand, the failures of nationalism and the conditions of African homelessness, and, on the other hand, enlists migrants’ condition of homelessness to celebrate uprootedness, deterritorialization, migrancy, vagrancy, multiplicity, and cosmopolitanism. At the crucial heart of this shift in orientation, the African migrant subject (who initially has been observed to suffer from a crisis of belonging and a condition of homelessness in Africa and the world at large) becomes recalibrated into a figure of strength and empowerment whose condition is used to celebrate hybridity and cultural mixing. Notwithstanding my occasional attempts to refocus the class attention to what Iheka and Taylor (2018) explain as “the precarious condition of the African migrant in these narratives [especially calling attention to the ways their representation] complicates the privileged Afropolitan subjectivity that Taiye Selasi celebrates in her descriptive article on the elite, immigrant, mobile African subject who is comfortable in New York and Nairobi, as well as in Los Angeles and Lagos” (p. 6), there remained, as I discerned from reading the students’ essays, a sense (almost an

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acceptance) that the cosmopolitan sentiments and sensibilities espoused by Selasi and others (if one edited out the “exuberant materialism” [Iheka & Taylor, 2018: 6] of their privileged African migrant) contained a viable answer to the African subject’s crisis of belonging. In this, my students often committed another fallacy of thinking when they liberally quoted from Iheka and Taylor (2018) that “the world [in the context of African migration experiences] faces not a crisis in immigration, but a crisis in our capacity to offer hospitality, to welcome those in need” (p.  14). And therein is the lie: that the problem of African belonging is caused by a lack of an ethics of openness and an inability to mobilize a cosmopolitan vision of reality.

III4 Some years ago, I considered researching African migration stories for my PhD research. My interest in migration stories stemmed from several reasons. I earned my university degrees in two different regions of Nigeria: a bachelor’s degree in literature from the University of Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta region, and a master’s degree in literature from Nigeria’s foremost university—the University of Ibadan—in the southwest. Pursuing university education in these two regions (given that I grew up in a suburb of the southeastern city of Onitsha) was like living in two different countries. Anyone who is faintly familiar with living across different parts of Nigeria would probably agree that the cultures across the different regions are different (different languages, foods, dressing, worldviews, etc.), not to mention the relative experiences of ethnicism and marginalization and religionism experienced by those living outside of their so-called ethnic homeland. As a result of my experience with moving around within Nigeria, migration, even within one country, interested me, and I wanted to explore its representations in stories. A stronger motivation for the subject, however, stemmed from an event in my neighbourhood in Onitsha some years back, which left a strong impression on me and perhaps explained my eventual decision to explore the narratives of African migration to Western countries. A photographer who was popularly known as Toronto took his own life. Toronto was most 4  The narrative in this section is a semi-fictional account of real-life situations. I decided that this approach is best if only to keep the reader’s mind focused on the issue and mitigate any identification with real people.

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memorable to me because of his Jerry curls, peculiar dressing (including wearing socks in open-toed sandals), and his mix of foreign accented English and Igbo. Folks in the neighbourhood derided him and called him a been-to-miss-road, which is to say a loafing, lost migrant returnee from the West. I did not know what all these meant then. I did not even know that Toronto was the name of a real place until much later. I assumed the name was one of those Western names that folks in the city gave to their male kids for good luck and for social prestige like Williams, Arthur, Jerry, and suchlike. One morning Toronto was found hanging in his photography studio— an apparent suicide. Some said his suicide was an act of madness. Some said Canada made him mad. Much later I learned that he lived in Toronto for nearly 20 years before he was deported back to Nigeria. The details of his life in Canada and his deportation are unclear and are muddled by speculation. One narrative was that he was caught dealing drugs; in another he was involved in some unknown criminal act and spent some time in jail before he was bundled back to Nigeria; in yet another he had had a falling-out with his wife, a white woman who blackmailed him and got him deported. The more widely accepted speculation was that he was an illegal immigrant in Canada who had been caught: that could explain why he didn’t return home or communicate with his family all those years, even when both of his parents took ill and died. I found it interesting that no one in the neighbourhood seemed to know exactly what happened to Toronto while he was in Canada leading to his return. What seemed like a consensus about Toronto, however, was that he was irresponsible and had wronged his parents who used all their life savings to sponsor his study abroad. Why else, folks wondered, would he have spent nearly 20 years in Canada only to return home to become a wretched photographer? This verdict supplied a generative ground for the research I had wished to carry out about the suburban dwellers’ perceptions of the so-called been-to or the Western migrant returnee in Nigeria. Several novels dealing with African migrant returnees from Western countries—particularly those published between the 1960s and the 1990s but also recently—relate stories like Toronto’s. Many of these stories concern migrants from Africa who move in search of education, only to subsequently return home and experience a particular kind of disorientation. In many such stories, the migrant returns home after their education armed with a Western idealism that conflicts with an equally Western-­ corrupted African world wasted by capitalism. Like Toronto, many of the

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heroes (better still, anti-heroes) of these novels die by suicidal acts, commit acts of transgression, or degenerate into madness. For example, Obi Okonkwo, the protagonist in Chinua Achebe’s 1960 novel, No Longer at Ease, returns to Nigeria from England only to commit what one might describe as social/cultural suicide. In the 1961 philosophical novel by the Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L’Aventure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure), Samba Diallo goes to France to study Western philosophy and returns disoriented, a state that eventually leads to his murder. Mustafa Sa’eed and the unnamed narrator in Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel, Season of Migration to the North, both of whom study in England, face relatively the same fate. Baako, in Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1970 novel, Fragments, suffers insanity following his return to Ghana after studying in the US. Notably, the migrant returnees of these stories are mostly men who (like the authors of the stories) have been schooled in Western humanities programmes, especially literature and philosophy—an education that appears to transform them into “beasts of no nation,” a derogatory phrase used by a character in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease to ridicule Obi. The phrase seems poignantly instructive of the conditions of African migrant returnees of the ilk, especially those who have sought Western education abroad. The condition of these characters reflects a crisis of identity and belonging as dramatized remarkably in the Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s, 1988 novel, Nervous Conditions, which is also based in part on the return of a British-educated African family. Nyasha as well as her father Babamukuru exemplifies this crisis of identity in the novel that transforms the returnee into a beast of no nation. A slight shift in this brand of African migration literature would emerge later in the 1970s and subsequently. This shift is characterized less by Western-school migrant returnee and is based more on the experiences of settling and living in Western countries—that is the focus shifted to the emergent African diasporas in Western countries. This early trend in African migration literature developed out of the imaginative depth supplied in African women’s writing. Writing by women such as Ama Ata Aidoo (Our Sister Killjoy (1977)), Buchi Emecheta (e.g. Second-Class Citizen (1974); or in the subplot trajectory of Aïssatou’s life in the influential novella, Une si longue lettre [So Long a Letter (1979)] by the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ) depicts African women’s migration to Western countries as a quest for liberation unavailable to them in African

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societies. These journeys, like those previously mentioned, are not without complications: the protagonists confront racism and marginalization in the West (as also revealed in Sembène’s film, Black Girl). Many of the remarkable African migration stories produced in recent years—including those dealing with settlement away from an original home or a return to it—have circled similar themes as these earlier stories. As my wish then was to seek a PhD abroad and not in Nigeria, I felt that I would not be taking full advantage of the research infrastructures in Western universities if I focused on the narratives about African returnees. Instead, it felt right to focus on the conditions of living in the West as an African particularly focusing on novels about African migration to Europe and North America published after 2000, in part to track the relationship of these narratives to their twentieth-century forebears. Some of the novels include NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Teju Cole’s Open City, Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities, Helon Habila’s Travelers, as well as shorter prose works, for example Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish, and Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home. Given my especial interest in African migrations to Canada—in part because of the photographer Toronto’s suicide in my childhood neighbourhood and my studentship in a Canadian university—I was surprised at first to discover a paucity of novels on the subject. By African migration novels I am referring to fictional narratives about continental Africans (not people of African descent) travelling from one place in Africa to another, or from a place in Africa to some other place outside the continent. The large body of novels about migration of people of African descent to Canada—for example from the Caribbean—wouldn’t qualify in this consideration as African migration narratives. Moreover, not all novels by Africans in the diaspora (or their children born in Canada) concern African migration. The bulk of recent stories of African migration to Canada (such as Téa Mutonji’s short story collection Shut Up, You’re Pretty; Rebecca Fisseha’s Ethiopia returnee novel Daughters of Silence; Jane Igharo’s interracial romance novel Ties That Tether; and Francesca Ekwuyasi’s family saga Butter Honey Pig Bread) concerns traumatic childhoods experienced in Africa in tension with adolescence or adulthood in Canada. Besides these,

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I can count only a handful of novelists who have written on African migration to Canada. Notably, some of M.G.  Vassanji’s novels deal with the experiences of Africans who are usually misrecognized as such. For example, his 1991 novel, No New Land, narrates the migration and settlement of the so-called Indian Africans from Dar es Salam in Tanzania (formerly known as Tanganyika) to Toronto. Historically, these Africans were part of the British (and German) colonial elites, who acted as go-betweens between European colonizers and the so-called African natives. Following political independence across East Africa, they faced increasing marginalization including, for example, a violent nationalization policy of Idi Amin’s Uganda in the 1970s that expelled them from the country. Vassanji’s story is based on the experiences of these African communities some of whom left East Africa to settle in Canada, which he explored even more closely in his 2003 novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. The point of this detour is to connect the thematic dots of the genres and subgenres of African migration narratives. These dots cluster around the same question of what it means for Africans to belong in the world— or in a part of it—as fully realized human beings; in other words, these narratives are dealing with the enduring crisis of belonging. This is not so much an existential issue as it is a historical one. These stories are saturated with the changing conditions of Africans’ failed search for belonging in the modern world. That the bulk of African migration narratives have been saturated with stories of this crisis of belonging shows an enduring artistic commitment to imagine not just the reality of the crisis but also prospects for resolving it. My approach to studying these works in the context of my courses has largely been to consider what the narratives are calling out as the impelling force of the crisis of belonging: to wit, the racist, colonialist ideological structures of political, economic, and social organization and the relations that inform everyday lives and experiences of people. The attention to this impelling force of African alienation (from self/community/place) is what the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of paradigms such as Afropolitanism seem to detract from. So, I try instead to ask of these narratives: what alternative values or attitudes or perspectives are these stories summoning, encouraging, challenging; what forms of relationships and relationalities are they making more visible so that when taken together one can identify anti-­ racist, liberationist ideologies of resistance, struggle, and freedom? How have these stories [re]envisioned this enduring crisis of African belonging?

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One thing I find most puzzling in several of these narratives (in thinking about the last question in particular) is the reality they seem to make visible: the idea that the normative condition of African experience is unending liberation struggle to find a sense of belonging in the world. That to be African (especially if racialized as black African) is to embody a life of constant struggle for freedom or struggle against a daily barrage of violence against one’s sense of belonging. The African subject has been born into this historical struggle; their Africanness steeped in this struggle; the struggle providing the major basis for the subject’s visibility as a being until struggle (not a desired outcome) becomes in and of itself the end and domain of respite. In other words, the African subject’s struggles for belonging becomes the subject’s destiny—a form of hindrance, an imprisoning condition for which the self in struggle cannot escape yet cannot rebuff because to refuse to struggle is to accept the order of one’s own non-existence. It is this paradox of struggle that perhaps explains the attitude of pessimism one detects in some of the earlier works dealing with the African returnee who has come to realize that not even in Africa (and not even in oneself) can one find the compost of belonging. The challenge then is whether one can imagine a world where Africans belong and are at home, and what such a world might look like or be constituted by, given what one has come to understand from studying these works about the entrenched and enduring violence of colonialism and racism stacked against the African subject. This might be a question more suitable to African Afrofuturist literature and similarly speculative narratives. My hypothetical claim would be that not even this genre has an answer yet that does not require staying more critically with the unresolved question of why a sense of belonging has continued to elude the African subject in the contemporary world.

References Achebe, C. (1960). No longer at ease. Anchor Canada. Adichie, C. N. (2014). Americanah. Vintage Canada. Aidoo, A. A. (1977). Our sister killjoy. Longman. Appiah, K. A. (2007). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. W. W. Norton. Armah, A. K. (1970). Fragments. Heinemann. Bâ, M. (1979). So long a letter. Heinemann. Bulawayo, N. (2014). We need new names. Back Bay Books.

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Calhoun, D. (2020). (Im)possible inscriptions: Silence, servitude, and suicide in Ousmane Sembène’s La noire de…. Research in African Literatures, 51(2), 96–116. Coly, A. A. (2010). The pull of postcolonial nationhood: Gender and migration in francophone African literature. Lexington Books. Dangarembga, T. (1988). Nervous conditions. Lynne Rienner. Emecheta, B. (1974). Second-class citizen. Allison and Busby. Eze, C. (2014). Rethinking African culture and identity: The Afropolitan model. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 26(2), 234–247. Eze, C. (2016). We, Afropolitans. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 28(1), 114–119. Gbogi, T. (2022). Against Afropolitanism: Race and the black migrant body in contemporary African poetry. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894221113767 Gyasi, Y. (2017). Homegoing. Anchor Canada. Haensell, D. (2021). Making black history: Diasporic fiction in the moment of Afropolitanism. De Gruyter. Iheka, C., & Taylor, J. (Eds.). (2018). African migration narratives: Politics, race, and space. University of Rochester Press. Kane, C. H. (1963). Ambiguous adventure. Heinemann. Knudsen, E. R., & Rahbek, U. (2016). In search of the Afropolitan: Encounters, conversations, and contemporary diasporic African literature. Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Mbembe, A. (2007). Afropolitanism. In S.  Njami (Ed.), Africa remix: Contemporary art of a continent. Johannesburg Art Gallery (pp. 26–29). Mbembe, A. (2018). Afropolitanism. In B.  Robbins, & P.  L. Horta (Eds.), Cosmopolitanisms (pp. 102–107). NYU. Salih, T. (1966). Season of migration to the north. Heinemann. Selasi, T. (2005, March 3). Bye-bye Babar. LIP Magazine. https://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/2005/03/03/bye-­bye-­barbar/ Sembène, O. (1966). Black girl. Video Service Corps. Vassanji, M.G. (1997). No new land. Emblem Editions. Vassanji, M. G. (2003). The in-between world of Vikram Lall. Ancho Canada. Wawrzinek, J. (2019). Afropolitanism and the novel: Mapping material networks in recent fiction from the African diaspora. In S.  Baumbach & B.  Neumann (Eds.), New approaches to the twenty-first-century Anglophone novel (pp. 237–254). Palgrave Macmillan. Wawrzinek, J., & Makokha, J. K. S. (Eds.). (2011). Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on borders and spaces in contemporary African literature and folklore. Rodopi.

CHAPTER 5

Being and Becoming “African” in the Postcolony Benjamin Maiangwa and Christiane Ndedi Essombe

Introduction The assumptions about Africa and its people have taken many demeaning turns and forms, particularly in western histography. Africa is often portrayed as essentially a no-history zone, as captured in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1830s stereotypical assertion that “Africa is no historical part of the world” (cited in Green, 2020). Echoing this belief in 2007, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy asserted on Senegalese soil that “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history”

B. Maiangwa (*) Department of Political Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Ndedi Essombe Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_5

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and that “neither room for human endeavour nor the idea of progress” were to be found in Africa (Ba, 2007). The omnipresent red thread running through such narratives speaks about a supposed dark, stagnant continent: a continent with barbaric people where “savagery” had remained the order of the day until the onset of European colonization’s saving grace couched as a divine project for the Black person to “enter into communion with God” (Baldwin, 1955: 17). This racist portrayal of Africa is well captured in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), where the gloom of the continent and the ugliness of its people are described as a dilemma and a burden for the European settler. This discourse of a dark continent with inhabitants in desperate need of a full-scale redemption is frequently used to justify colonial plunder and resulting privation on oppressed people (Kipling, 1899). Although it is at odds with historical facts, colonialism needed an excuse for the systematic and glorified industrial barbarity it inflicted on so-called noble savages and for its accompanying pillage. It is therefore unsurprising to observe such resorting to dehumanizing, demeaning, and vicious labels as part of colonial ecclesiastical and crude domineering and exploitative ventures. Writing later in the Postcolony, Aimé Césaire would eviscerate colonialism in his Discourse on Colonialism (2000). Césaire attributes the barbarism of colonialism to the thingification of the African person. He asserts that the visceral height of the colonial project in Africa can only be understood in terms of how the colonists perceived Africa and her peoples. Further, he points out that the colonial project was itself decadent, stating that western civilization had created an orgy of domination that it was unable to resolve in the so-called Third World. As one’s own identity is ostracized, it can become common to interiorize this violence and redirect it against other Africans who are now the stereotyped out-group (Hagendoorn, 1993). Jean Paul Sartre used the notion of “nervous conditions” in the preface of the Wretched of the Earth to evoke “the “disassociated self” created by colonialism (Sartre, 1961). In diasporic societies where the majority is not of African descent, Africans can become trapped with alleviating the burden of “blackness”. Reducing one’s identity to individual characteristics—whether social or economic—and “tribe” membership is also a frequently observed consequence of the disassociated self. While “tribal” identities, and its corollary “tribalism”, may be commonly mentioned by both Africans and Europeans when referring to African groups and communities, Mahmood Mamdani (2020) argues that

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“tribal” identities should be treated as malleable historical constructs, which could be denaturalized in social and political relations. He insists that the Postcolony must think beyond the concept of a nation-state that categorizes people into permanent minorities, settlers, or immigrants. Instead, the Postcolony must begin to realize how it has been wounded by the imperial White supremacist capitalist patriarchy (bell hooks in Mureithi, 2021). With that understanding, it could then regard itself as a survivor of imperial White supremacist capitalist patriarchal violence, with an opportunity to find a unifying agenda and sense of purpose that would assuage the anxieties and fears its inhabitants so deeply feel about each other. Without such a broader historical and political framing, “tribal” identities will continue to be used to reproduce colonial violence of “divide and rule” under the disguise of protecting “native customs” (Mamdani, 2020). There has been a flowering of Black scholarship on the question of revising the African past, not as a single-unchanging history but as a guide to unravel what that past constitutes and what had been lost to reclaim it (Shivji, 2011; Oyewumi, 2021). Cheikh Anta Diop  (1962) has written about how Africa’s matriarchal past was effective in countering the Eurocentric myth of the continent as a dark space, imbued with barbarity. Ali Mazrui has used the paradigm of the triple heritage (the influences of Africa’s indigenous heritage, Eurocentric capitalism, and Islam) to reclaim the African past (Mazrui, 1983). Walter Rodney, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), challenged many of the fallacious claims about the continent that pervade western scholarship on Africa. He pointed out that Africa was not a space of darkness and stagnancy but rather that African societies were passing through their own organic process of development when Europeans interrupted such a trajectory to facilitate the making of the modern world. Rodney (1972) notably pointed to budding city-states, expansive kingdoms, and empires to reject the notion of Africa’s decadent past. Furthermore, Howard French (2021) writes of the unacknowledged African natural and human resources as the building blocks of the modern/new world. Consequently, this chapter sets out to problematize the “dissociated African identity” created by slavery and colonization and explore where the African person belongs through a reconsideration of Africa’s past. It

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situates the notion of belonging for Africans or people received as Black1 both in their places of origin and in the diaspora. We begin by first presenting a few precolonial/precontact cultural, political, and confessional characteristics of some African societies and then trace the roots of identity disruption or disorientation (Williams, 2021) on the African continent to both endogenous and exogenous exploits of subjugation. These include the wars of conquests, the Islamic incursion, the transatlantic slave trade, and European colonization. The chapter discusses the internalization, banalization, and standardization of colonial violence within people of African descent and reflects on belonging and identity in the Postcolony as shaped by such legacies. The first part of the chapter develops a systematic literature review and synthesis of notions of belonging in Africa’s precontact stage. This review is done with the aim to answer the question: how did African peoples on the African continent relate to each other before the transatlantic slave trade and European colonization? Which identity groupings (race, ethnicity, or religion) prevailed in intercommunal relations? Was race an important identity marker at this stage? Next is the period of colonization and its attendant exploitative ventures and institution of “modernity” deployed at the expense of the African sense of Self and community. The chapter ponders on the implications of these historical legacies of enslavement, colonization, and resistance, and examines how these have shaped the trajectory of the African continent and people in a period of immense racial violence and disorienting nervousness surrounding the identity of the Black person at home and abroad.

1  Although there are uses of the term “Black” that predate White supremacist endeavors (e.g., the name “Sudan” refers to black-skinned people), “Black” as a contemporary appellation was appended forcefully to enslaved Africans after they were trafficked into the New World, Europe, and the Caribbean as the “subjugated race”. We thus posit that the concept of the “Black” individual as understood nowadays has, for the most part, been externally constructed through oppressive phenomena. Although nowadays this label commonly refers to the shared struggle for liberation of people of African descent in a post-transatlantic slave trade world, we recognize that people who are described, read, or received as Black due to their African heritage and skin color cannot only be reduced to this label and might use other markers to identify themselves such as their nationality, gender identity, culture, ethnicity (to name a few), and any intersection of those markers.

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Being and Becoming African: The Precontact Stage We call this stage the “precontact” because the term precolonial is often said to represent Africa as an isolated, simplistic, and homogenizing place that could only be understood through the prism of colonization (Taiwo, 2023). Moreover, political subjugation existed in various forms in Africa prior to the inroads of the Arabs and European colonists, and these periods feed off each other in mutually reinforcing and destructive ways (Taiwo, 2023). Another important thing to add here is that before 1480 when the Portuguese came to West Africa, the people of the continent had little notion of a collective identity of themselves as being African. According to Howard French, “African as a label was a moral or political community that was still awaiting invention” in the fifteenth century (French, 2021: 104). In other words, the terms Africa and African are ideas under construction, in search of a meaning. The discussion in this section draws mostly from the precontact configurations of the West African region, which is noted for its vast and massive kingdoms, city-states, culture, and empires. West Africa is also a region of immense ethno-religious communities and a home to most of the enslaved people uprooted from Africa from the 1500s onward (Bondarenko, 2017). The combined history of the region from Timbuktu to Kumbi Saleh makes for an interesting but not uncomplicated case study. We take on a few features of this history, beginning with the question of gender, and ask our readers to think deeply about the instrumentalization of the supposed universalism of tradition when applied to Africa. The Gender Question Women’s role in some parts of precontact African society was not based on a strict bifurcation of the genders. Arguably, there were gender divisions in terms of labor. However, these differences were not placed within a hierarchical ranking but rather as complementary aspects of human relations (Hendrickson & Zaki, 2013). Cheikh Anta Diop argues for the universality of gender during the precolonial period. He stated that patriarchal oppression was absent in many parts of precolonial Africa. He linked the rise of patriarchy to the influences of Christianity, Islam, and other forms of colonialism (Diop, 1989). Sefinatu Aliyu Dogo (2014) refutes Diop’s analysis of universal matriarchy in Africa, arguing that Diop failed to mention what the relations between the female and male gender identities

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were during that period. She also argues that the communities that now make up the Nigerian society have always been patriarchal, although they have not existed in the same form as obtained in the European colonial and post-colonial eras. She, however, holds that although males have dominated most communities in what today is Nigeria, females have had their own sphere of jurisdiction including in a range of subsistent economic activities such as farming (Dogo, 2014). Of relevance to this discourse is Oyeronke Oyewumi’s (1997) assertion that there is no evidence that gender was used in precontact Yorubaland and that the retrospective western gaze may have attributed gender roles where age and birth order were the main factors used to establish social hierarchies. Scholars like Tarikh Farrar (1997) challenge the claim that patriarchy was entirely absent in precontact Africa and that matriarchy is the most ancient family structure in Africa or that it has existed more frequently in the continent than anywhere else on Earth. She states that in the Akan State structure, the queen mother, as a female authority, possessed political power and might. Nadia Owusu underscores this point in her memoir “Aftershocks”, wherein she shares that her great-grandfather had been nominated by the queen mother of the Ashanti (a subgroup of the Akan group) to become a chief within forty days of the death of his predecessor (Owusu, 2021: 65). At the spiritual realm, the Earth, in Ashanti land’s cosmology, is protected by the goddess known as Asase Yaa, who holds things together and is responsible for helping people transit into the afterlife (Owusu, 2021). Thus, women were enmeshed in positions of leadership and wielded power within the Akan political structures. In such a society, political hierarchies were divided between male and female segments of the population in which women were mostly subject to other women’s political authority throughout the day-to-day operations of government. As a result, all issues concerning women were handled by female authorities. The female stool-holders dealt with marriage, adoration, strife, and women’s suffrage. This female-male political framework is referred to as a dual-sex political system in Akan society (Farrar, 1997). Moreover, it was the Ashanti women (Yaa Asantewaa) who protected the Golden Stool as the symbol of dignity and the soul of their people when the British wanted to desecrate it by sitting on it as the chiefs of the Ashanti people after making Ashanti kingdom a British protectorate (Owusu, 2021). Similarly, the matrilineal system was the axis for social organization in Ashanti land, which was led by a male elder (abusua panin) and a female

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elder (Obaa panin) (Akyeampong & Obeng, 1995). The chief (ohene) and queen mother (ohemaa) each had a function in this arrangement. These two, the chief and the queen mother, sat on stools, representing their ancestors’ spiritual abodes (Akyeampong & Obeng, 1995). The queen mother’s position in the Ashanti’s political structure demonstrates the critical role of women in the system and the complexities of power. The queen mother advised the king, and her traits complemented those of the king. She possessed the moral qualities of wisdom, understanding, sympathy, and compassion (Akyeampong & Obeng, 1995). Women’s prominence within this milieu was also reflected in the gender traits of the deities, who occasionally demanded female spokespersons with a thorough understanding of the deities. By the eighteenth century, the spiritual functions of females in Ashanti society were increasingly filled by females of an advanced age, referred to as “ritual men”. Their roles included specific privileges such as cutting their hair short (dansikra), dressing in masculine attire, drinking liquor, and pouring libations (Akyeampong & Obeng, 1995). However, “childbearing women were sidelined in public affairs because of male notions about the spiritual danger presented by menstrual blood” (Akyeampong & Obeng, 1995: 491). These practices may imply that women had to “perform masculinity” to access specific privileges while men were never expected to adopt social behaviors traditionally associated with women. Such practices appear to illustrate dynamics in which standards for authority and leadership were rooted in male gender roles. A similar approach to leadership and gender is also documented in Southern Bantu nations where “female husbands” could be political leaders and were “regarded as social males” (Oboler 1980, p.71  in Mehra et al., 2019). Thus, although women had a significant agency in important cultural events and rituals in precontact Africa, in some cases, this agency is reflected through the performance of what has been described a posteriori as male-associated behaviours and attributes. Indeed, it remains unclear to what extent a binary conception of gender or a concept of gender at all was present in Africa prior to European contact (Oyewumi, 1997). To this point, looking at social expectations in Ethiopia could be relevant. Ethiopia remained mostly free from European colonial subjugation for most of its history. Hence, any documented gender dynamics (or their lack thereof) could be quite telling about what was considered normal or not in African societies outside of any colonial paradigm. Murray (1998)

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reports that in the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for Maale men in Ethiopia called Ashtime to perform feminine roles and wear what would be defined as women’s clothes by a western colonial eye (Murray 1998 in Mehra et al., 2019). This observation appears to further challenge the premise of an omnipresent binary conception of gender in precontact African societies. The example of Chibados in the region of present-day Luanda constitutes additional evidence to support that hypothesis. Indeed, Chibados were diviners about whom the Portuguese colonizers wrote during the seventeenth century that they “dressed as women […] and they … by great offense called themselves men; they had husbands like the other women […]” (Viegas 1930  in Mehra et  al., 2019). In 1606, Christian missionaries documented their encounters with the chibadi of the kingdom of Motapa (or Monomotapa) in present-day South Africa and presented them as “cross-dressing men” (Stewart 2017, para 17  in Mehra et al., 2019). Those observations and the fact that they were documented by Europeans likely speak to a clash of opposing worldviews. As such, they could indicate that gender in precontact African nations was understood in a different way than in European colonial nations. In addition to the framing of gender, another distinctive feature of this period was the ethnic identity tied to territorial membership, which still occupies a unique position in most African societies. The Ethno-territorial Question According to Ali Mazrui (1983), Africa was a patchwork during the precontact period, ranging from empires to stateless cultures, with hunting bands, intricate civilizations, and rustic village settlements. Prior to European contact with the Upper Guinea Coast, Africa’s cultural, political, and social structures were diverse (Knör & Filho, 2010). Lexington Izuagie (2014) notes that while existing literature on colonial and post-­ colonial West Africa tends to categorize the region as a “micro region” with little or no interaction among the various peoples prior to European colonization, the region’s history demonstrates that this notion of “micro region” does not present a complete picture of its macro nature. For example, centralized state formations like the Empires of Western Sudan (Ghana, Mali, and Songhai) and other seemingly acephalous formations like the Igbo-speaking formations and others in eastern Nigeria were formed on communal conceptions but not “tribalism” (Njoku, 2015).

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Generally, the central social units of these states were mostly groups of common descent linked together by overlapping age groups and title associations, with political hierarchy that was decentralized. This decentralized political structure provided a framework for the integration of the numerous micro-states. Indeed, “the precolonial politics showed how decentralization could moderate diversities with ‘minimum consensus’ rather than recourse to such strategies as suppression and genocide” (Njoku, 2015: 33). In essence, Africa was an open field for social interactions and economic activities prior to its contact with foreign colonizers. For as Falola and Fleming (2009) argue, African societies related on the basis of warfare, marriage, business, and accommodation. This interaction cuts across various ethno-linguistic groups within a context of which there was a high sense of hospitality and wealth distribution that served as bulwark against unemployment and homelessness (Falola & Fleming, 2009). Some of the skirmishes between different groups during this time centered mostly on boundary disputes and raids. These reached new heights during and after European colonization with the imposition of fixed territories and politicized ethnic groupings—“tribalism” (Attah, 2011; Njoku, 2015). Conquest wars, sporadic state formations, and the loss of power and resources by ethnic groups such as Dagbon, Ashanti, and Gonja resulted in the loss of control and resources by communities lacking centralized political institutions. This resulted in numerous ethnic groups living in a climate of tension and struggle for resources, which was exacerbated by raids to capture and enslave war prisoners, the establishment of the colonial state, and, more recently, migrations during the colonial and post-colonial periods (Tsikata & Seini, 2004). Overall, African empires struggled to maintain the cohesion and loyalty of minoritized groups. These societies did not entirely succeed in assimilating the numerical and political minority groups into the imperial culture, which explains the ever-expanding frontiers of the states in which the boundaries constantly shifted and created a unique blend of collective territoriality and individual rights (Njoku, 2015). Ethno-territoriality is also closely linked to the confessional question as discussed below. The Confessional Question It might be worth starting with the impact of Islam in West Africa, particularly in Hausaland. Islam was introduced to Hausa territory in the fourteenth century by foreign Mallams or teachers and merchants of

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Wagara Arab and Fulani origins. The Fulanis travelled from an area in modern-day Senegal and lived in villages and towns in northwestern Hausaland, resulting in a synthesis of indigenous cultural forces and foreign conquerors. One of the major causes of the subsequent jihad led by the Fulanis was the need to purify Islam in the Habe State of now northern Nigeria (Aremu, 2011). The Fulani labelled the Hausa rulers as polytheistic due to their assumed non-Islamic religious rites and practices, which included prohibiting women from wearing veils, veneration of rivers and trees, close consultation with soothsayers and magicians, and offering sacrifices to various deities. Thus, Uthman dan Fodio’s declaration of jihad against the Sultan of Gobir in 1804 was justified as a holy war between pagan religious views and Islam (Aremu, 2011). The jihad dispersed the land’s population and eventually reassembled it to form a new state—the Sokoto Caliphate. It paved the way for the rise of a new governing body in Hausaland comprising the Fulani and Hausa (Lenshie & Ayokhai, 2013). The Hausa state was transformed by the Hausa and Fulani aristocracy into an ethno-religious state that was expedient for British despotic decentralized rule (Mamdani, 2020) which relied on the “ruling race” or the “subcolonials” as it did in other parts of Africa (Ochonu, 2014). Dan Fodio drove his uprising against inequalities and corruption in both present-day northern and parts of southern Nigeria. This campaign quickly extended to what is now Mali and The Gambia (Green, 2020). Margari Hill believes (2009) that the history and influence of Islam in West Africa may be explained in three stages: containment, mixing, and reform. This three-phase structure helps to explain the rise of Mali’s, Ghana’s, and Songhay’s mediaeval empires, as well as the foundation of the Sokoto Caliphate in Hausaland and the Umaraian state in Senegambia. According to Hill (2009), the Mali empire evolved from a feuding monarchy that spanned the majority of current Senegal, Mali, and portions of Mauritania and Guinea. The empire was multiethnic and incorporated a diverse range of religious and cultural traditions. Muslims were mostly prominent as councilors and consultants in the fields of law and jurisprudence. Although Sundiata Kieta, the empire’s founder, was not Muslim, by 1300, Mali’s rulers had converted to Islam. Mansa K. Musa, the most famous of the lot, established Islam as the national religion and travelled to Mecca in 1324 on a pilgrimage (Hill, 2009). It is also important to analyze the role of Christianity in exposing the contradictions of Eurocentric discourse about Africans and the religious

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imaginations of its people. Prior to the arrival of Islam and Christianity, Africans worshipped various deities representing the magnificence of a Supreme Being. Because African religions did not satisfy European conceptions of monotheism, African religions were demonized as paganistic forms of worship, and the people were regarded as heathens or pagans (Nkomazana & Setume, 2016). The hubris of the western proselytizers who brought Christianity was that they did not only discount the foundations of African traditional beliefs but also gave the impression that no religious traditions or heritage existed prior to their arrival on the African continent. In essence, modern religion became a tool for colonization, not only in terms of its denial of legitimate African spirituality, values, and cultural practices but also with regard to the perception of the “African” as an inferior race. The Race Question Although the consolidation of race relations has often been traced to slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism, the unequal treatment of people based on biological or cultural differences can be traced back to earlier times. For example, feudalism in Europe can be understood as a racial hierarchy erected on socioeconomic markers and alleged divine attributes (Robinson, 2021). Indeed, several western biological, philosophical, and theological discourses have represented a critical epistemological turn to normalize a racial (and consequently racist) order. European philosophers from the Enlightenment era shared evolutionary views which were used to rationalize White supremacy. Voltaire ranked “Negroes” as “[occupying] a median position between Europeans and apes” and used that logic to justify the enslavement of Black people (Harrison, 2020). David Hume, another European philosopher, said about Black people that “there scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion […]” (Harrison, 2020). Finally, the Darwinian theory of evolution conceptualized distinctions of the human species in western quarters as “the struggle for life, and survival of the fittest … is applicable to the races of man [sic] also” (McCarthy, 2009: 77). Approaches to establish and normalize supremacist rationale and hierarchies consequently have a long history among people of European descent. Among those, animalization was a common and critical practice to disqualify Black people from possessing any cognitive and intellectual skills. Rev. Payne of Nashville (1867)—who used the

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pen-­name Ariel—unequivocally and unilaterally declared that “Negroes weren’t descended from Adam and Eve. […] Adam and Eve being white […] they could never be the father or mother of the kinky-headed, low forehead, flat nose, thick lip and black-skinned Negro[..]. [I]t follows, beyond all the reasonings […] that [the Negro] was created before Adam, that, like all beasts and cattle, they have no souls.” Such affirmations were in line with racist conclusions from Carl Linnaeus, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Samuel Morton’s pseudo-scientific studies (Gallego-­ Duran, 2011) that supported the existence of a Caucasian race which was supposedly the “original” race and thereby superior. By way of this reasoning, Africans and, indeed, the American “Indians” are the inferior races “at arrested stages of development, while Caucasians are … further along the scale of human evolution” (McCarthy, 2009: 76). This false and racist hierarchy became the blueprint for colonization. Colonialism exploited the racial question in much the same sense as the “tribal” question to stoke division and blunt solidarity among the colonized people (Diop and Salemson, 2012). However, the story about the Niger bend region during the precontact period reads quite differently. There were four major ethnic groups in the Niger bend at this time: the pastoralist Tuareg, Arab, Fulbe, and the agriculturalist Songhay (Hall, 1997). Even among these four groups, there was little racial differentiation, despite the presence of racial labels as indicators of social status within linguistically defined groups. This phenomenon arises as a result of nobles in these various groups perceiving themselves as nonblack, in contrast to black-skinned enslaved people and other individuals with lower social status. This conception of race derives from Islamic concepts, particularly the dichotomy between believer and unbeliever and notions of lineage, which formed the foundation of the Sahelian conception of race. Moreover, some scholarships have shown that the treatment reserved to African people with black skin within Islamic expansion efforts followed two main schools of thoughts: racial subordination or religious kinship. Indeed, El Hamel in Black Morocco (2014) argues that Black people “in Morocco have been marginalized for centuries” (p.99). This was notably made evident with the racialization of slavery starting from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century (Young & Weitzberg, 2021) and the enslavement of a free Muslim population of Black African people (El Hamel, 2014). El Hamel also explains that such racial hierarchies were justified by Islamic traditions although they could not be divorced from the “racial terror of the global slave trade” (El Hamel, 2014: 5).

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Nevertheless, Hanretta (2010) and Ware (2011) document practices of Islamic universalism across ethnic and linguistic divides as well as a tradition of Islamic abolitionism. While traces of racial orders existed in parts of Africa given the religious observances and stratifications between enslavers and enslaved people, the “Atlantic commerce in Black bodies” (French, 2021) and European colonization took it to another height. African people taken as captives to the U.S. and other parts of the “New World” and the United Kingdom had their sense of the sacredness of Self and family obliterated from their minds and hearts (Frederick, 2003). This is not to say that servitude was non-existent in Africa before the Europeans or Arabs came over. When Mansa Musa made his famous trip to Egypt and mecca, “his lavish use of slaves was eye-catching as his flaunting of Gold. This may have reinforced Africa’s reputation throughout the Near East as an inexhaustible source of Black slavemen and women. The legacy of this trip in 1324 hunted the region between the 15—1800s and set the creation of an Atlantic world into motion” (French, 2021: 33). Servitude was equally an already established practice by the time the Portuguese had arrived in the Kingdoms of Guinea, particularly in Jolof, where exchanges of captured people were made with societies across the Sahara. Those individuals while in servitude were not considered enslaved in the “strict sense of the word”, that is, people whose sole purpose is to perform a task they have not agreed to for somebody else’s benefit (Fomin, 2012). Indeed, servitude was not an immutable identity that was automatically passed onto one’s relatives or anybody that shared similar phenotypical traits with them. Through it all, it was the “blackness” of Africans and its contrast to the whiteness of European traffickers that provided the raison d’être for the dehumanization that occurred during the dramatic expansion of slavery (French, 2021). On the continent, the transatlantic slave trade caused an enormous division between predatory rulers and their distrustful subjects, which was further embossed by colonization (Green, 2020). In a way, the labor of the enslaved African people in the New World and their stolen resources challenge the notion that Europe ascended economically and politically at this time due strictly to such factors as culture, religion, geography, and the nature of their state system. Profits made from the toils of the enslaved Africans through the Atlantic slave trade and subsequently colonization laid the groundwork for the prosperity of Europe and the “modern” world (Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson in French, 2021).

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The Nervousness of Becoming “African”: The European Stage It was the self-proclaimed ambition of the European colonial project to usher in the so-called era of “modernity”. The political project underpinning the Modern Era was a hegemonical one that required a clear distinction between those deemed endowed with rationality and cognitive skills, and those deemed deprived of those very attributes. The unmatched cruelty for which this era would become known (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2014) appears to undermine its very essence of enlightenment and progress (Césaire et al., 1972). It ensued that the supremacy of individuals who had self-assessed themselves not only as intellectually capable of ruling over non-European peoples, but rather responsible for doing so, became the ruling paradigm. At a time where Europeans were stumbling upon the riches of lands inhabited by non-European populations, it became increasingly beneficial to frame these populations as incapable of adequately managing such resources (Rodney, 1972). They also often considered such land to be barren and ripe for usurpation, whereas this was at times due to “poor soil quality, infrequent rainfall, or [the land] had been claimed for future use” (Falola & Fleming, 2009). The “discovery” of this “unsettled” or “barren” wealth became another incentive to dehumanize these populations, deny their rationality, and claim ownership of their riches (Rodney, 1972). The Modern Era is therefore intrinsically characterized by European colonialism; that is, the process by which a European power took over an independent non-European nation, exploited its people and resources to impose its culture, identity, languages, and hegemonic agenda onto the newly subjugated people for its own benefits (Longley, 2021). It follows that in such a conjuncture, the only redeeming path for colonized people is to assimilate into the colonizers’ ways to become human and “modern”. Since only the subjectivity and worldview of the colonizer was acknowledged, colonized people were effectively rebaptized during colonial times. Their borders were also drawn by the same powers who only sought to exploit them. In West Africa, the kingdom of Dahomey became parts of what is now Benin (Rodney, 1972), the Ashanti kingdom turned into regions of the Gold Coast as initially named by European traders (Rodney, 1972). In Southern Africa, the land of the Nama, San, and Damara peoples first became German South-West Africa and then South-West Africa (South African History Online, n.d.). The Gold Coast was renamed Ghana

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following independence, South-West Africa became Namibia, and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe (South African History Online, n.d.). In places like Rwanda, colonizers sought to emphasize trivial phenotypical differences in their pseudo-classification, using absurd markers such as height and the shape of the nose (MHM, n.d.). This ethnic instrumentalization notwithstanding, it is worth noting that African cultures had their own processes of differentiation and/or identification prior to the inroads of the Europeans in most parts of the continent. For example, Hutu, Tusti, or Kikuyu ethnic identities need to be understood across a much broader timeframe prior to colonization, rather than only as colonially invented or imagined communities (Reid, 2011). Besides, “the fact that some ethnic groups were more creatively invented during colonial rule than others, does not in and of itself make them any more or less genuine, or legitimate, than others” (Reid, 2011: 150). There is also the possibility of a continuity between the precolonial and colonial identity formations (Reid, 2011). Hence, what is at issue is not the existence of ethnic identities per se but rather any amped up rivalry and animosity that has been colonially engineered to facilitate the divide-and-rule exploitation of sovereign people and their resources. In the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), ethno-territorial divisions played out since the country was declared the fiefdom of King Leopold II. It is worth noting that in the Belgian Congo, local African populations had no territories assigned to them (Ndlovu-­ Gatsheni, 2012). Indeed, there was only a Free Trade Zone, intended for European traders and a Domaine Privé (Private domain) (Ndlovu-­ Gatsheni, 2012). As the local African population was considered cheap labor in King Leopold II’s personal property, local populations were forced to migrate between territories that no longer belonged to them and where they were brutally forced to work for the Belgium colonial power (Olson, 2008). These movements eventually reflected in names given to ethnic groups, adding an additional level of coloniality to these identifiers. Any geographic reference to a “homeland” that now commonly accompanies the colonial invention of “tribe” is thus also questionable since it is based on colonial borders (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2012). Ndlovu-Gastsheni (2012: 432) drew on Mahmoud Mamdani (2011) to unpack how: “[…] in diamond-rich Katanga region with its massive labor immigration, ethnic identities became fragmented into Lunda (considered indigenous)

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and Luba (migrants from neighboring Kasai)”. The Luba were then further sub-categorized into “Luba–Katanga” (those who moved to Katanga prior to colonialism and were eventually also considered as indigenous) and “Luba–Kasai” (classified as non-indigenous).

Such recategorization of groups speaks clearly to the lasting impact of the colonial transformation that social groups underwent. This transformation was more so with regard to race. In colonized countries, the figure of the colonizer became associated with power while the colonizer’s skin color became associated with both power and protection—the power to carry brutal and inhumane treatment and the protection from facing the same. One could even argue that such obsession with skin color can be traced back to slavery (Bernal, 1995), when a lighter hue in a Black individual indicated a potential genetic tie with the White master and therefore some entitlement to his brutalizing powers. The impact of such phenotypical citizenship where people with white skin or lighter hues are awarded rights that nobody else can fathom, led to the adoption of the concept of race and its associated irrational and destructive hierarchy. Such a reasoning lays the foundation of the so-called pigmentocracy (Telles, 2014). Pigmentocracy, built around the words “pigment” and “democracy”, refers to the level of rights and privileges that a non-White individual can aspire to in a (post)colonial society where White masters used to be the figures of power. In such a paradigm closeness to white skin is read as closeness to the colonizer and distance from the enslaved. It thus constitutes somewhat of a redeeming grace, protecting against the violence of racism and particularly against anti-blackness (Da Silva, 2009). With a relatively light skin color, one is suddenly no longer automatically condemned to being lumped with the “animals”, denied humanity, and treated as an object. Instead, one can hope to “pass” and be mistaken for a White person (Al-Qaragolie, 2020). Regardless of their ancestry, in the pigmentocracy system, they become ontologically, by some mystery of the genetic lottery, closer to the White master and ought to be treated as such. To this point, Ian Williams argues that “people of colour don’t want to be white; [they] want to exist at full value—and the only people who seem to occupy that class of existence are white folks” (Williams, 2021: 178). Hence, they aspire to become white or are whited by the White supremacist capitalist system (see Chap. 8).

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In contemporary, post-Apartheid South Africa, skin color has been used to justify violence against Black Africans from the rest of the continent. It has been reported that South Africans believe that they are different from other Africans because they allegedly have lighter skin (Dube, 2017) unlike other Africans who are supposedly “darker, dirty, and smelly ‘makwerekwere’”2 (Dube, 2017; Matsinhe, 2011). Such narratives crystallize some internalized hatred of blackness and the association of blackness with undesirable characteristics, even among African people themselves. In addition to a racial hierarchy, it is conceivable that colonialism either established or strengthened a hierarchy of gender with men at its top. It was after all White European men who would make decisions during that epoch and who could decide the fate of people and resources (Rodney, 1972). There have been at least two obvious long-lasting consequences from this: the adoption of a male hegemonic worldview that posits that men ought to assume headship of any aspect of society and a narrow, binary approach to gender identity that only acknowledges female-­ identifying and male-identifying individuals while negating or criminalizing anybody else (Muiga, 2019). When faced with female-identified individuals as powerful as male-­ identified ones, European colonialism simply silenced those figures rather than questioned the social construction of gender. This is the reason why in Africa, the fierce warfare skills of the N’Nonmito, Queen Nzinga’s unparalleled rule (Dash, 2011), and the entrepreneurial skills of Igbo women (Kies, 2013) have seldomly been acknowledged by the colonizers. Similarly, they have rarely been acknowledged to this day in the national history of present-day African countries that exist in these regions of the continent. Women-led colonial rebellions such as that of the Aba women in 1929 against direct taxation have also been largely under-documented and overlooked although it strived to preserve precolonial African traditions of democratic societies that did not rely on any monetary taxation scheme (Anoba, 2018). It is African scholars such as Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997) who are seeking to document evidence from precontact times which corroborate how high political responsibilities were not only reserved to men. Despite this, European colonizers sought to reproduce their patriarchal society to ensure that any political responsibility would 2  Derogatory terms meaning those who are “incapable of articulating local languages that epitomize economic success and power” (Nyamnjoh, 2010: 65).

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only be granted to male-identified individuals (Muiga, 2019), from the ethnic group that it was more convenient to use as a pawn (Mamdani, 2011). To further position European colonizers as the only acceptable model of humanity, their religion, Christianity, had to be imposed upon the colonized who were supposedly deprived of any humanity and in need of salvation. Consequently, African practices became associated with undesirable, immoral, unacceptable beliefs (Roberts, 1971). It is worth noting that Christianity became a medium for the European colonizers to associate representations of White European people with divine ancestry. Indeed, if God and all the angels are Europeans and if “God created man in his own image” as stated in Genesis 1:27, then one can only conclude that God ought to be a White European man and that by extension White European men (and any White person) also hold some divine powers. Whereas as Fanon points out, “Satan is black; one talks of darkness when you’re filthy and dirty. Darkness, obscurity, Shadows, gloom, night, the Labyrinth of the underworld, the murky depths” (Fanon, 1952: 166). Simply put, black-skinned people symbolize the essence of evil, who must be saved from themselves. These cultural impositions of White civilizations have become part of the African collective unconscious and becoming. The role of Islam in creating hierarchies and defining how one ought to be treated on the African continent cannot be overlooked either. Young and Weitzberg (2021) indicate that during colonial times, in the nineteenth century in Northeast Africa, religion and whether one was a pastoralist were the criteria upon which social hierarchies and the eligibility to enslavement were decided. They also note that such criteria coincided at times with skin color (Weitzberg, 2017). It thus appears that racialization and racial dynamics have not followed a continuous linear evolution and have instead several iterations and redeployments in Muslim societies on the African continent (Young & Weitzberg, 2021). It remains that for centuries, whether under Christian or Muslim rule, blackness and generally being framed as the Other has had profound identity-altering consequences for African people. Under European colonization, surrendering to a religion that could supposedly save them became another way to embrace modernity and rupture from their ways which, for the most part, did not disprove the existence of a Supreme Being. In fact, the reason most African communities embraced Christianity, or Islam for that matter, was partly because they found them complementary to their prevailing ways of worship, reverence, and adoration of a Being higher than themselves.

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It is worth underlining that colonial ambitions and pertaining dramatic consequences were not left unchallenged as illustrated in the multiple uprisings against slavery and colonial rule both in the Americas (Robinson, 2021) and on the African continent. Under the rule of Emperor Menelik II and with the critical support of Empress Taytu, an army of 100,000 Ethiopians from all regions of the country affronted and defeated the Italian army on March 1, 1896, during the Battle of Adwa, thwarting Italy’s colonial ambitions (Woldeyes, 2020). The Mau Mau contested the rule of British settlers in the British colony of Kenya for close to 10 years (1952–1960) and went on even after Kenya’s independence (South African History Online, n.d.), eventually resulting in legal action against the British Government in 2011 (BBC, 2011). Several uprisings against German colonial rule in Tanganyika have been documented in the 1890s and later in 1905 notably under the leadership of prophet Kinjikitile Ngwale (Getz, n.d.). In the southern region of the continent, in former “Southwest Africa”, the Herero people led revolts in 1904 to successfully reclaim some of the lands that had been expropriated from them (South Africa History Online, n.d.). Tragically, the resistance of the Herero people would be read by German commander Lothar Von Trotha as warranting their extermination which led to the Herero genocide (1904–1907) (South African History Online, n.d.; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2012). In West Africa, the revolutionary fighters in Guinea Bissau defeated the Portuguese in the wars of independence between 1963 and 1974 (Green, 2020). The Dan Fodio jihad in some parts of West Africa has also been described as resistance to slavery and inequalities, issues that groups like Boko Haram and the Niger Delta activists have adroitly latched on to wage violent actions against the Nigerian establishment (Green, 2020). Such a course of events indicates not only the agency of indigenous people from Africa, but once again exposes the European hegemonical project as one that placed its own people as eligible for sovereignty and freedom, while violently punishing the resistance and obliterating the agency of those labeled as “Africans”. It thus appears that the whole notion of humanity and modernity became conflated with abiding to European colonial standards. From names of countries, names of nations, emplacement of borders, social hierarchies, and the modelling of the environment, colonizers imposed their colonial vision onto colonized people (see Chap. 3). These violent and oppressive metamorphosis ultimately resulted in the colonized people assimilating the colonizer’s vision: a resource-dependent, power-deprived, economically challenged dubious

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interpretation of an eighteenth-century European society. Colonial violence and its internalization have blinded many Africans and people received as Black of the ability to recognize the ills of this system, its resultant trauma, and the urging responsibility to envision and chart an alternative pathway, beginning from the very essence of their dislodged sense of Self and place.

The “Postcolonial” Condition There are several implications to be drawn from the African journey of becoming and continuity from the Precontact era to the Postcolony. First, the concept of Africa itself is a colonial creation and has remained so despite the attainment of political independence by all the states on the continent. The very name of the continent is a term that was used in the Roman empire to refer to a specific people in present-day Libya (Ndlovu-­ Gatsheni & Chambati, 2013). “Africa” and the “Africans” are consequently European inventions associated with the unknown. They hold as their only certainty the supposed ontological difference of the place and people they refer to. It follows that what Europe and Europeans are, Africa and Africans cannot be. If there have been European empires, the mere thought of African empires can only be a fallacy or the fruit of some Caucasoid European people who somehow found their way to Africa but were not Africans themselves, as was claimed by the Hamitic hypothesis (Sanders, 1969). Unsurprisingly, discourses on Africa or blackness in general have been largely informed by such a racist Eurocentric worldview. They have been silenced or altered because of hegemonic western discourses and universalizing tendencies that place the western paradigm as the only valid model. Afrocentric discourses are not exempt, and they too bear the mark of western hegemony since coloniality also permeates reflections about African realities (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2014). The second point is that although the idea of Africa is a European creation, the lived experiences of the people and their culture are legitimate, even if these have been delegitimized through slave trades and colonization. The colonial Eurocentric discourses about Africa and generally about non-European contexts have deliberately remained silent on the accomplishments, societal structures, and socio-political organizing of societies that were to be colonized and “westernized”. These discourses have also remained silent about the contributions of Africans to the making of the Modern World by providing the oil that greased the wheels of the

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industrial machine which sets Europe up for progress (French, 2021). Instead, these discourses describe the continent as a European construction of alterity, negation, and inferiority—“alterity of rupture, of struggle, and combat” (Fanon, 1952: 197). Africa’s deep past has, in effect, been detached from the challenges of the present and the discussions on proffering solutions to some of the contemporary issues troubling the continent. The solution-driven agendas of the post-imperial age or modernity seem to have no place for the realities of the past. The past is mostly only romanticized as something to be recounted in stories with no consequence to the “real business of policy and solutions and the ‘here and now’” (Reid, 2011: 153). Consequently, Africa is still imagined as a region devoid of history, philosophy, and socioeconomic progress—a decadent continent rescued by the arrival of western colonialism. And yet, societies on the African continent, can … be credited not only with giving rise to the many scientific developments associated with Egypt, engineering, mathematics, architecture, medicine etc. but also with important early political developments such as state formation and monarchy …. Some of the world’s other great civilisations, such as Kush, Axum, Mali, and Great Zimbabwe, flourished in Africa in the years before 1500. In this early period, Africans participated in extensive international trading networks and in trans-oceanic travel. Certainly, some African states had established important trading relations with India, China, and other parts of Asia long before these were disrupted by European intervention (Black History Month 2020).

The “focus on slavery to the exclusion of the artistic, musical, scientific, and ecological insights of African societies leads to historical narratives that can alienate many Africans and people of African descent” (Green, 2020). As Richard Reid (2011: 155) aptly notes, “the deep past remains critically important; the longer it is marginalized, the less healthy the body politic will become, and the more troubled the society in denial”. James Baldwin also cautions that “the truth about the past is not that it is too brief, or too superficial but only that we, having turned our faces so resolutely away from it, have never demanded from it what it has to give” (Baldwin, 1955: 139). For some enslaved Americans, honoring this “deep past” actually means returning to the African continent to connect more organically with its cultures, peoples, and environment. The story of

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return is not new. Freed enslaved people had returned in the past and founded a new colonial space in places like Liberia in the nineteenth century during the American civil war. However, the nature of the current “return” program is more about self-emancipation, self-renewal, and self-­ reclamation, gearing at repairing historical wrongs and healing the ancestral homeland (AL-Solaylee, 2021). The third implication of Africa’s journey from the precontact to the present times relates to the framing of Africa and African people as the opposite of progress, personhood, spirituality, and civilization. This framing deepens the crisis or nervousness of “being and becoming” (Zeleza 2006: 19  in Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Chambati, 2013). This nervousness describes how with limited access to non-western recounting of their past and origins, Africans, rather than reclaiming their own references to break free from a foreign and fabricated simile of identity, rely on imposed and condescending colonial names and borders that effectively divided ethno-­ cultural groups, resulting in present-day conflicts (Hyde, 2016). The proliferation of platforms for self-determination or secessionist campaigns in the Postcolony is not unrelated to the physical and structural violence associated with this travesty of what Franz Fanon dubs the “pitfalls of national consciousness” (Fanon, 1968). If “being oppressed means the absence of choices”, as bell hooks (1984) argues, then it can be said that oppressed Africans, trapped in a long-­ lasting dehumanizing colonial order of the Postcolony, have constructed, at least since colonization (to not say since European contact), psychological and physical barriers hinged on self-hatred, underappreciation, and dismissal of their own sense of being and worth. These physical borders have coalesced with the psychological to wreak devastating havoc on socio-­ political relations in the continent. In South Africa, as with Nigeria, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, South Sudan, Tanzania, and so on, the nervousness of “being and becoming” has percolated national and everyday politics in the form of xenophobic and negrophobic attacks that alienate the relatively vulnerable “foreigner”—usually one that is not White. Be they the Zimbabweans and other African nationals in South Africa, the Banyamulenge in Congo, the Maasai in Tanzania, and so on, Black Africans bearing the brunt of attacks at the hands of other Africans supposedly because of their citizenship or ethnicity highlights deep-rooted Afrophobia (Thomson Reuters, 2019). It is also telling of a sustained racist colonial logic that dehumanizes whoever is not perceived as White and strips them of any sovereignty over their existence or a place where their

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presence will not be challenged. Lateral violence has become the go-to answer, attacking those who have been historically marginalized and dehumanized to position one-self as superior and “different” from the alleged “job-stealer, disease-spreader African” (Oliver, 2020). Such horrid practices as so-called xenophobia (a term that has been challenged given that its violence is particularly virulent against black-skinned African people and quite forgiving of other foreigners) is a clear case of the colonized becoming the colonizer. It is also an indication that Africa is still in search of itself. Its realities are still being mediated through colonial or imperial lens and practices, which derails the actualization of the African personhood. Questioning the legacy of anti-African bias, inter-African violence, and the very social hierarchy that rewards those closer to former colonists and overlooks “natives”, is a road too seldom travelled in this journey of being and becoming African. The commitment to not repeat or reinvent embarrassing oppressive discriminatory dynamics would be particularly expected from societies that have historically been divided and engineered on the very premise of othering. Instead, structures of difference in Africa have been created to maintain a hierarchy in which those who resemble the former colonists in their ideology, socio-economic status, or racial identity, continue to access the best schools, degree programs, and basic resources, while undermining the legitimate rights and existence of the African “Others”.

Conclusion We have problematized in this chapter the crisis of belonging, of what we termed “being and becoming African” from the “Precontact” era to the “Postcolony”. We have interrogated the place of Africans themselves in instituting this crisis through the internal (re)configurations of their communities by way of conquests and various forms of ethno-territorial segregations. We underscored some elements of the Precontact period that merit consideration in the social life and governance of the Postcolony. These include gender equality, accommodation, spirituality, and the sacredness of the land/environment. While some of these practices and cultures were dislodged by the European slave trades (later turned colonizers) and the Arab incursions on the continent, Africans are equally responsible for the amnesia of this deep past and complacency with the imperial order of the day. The consequences have been to live with and anticipate the “specter of violence” (Graham, 2020)—violence against

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one’s identity and a sense of place. It is a life-long questioning about one’s identity outside of the relentlessness and insidiousness of racism. For decades, Eurocentric scholarship on Africa’s past tended to paint Africa in a dehumanizing light, constructing a narrative that the continent existed in a haze of darkness and backwardness, afflicted with stagnancy. On the other hand, African and other progressive scholars have theorized about this age and traced its patterns of interaction. While many have not portrayed a picture of the past as magnificent, they have recognized that Africa is much more than its history of slave trades or colonization. For as Toby Green (2020) avers “to look at African history as the history of slavery and the slave trade is no more accurate than to study the history of the Nazis as the sum of the German past”. A new human consciousness that traverses myopic and reductionist discourses and preoccupation with racial difference must be sought as a matter of moral obligation to reshape our globally defective, oppressive, neocolonial, capitalist, patriarchal heteronormative system that stagnates the journey of a people and disempower them from truly becoming themselves.

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PART II

Diaspora, Race, and Immigration

CHAPTER 6

Notes on the Nervous Condition of Black and African Immigrants in Canada Ademola Adesola

Introduction In his popular preface to France Fanon’s classic work, The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre thinks of “the status of ‘native’” as a “nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent” (2008: 17). I posit that the offspring of the natives Sartre refers to have become immigrants in countries from whence the colonizers of yesteryears originated. And for varied reasons, one of which is the uneasy question of belonging, the condition of the immigrants in their new lands of sojourn remains nervous. The immigrants’ painful realization that they cannot find home in Western countries1 because almost 1  And in some cases, in their home countries as well given the issues of indigeneity and Afrophobia, which are all legacies of colonization.

A. Adesola (*) Department of English, Languages, and Cultures, Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_6

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everything reminds them of their “otherness.” Their “out-sideness” also generates a nervous distress in them. Having departed the places they have known as “home,” the immigrants assume a status of otherness to their “compatriots” who imagine them as belonging elsewhere. Drawing from personal experience and testimonies of Black and African2 immigrants in Canada, this chapter reflects on the nervous condition of immigrants in Canada, arguing that Canada’s multiculturalism thrives on systemic exclusion that makes belonging fraught. Leaning on Nandita Sharma’s (2001) critique of the promotion of multiculturalism in Canada as a “branding” and image laundry effort aimed at projecting Canada as a haven of multicultural citizenship and tolerance, this chapter posits that multiculturalism in Canada is an ideal that is yet to become a reality. Or as Rinaldo Walcott claims, the adoption of multiculturalism in Canada has a ring of deception to it, for it works well to “contain blackness through the discourses of Canadian benevolence” (2003: 44). Being the “Other” whose humanity is always questioned, African and Black immigrants in Canada continue to live with the torturing nervousness that comes with being in a space where they are more valued only for the surface difference their skin colour adds to the surface mosaic of racial equality most White Canadians imagine the country to be. The African and Black immigrants’ encounters of and relations with such institutions as immigration system, schools, police, and work environments in Canada always serve to engender tension and nervousness in them (the African and Black immigrants) and to trigger consciousness of alienation and lack of belonging. In what follows hereafter I examine some of the issues that put African and Black immigrants in Canada in nervous condition and make belonging nearly impossible. George J. Sefa Dei gets it right: “The fact is that in Canada and elsewhere, Blackness has always showed up in unwanted spaces with deleterious consequences for Black people’s lives and bodies” (2022: 21).

2   I would like to clarify my use of African and Black in this chapter. Both concepts are not amenable to any straightforward meaning. It is the case that those so described by them did not choose the terms for themselves (see Chap. 5 ). Besides, neither “Blackness” nor “Africanness” means one single thing. Here I am reminded of George J. Sefa Dei’s conclusion: “Blackness is not a homogeneous category, and we must speak about it differently” (2022: 20). Also see chapter two of Achille Mbembe’s The Critique of Black Reason (2017) for more on the various meanings of Africa(ness). In these two works, the multidimensionality of Africa and Black is emphasized.

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Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees The presence of Blacks and peoples of African descents in Canada as visitors, refugees, international students, permanent residents, and citizens is seen by many White Canadians as a proof that anti-Black stances have no place in the country; that it is an American bogeyman. Omisoore Dryden captures this point well in their submission that “Canada’s anti-Black, racist, historical, and contemporary realities are often nationally and publicly obscured by narratives that frame Canada as innocent and free of the ‘ugly’ realities present elsewhere” (2022: 383). Were the opposite to be the case, it is reasoned, Canada would not continue to be a destination for Blacks and Africans as the annual records of the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) show in recent years. This presence has also become useful for deodorizing the fetid history of Black enslavement and forced coerced emigration from Canada “under the false, state-endorsed pretense that Black belonging is impossible in Canada, because Black people cannot possibly be from here” (Thompson, 2022: 35). In White Canada’s disingenuous view of Black presence in the country, there is no place for coming to terms with the immigration policy of the past that anathematized and forbade Black immigration into the country, in the same sense that governmental policies in the past constrained Black Canadians from participating in the sociopolitical arena of the country (Thompson, 2022). So, while Black presence in the country is considered as evidence of the welcoming and inclusive space that Canada has become, the psychological and emotional costs of what it means to be Black and African immigrants in Canada are not accorded the status of a concerning reality. White Canada does not appreciate or care about the nervous condition that its systemic racism create in its Black population. It wilfully does not see the forest for the trees because Black and African presence within its borders is construed as evidence of its matchless benevolence. It sees only this presence but turns a blind eye to how it frustrates the efforts of that presence in forging a sense of belonging.3 It is this contradiction that creates the acute nervousness that most Black and African immigrants in this 3  Robyn Maynard makes similar point: “[S]tate violence against Black persons in Canada has, by and large, remained insulated by a wall of silence and gone largely unrecognized by much of the public, outside of brief media flashpoints. Anti-Blackness in Canada often goes unspoken. When acknowledged, it is assumed to exist, perhaps, but in another time (centuries ago), or in another place (the United States)” (2017: 3).

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country know too well. The uneasiness is reinforced by the knowledge that in White Canada, as it is in other Western states, Blackness is understood as a problem, as “an individual who is by definition always already void of relationality” (Wilderson, 2010: 18).

What Does Experience Show? Among my own unwarranted experiences of Canada as a place my African body does not belong to was a particular encounter I had with law enforcement officers at the Calgary International Airport in December 2018. What transpired should not have had anything to do with the cops. But because I am that African fellow who is deemed naturally dangerous and undeserving of justice, given that justice is what human beings who are wronged get, the police must be brought in. I began my journey on that December morning from Winnipeg to Calgary, my destination being Nigeria. At the Winnipeg airport I was asked to check in my carry-on because, as the airline agent who attended to me explained it, the plane was full. I inquired from the agent if retrieving the bag in Calgary would be smooth. They assured me confidently that there would be no hassles. I accepted their words that there would be no difficulty in retrieving my bag. We touched down in Calgary in good time—apt enough to allow for about two hours rest. I went to the carousel for my small bag. In the first few minutes I had no reason to believe that there would be any cause for alarm. Sooner it would be clear to me that something was amiss. I searched in vain among the various bags making a repeated round on the belt. I called attention to the absence of my bag at the right office. They launched a search, an exercise that almost took forever. Had I been allowed to board with my bag, I would not have been needlessly delayed looking for it when I should be getting ready for my next flight to Amsterdam. My carry-on was recovered about seventy minutes after my arrival at the airport. I raced to the stand of the same airline to check in for the next flight. The boarding had been completed and the plane was about to take off, I was told. I was still figuring out what the attendant meant when they asked me another question—do you have your boarding pass? No. There again it dawned on me that the airline agent at Winnipeg had refused to let me do another thing I knew I should do—get my boarding pass. The airline agent in Calgary simply said they would look for another flight for me. This was the point when the drama of my unbelonging in

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Canada was staged before me. The first option the agent offered to me as my rescheduled flight was to take place two days later. I rejected it. The agent browsed their system again and came up with another option that would see me going to places not relevant to my travel. When that junketing would be done, I would arrive in Nigeria on the second day of the new year. Yet I had less than two weeks to spend in Nigeria. Our second child had been born in my absence some five months earlier. I wanted to see her and the family. I wanted to spend some time with them before I returned to Winnipeg for my loaded teaching schedule. With appreciation and firmness, I turned down the offer. In any case, for a trip I had booked in September, I did not expect that there would be such change, all avoidably caused by the airline. What was right at that point was not to be given offers that were completely against my plans. I was there at the counter with the agent still looking into their system for another schedule when suddenly I noticed that I had been surrounded by some police officers, numbering between seven and eight, with their hands firmly on their weapons. It looked to me like a scene from a 007 movie. Nonplussed, I asked the agent if he was the one who called the cops. He said it was his manager. Not far from him was a White fellow standing and looking at me, some satisfaction playing out on his face. “Why did you call the cops,” I inquired from him. “You refused all the offers we gave you,” he retorted firmly. In that state of surprise, I asked him: “So you have a right to make offers to me, but I do not have the right to refuse them?” All along the officer who led the police team was requesting my passport from the airline agent. Once he heard my question to the manager, that lead officer turned and said sternly to me: “You had better accept what they are offering you, or else I will throw you out of this place!” I refused to engage that officer. Rather, I turned to the manager and asked him if that was how they treat guests whose travel plans they had messed up. Again, it was the lead police officer who responded. He repeated his earlier threat, adding this time that “the airline had done their best,” as if he was one of their employees. At that time, I was already troubled, what with the other officers who formed a ring round me and looked as though I was a threat they were ready to neutralize within minutes. That situation made me nervous. That was my first encounter with the police in Canada. And up until that point, I was like many immigrants who believe the myth that policing in Canada was unlike what we had known from where we hail from. We buy that untruth without taking our Africanness and Blackness and the invented stories about it into account.

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We perhaps think like most White Canadians that anti-Black police assault and violence are things that belong elsewhere. While it is not the case that policing in Canada generally is without positives, what cannot be ignored is the fact that African and Black people in the country experience it differently from how White people know it.4 My argument here is that African and Black immigrants’ experiences of policing in this land are one of the major causes of anxiety, and it is a condition that does much to remind them (African and Black immigrants) of how the country they love to be in and contribute to does not want them. Yet all that these people want, as James Baldwin articulates it in the case of African Americans, is to not be treated as deranged wards in need of care; Black people, as Baldwin notes, “are human[s] too” (cited in Nicholas Buccola, 2019: 284). All that I wanted that evening at the Calgary airport was to be treated as a human being who has rights, one who can get justice when wronged. But the lead police officer was clear in his mind that I did not deserve the kind of respectful and just treatment that other guests, especially White ones, enjoy. I became an object of attention for every passerby within the period I was ringed round by those officers. Why would police officers surround an African man if he is not a subject of interest? It was possible that those onlookers were even grateful in their hearts to the officers for containing what was a threat in an airport. I felt deeply ashamed and concerned at the same time for what could happen there. My sense of shame gave way to my uneasiness, and I decided to deescalate the situation. I did not want to be added to the data of anti-Black police violence. If Nigeria with all its policing challenges and my encounters with police officers in the line of duty as a journalist did not put me six feet under, it was not in Canada that it would happen. Consequently, I looked to the airline agent, who I could tell was sorry for me but did not have the courage to tell his boss that he was wrong to invite the police. I asked the agent to give me one of the initial offers they made to me. Again, my decision was the practical thing to do at that point. 4  Among other scholars who have engaged the subject of how Blacks are policed in Canada is Robyn Maynard. Maynard’s Policing Black Lives (2017) is a compelling account of the performative tolerance and skin-deep multiculturalism that divert attention from the troubling realities of anti-Black violence at various levels of society. One finds the same story in Desmond Cole’s The Skin We’re In, in which the author bears witness to “the ever-present impediments to Black life: policing, public education, prisons, the apprehension of our children, the discrimination against our parents at work, the disrespect of our elders on public transit” (2020: 1).

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I wanted to live to fight another day. The airline agent gave me the schedule that would see me resume my journey two days later. I then asked him where I would pass the night. Before the agent and his boss could say anything, the lead cop ventured a response: “There are couches in the airport; you can use any of them.” I ignored him and asked the manager, “Is that how you do it?” “No,” he answered, “there are hotel accommodation and food tickets.” With all the paperwork done, I looked at the police boss and said to them: “Were a White person the one involved in this matter, would you have treated them in the same way as you have done to me today? Would you have said those things you said to me to them? Would you have asked your men to form a ring round them, ready to act?” The officer pointed a finger in my face and said something along the line of “learn to accept given options.” There you have it; the Black person is that person who has no right to insist on what is in their own best interest. The Black person is not expected to question anything from Whiteness (Whiteness in a uniform especially); they should act as they are commanded. To do otherwise is to be confronted as a problem—a poisonous plant to be weeded out, root and branch. It was a few centuries ago when the notable African American thinker W. E. B. Du Bois asked the question in his book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903): “How does it feel to be a problem?” For Du Bois, this is a question he has no answer to give to his White interlocutor. It is not difficult to imagine why Du Bois has no answer for this question. It does not make any sense to dissipate energy on what is an invention. Africanness and Blackness as a problem, or “the Negro problem” as Baldwin calls it, is an invented thing that works to underscore the point that Black people do not belong in White spaces, as well as to deflect attention from what the real problem is.5 Baldwin understands what that actual problem is, and he identifies it unmistakably. As Nicholas Buccola explains it, Baldwin is aware that “the Negro” was “an invention that white America had used for centuries in order to avoid confronting historical and moral realities that 5  It is for this reason that Toni Morrison considers racism as a distraction. According to Morrison, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

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terrified them [… and] the racial ‘problem’ was really a ‘white problem,’ not a ‘negro problem’” (2019: 284). It is the case that when Whiteness does not want to come to terms with its issues, it projects onto other people all that it denies about itself. With the gradually increasing African and Black presence in Canada,6 the idea of African and Black immigrants as leeches and economic problems is not difficult to come across in Canada. There are those among the White population in Canada who see immigrants in Canada as problems. Such people do not think of immigrants as contributors to the economic wellbeing of the country. It should be noted that Canada is not a stranger to the invention of the Other as a problem. Indigenous peoples in Canada know too well about the “Indian Problem,” which the then Minister of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott spoke about in 1920 in his presentation of a Bill to parliament to establish the residential school system: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem […] Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question” (cited in Theodore Fontaine, 2010: 171–172). Note that for Scott and his ilk, annihilation is the solution to the Other as an invented problem. No coordinated efforts at understanding—assuming there is something to understand—the imaginary problem and exploring solutions other than extirpation.7 Having gleaned some biographical information from my passport, the lead police officer in my Calgary airport unnerving experience was further convinced I did not belong to that society. For if he saw me as belonging 6  See Marina Jimenez’s “When Multiculturalism Morphs into Pluralism.” The Globe and Mail, 2007, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/when-multi-morphs-into-plural/article726582/ and Aaron D’Andrea’s “Canada sets new immigration record with 430K newcomers in 2022.” Global News, 2023, https://globalnews.ca/news/9383885/ canada-immigration-record-2022/ 7  Genocide appears an easy way out for any group which constructs another as a problem. Think of the fates of the Amerindians in North and South Americas, the children of residential schools and missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, the Jews in Europe, the Tutusi in Rwanda, the Herero and the Nama ethnic groups in Namibia wiped out by German soldiers, among many other similar human obliterations in other places of our world. The common feature in all these cases is that the eradicated groups were first constructed as problems by their killers; that is the exterminators first degraded their victims as humans before going to “work” against them so as to make the act much easier. In profiling their victims as savages, cockroaches, pigs, and rats, the executors of genocidal plans avoided coming to terms with the troubling fact that the people they were killing were human beings as themselves.

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there, he would not have treated me in the horrible way that he did. Racially I am different from him, but his detestation of my Africanness did not allow him to appreciate the fact that there is nothing wrong in being racially different. The same thing can be said of the manager; had he seen me as a human being, he would not have invited the police. There was nothing in my conversation with the airline agent that indicated threat or trouble. It was mainly a case of unwanted offers rejected uncompromisingly. But because to that person I was an unwanted presence and one that is without rights, he decided to invite law enforcement agents to deal with me as a non-person, a non-being. After I received the hotel papers and food vouchers, I excused myself from that suffocating environment. I barely slept through the night. I kept turning the matter over in my mind. The following morning, I returned to the scene again. There was a new set of people. I brought up the matter of my treatment the previous night to their attention. They were sorry to learn of the unacceptable manner I was treated. Recall that the previous night I was assailed with rescheduling options that would make my travel pointless and punishing. On that morning in question, I was rescheduled for another flight the same day. Did the opening just come up that day? Was the manager being sadistic? All that I know for certain is that my refusal to accept any of the options given to me meant that I asserted my capacity for choice and understanding of my rights as befitting any human being. But the manager did not like that; only those considered humans could do so, but to that fellow any person like me was not one of them. After all, as bell hooks observes, “racist thinking perpetuates the fantasy that the Other who is subjugated, who is subhuman, lacks the ability to comprehend, to understand, to see the working of the powerful” (2009: 92). I received some apologies from the person who offered me a viable ticket with which to resume my journey. There would be more apologies. Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba (2021) is right. Canada is a Republic of Apology. Its politicians are quick to offer confetti of apologies for just about anything, chief among which is atrocities informed by racism. But as anyone who pays attention knows too well, such apologies do not upset the apple cart of systemic racism or wrongdoing. It is apologies as smokescreen to keep diverting attention from the entrenchment of actions and policies that make non-White peoples feel unwanted and unwelcomed in this land. In this land where apologies are used to deny justice, “[e]very matter of injustice has its own practised apology performance. Apologies for colonization, for genocide, for police shootings, for mass shootings in

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mosque, for racism, for inequality and discrimination, for a lack of diversity, for looking the other way while a serial killer slaughtered gay men for years” (Anyaduba, 2021: np). Like many Indigenous peoples in Canada, African and Black immigrants do know that apologies are not precursors to justice. They know that apologies usurp the place of justice and perpetuate racially motivated bad practices. Apologies do not address the unjustifiable nervous conditions that African and Black immigrants know and experience again and again. Most Black and African immigrants would like to see systemic racism and discrimination frontally engaged. Across the length and breadth of the country, especially in places such as Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario, African and Black immigrants would like to live without the fear of police violence, without ersatz appreciation of diversity, without inequality in workplaces and institutions of learning, and exclusion from critical positions in the commonwealth. The workplace is another veritable place where Black immigrants in Canada are reminded that they do not belong in the country. Take, for example, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). For an organization that is foremost in projecting Canada as a truly, welcoming, multicultural space where everyone can thrive and live without fear of discrimination, one would think the reality of its own workforce would exemplify what it says. Although the IRCC understands, as Immigration Minister Sean Frazer8 reiterates recently in a news release, that “[n]ewcomers play an essential role in filling labour shortages, bringing new perspectives and talents to our communities, and enriching our society as a whole” (2023), it is not clear if it thinks they are worth any more than what they contribute to the society. In other words, does the IRCC see immigrants, especially African and Black émigrés, as people who belong here? Or how do we make sense of the experiences of the peoples of colour within its own personnel? The final report of a focus study conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights entitled “IRCC Anti-Racism Employee Focus Group” underscores the racism that non-White IRCC employees contend with as well as the racist elements in the processing of visa applications from African and Black applicants. Here is an extract from that report published in June 2021:

8  As at the time of preparing this book for production, Minister Sean Frazer was moved from the IRCC to Housing, Infrastructure and Communities in what was a cabinet reshuffle in July.

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Given the particular nature of IRCC’s work, participants also mentioned numerous examples of microaggressions heard internally in reference to client groups, that not only suggest to them the possibility of implicit biases affecting client treatment and processing but also impact employees themselves as they breed distrust of their colleagues and supervisors. Examples of these include: [a] Widespread internal references to certain African nations as ‘the dirty 30’ [;] [b] Stereotyping Nigerians as particularly corrupt or untrustworthy [; and] [c] A manager referring to Latin American applicants as people who just come here to collect social insurance. (Such negative stereotypes were mentioned about certain other immigrant groups as well, but Nigerians were cited as an example particularly often in our conversations). (IRCC, 2021: np)

It is not surprising that Nigerians feature a lot in this study. Those who have monitored the high number of rejections of visa applications from Nigeria are not likely to be taken aback by this information.9 Notice too that the so-called dirty 30 are African countries. The choice of naming for this group of countries is not inconsistent with the representation of Blacks and Africans in Western imagination. This representation, as Achille Mbembe submits, does the work of dehumanization, of denying the humanity of Blacks and Africans (2017: 39–77). As different scholars have long established, while Whiteness associates itself with light, safety, cleanliness, and intellection, it synonymizes Blackness with darkness, threat, evil, dirtiness, and mental inferiority (hooks, 2009: 94). Given all its historical and contemporary violent atrocities against peoples of colour, it is interesting to note that Whiteness does not consider itself as a source of terror. Based on how Whiteness hounds and segregates Black and African peoples within its borders, it is remarkable that it does not see itself as a threat to the wellbeing and happiness of those people (see Chap. 3). Like hooks, I too “think that one of the fantasies of whiteness is that the threatening Other is always a terrorist. This projection enables many white people to imagine there is no representation of whiteness as terror, as terrorizing” (2009: 101). Yet the experience of most African and Black peoples in spaces dominated by Whiteness is one of Whiteness as terror.

9  I have chronicled my own experience of visa application rejections by the IRCC in a chapter I contributed to a forthcoming book, Interruptions. I have lost count of the number of people that I know who were made needlessly nervous by their incomprehensible visa rejection communications.

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The acts euphemistically described in the IRCC Focused Group Report as “microaggressions” are terrors. They are terrors because they rob those they are directed against any sense of belonging, safety, and mental wellbeing. As the passage above from the report shows, those IRCC workers of colour do not trust their White colleagues and superiors. Terror breeds distrust and fear. Some other parts of the report also show that IRCC officers of colour are skipped for White colleagues when the opportunities for capacity-building trainings or even promotions come up. It is doubtful to imagine if those so bypassed can be free of the nervousness that comes with being sidelined for pivotal elevations. In fact, it is doubtful whether people from places so construed as “the dirty 30” can ever truly feel a sense of belonging in Canada. Yet hooks reminds us that Whiteness does not think about the way it “makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, [which] is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness” (2009: 94). While they get by and continue to contribute to the progress of Canada, African and Black immigrants are not ignorant of the inequality and discrimination with which White Canada treats them. Accordingly, they too can say certainly as Itabari Njeri does in her autobiographical chronicle, Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone, that “this society deals blacks a disproportionate share of pain and denial” (1991: 178). Africans and Blacks who travel to, live, and work in Canada know too well the unsettling terror of White Supremacy. What the IRCC workers of colour describe in that report is not unique and limited to them. It is the experience of most African and Black immigrants in varied workplaces in Canada. It is vital to note here that there are Africans and Blacks who deny the existence of racism in Canada.10 Such people claim that they feel they belong here than where they hailed from.11 Perhaps making this claim is how some of them choose to manage their neither belonging in their countries of provenance nor being truly accepted in Canada.12 Perhaps such people are yet to understand that in Canada  bell hooks worries about the same denial in the US, noting that “in contemporary society, white and black people alike believe that racism no longer exists” (2009: 103). She argues that stance is not without a purpose; it works to explain away the horror of racism. 11  This view raises an important question about home. Nonetheless, finding home far away from the place of our birth does not invalidate the distressing reality of racism in our new place of abode. 12  There are those who resign to their exclusion and just carry on. Moreover, some relocate altogether, returning to their lands of origin. For everyone who has had enough and leaves, there are others who choose to manage in the margins they are pushed to. 10

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“racism melts into thin air even as it permeates” its nooks and crannies (Shirley Anne Tate, 2014: 68). It is likely taking them time to realize that racism has an invisible touch and those denying its existence “can’t quite put [their] finger[s] on it” (Tate, 2014: 68). I recall a Black person who once told me that racism is not a reality in Canada. That person said they did not know what it looked like. All that they know was that they were doing well in Canada. What is at issue here is not whether African and Black immigrants in this country do well or not, especially economically. The point is how many of them feel a sense of belonging. Denying that one does not feel a sense of belonging in Canada does not erase the numbing fact that racism and discrimination are real there. Such denial, hooks argue, “allows for assimilation and forgetfulness” and “is a response to the terror” of alienation that those engaged in it suffer (2009: 103). I have heard directly and indirectly stories of African and Black immigrants in workplaces denied of promotion because there were White coworkers to be considered. One of the things that is common in such stories is the point that those so denied were even more qualified than the ones given promotions and placed in certain positions. For most Black and African immigrants, therefore, workplaces activate and accentuate a nervous condition, but they still must show up if they are not to become economically penurious. It also inspires such strange creativity, in a bid for survival, that makes victims of White terror complacent or even complicit in the terror of Whiteness. The Uncle Tom virus is not dead. The Canadian academy is another site where Blacks and Africans experience a deep sense of unwelcomeness. Black scholars in that world understand how their presence therein is considered an abnormality and is seen as a product of some affirmative action. Academic institutions in this country are welcoming and inclusive insofar as Blackness and Africanness are not in vital positions. Among many other voices, a collected volume entitled Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy (2022) brings together other voices of Black professors and scholars who engage the subject of what it means to be a professor, student, scholar, and researcher while being Black. The various contributors speak to the exclusionary and discriminatory practices that define the White-dominated higher institutions of learning in Canada. Taken together, the book stresses the point that being Black at whatever level in those institutions is challenging. Black professors, Dei observes, “are under constant surveillance in [their] educational institutions. There is a false feeling of belonging, but only if we play by the rules [the ones which make specious belonging possible].

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But we are deemed not to belong or made to feel that way when we resist and when we assert our authentic individual and racial selves” (2022: 19). There is a huge gulf between what those institutions claim about inclusive spaces and acceptance of the non-White Other. The universe of those places of learning celebrates superficial diversity. Anti-Blackness is actively alive in their universe. As some scholars have reasoned, the introduction of the doctrine of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Canadian learning institutions and elsewhere tends to work more to give the impression of change while the old habits of unfairness, exclusion, and underrepresentation of visible minority groups are continuously entrenched. Ask Ian Williams. One of his considered points in what he calls “Ten Bullets on Whiteness” is number five—“Whiteness Adapts.” Operating like the proverbial cat with nine lives, Whiteness does not allow anything to check its logic of its discriminating operation. As Williams puts it, “Whiteness is like a melody where the tune stays the same, but the words change […] Whiteness […] is also creative in its strategies to remain dominant […] To every challenge and agitation of Blackness, whiteness finds a way to respond, even if the response is only a performance” (2021: 49–50). That is where we are at with EDI. The performance around this idea overshadows the real need for a change. At the centre of that performance are the White administrators who call the shots. We are in an age where the initiation and execution of EDI initiatives in our (academic) institutions centre Whiteness. In any case, whether EDI, which in a way highlights the contradiction13 that exists in higher institutions of learning that by their nature as centres of knowledge should be non-discriminatory, is even an effective tool for addressing centuries of racism and discrimination is one conversation that requires critical attention. Such a conversation cannot take place where the idea of EDI as currently instituted in many institutions in this country is taken as a fait accompli and spoken of as an infallible solution. Just what does EDI mean when administrative appointments and tenurable positions are still the exclusive preserves of Whiteness, diluted of course with one coloured fellow here and there to contrive the picture of a mosaic? In this dispensation of EDI, do African and Black (and other non-White) professors and researchers in the Canadian academy have a sense of belonging? How about African and Black students? Why do they 13  See page 51 of Ian Williams’ Disorientation: Being Black in the World (2021) for more on how “whiteness contradicts itself.”

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still endure the discomfort and pains that come with being Africans and Blacks in environments that perform tolerance and talk EDI? Why do most Black and African students in Canada find it hard to reconcile the idea of campuses as welcoming environments with the discrimination they experience within it in this age of EDI? It is hard to disagree with Dryden’s conclusion that “university-established policies and practices are incapable of disrupting anti-Black racism” (2022: 372). It is the case that those who champion the EDI doctrine and similar policies are the same minds that are hardly convinced that unfairness against visible minorities exists in the first place. Besides, the murmurings against measures to redress long-­ existing inequity and inequality against coloured professors and workers ensure that the implementations of EDI policies are in a manner that maintains the status quo ante of the extant order. No measures born out of dissimulating appeasement mentality, or the mindset of “let’s give them something to keep them off our back,” can do much to defeat anti-Black racism, discrimination, and underrepresentation in Canadian academic institutions.

Concluding Thoughts The focus of this chapter has been on experiences that make Black and African immigrants in Canada feel unwelcome. Their situation is one of nervous condition. It robs them of the happiness that should be derived from being in a place where they set out to call home, live in, and contribute to. Additionally, the nervous condition of Black and African immigrants in Canada is enabled by the contradiction between the ideals (multicultural citizenship, for example) the country celebrates and the perplexing reality of racism and discrimination therein. A country that promotes itself as oriented to equality, justice, and inclusion should not be one where some section of it struggles to live as full persons. Speaking to this costly contradiction as is the case in this chapter does not conduce to anti-White racism. It is neither “reverse racism” nor is it the case that “black folks who talk about the ways we are treated by whites are merely evoking victimization to demand special treatment” (hooks, 2009:104). Special privileges or treatments are not in demand when the dehumanization of Black and African immigrants is the subject. Black and African immigrants want to be held to the same standards as others. They do not want to be treated as a problem. They want to live and be without fears of police and carceral violence. They want Canada to be truly home for them.

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Since most of these people can no longer call anywhere else other than Canada home, it is important that White Canada work with them, as well as others, to seriously address the conditions that impedes a true sense of belonging.

References Anyaduba, C. A. (2021). The republic of apology. Public Parking: A Journal of Storytelling, Arguments, and Discovery Through Tangential Conversations. https://thisispublicparking.com/posts/the-­republic-­of-­apology Cole, D. (2020). The skin we’re in: A year of black resistance and power. Doubleday Canada. D’Andrea, A. (2023). Canada sets new immigration record with 430K newcomers in 2022. Global News. https://globalnews.ca/news/9383885/canada-­ immigration-­record-­2022/ Dei, G. J. S. (2022). Commentary on part one: Why the study of blackness is critical at this historical juncture. In A.  Ibrahim, T.  Kitossa, M.  S. Smith, & H. K. Wright (Eds.), Nuances of blackness in the Canadian academy: Teaching, learning, and researching while black (pp. 17–22). U of T Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of black folk. A. C. McClurg. Dryden, O.  H. (2022). Blackness and the limits of institutional goodwill. In A. Ibrahim, T. Kitossa, M. S. Smith, & H. K. Wright (Eds.), Nuances of blackness in the Canadian academy: Teaching, learning, and researching while black (pp. 372–385). U of T Press. Fanon, F. (2008). (translated by Richard Philcox). Black skin, white masks. Grove Press. Fontaine, T. (2010). Broken circle: The dark legacy of Indian residential schools. Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.. hooks, b. (2009). Belonging: A culture of place. Routledge. IRCC Anti-Racism Employee Focus Groups. (2021). https://epe.lac-­bac.gc. ca/100/200/301/pwgsc-­tpsgc/por-­ef/immigration_refugees/2021/122-­ 20-­e/POR_122-­20-­Final_Report_EN.htm Jimenez, M. (2007, January 12). How Canadian are you? Globe and Mail. Maynard, R. (2017). Policing black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present. Fernwood Publishing. Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of black reason. Duke UP. Njeri, I. (1991). Every good-bye ain’t gone. Vintage Books. Pollara Strategic Insights. (2021). IRCC anti-racism employee focus groups. https://epe.lac-­bac.gc.ca/100/200/301/pwgsc-­tpsgc/por-­ef/immigration_ refugees/2021/122-­20-­e/POR_122-­20-­Final_Report_EN.htm

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Sharma, N. (2001). On being not Canadian: The social organization of ‘migrant workers’ in Canada. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 38(4), 415–439. Tate, S.  A. (2014). ‘I can’t put my finger on it’: Racism’s touch. Ethnicities, 16(1), 68–85. Thompson, D. (2022). The long road home: On blackness and belonging. Scribner Canada. Walcott, R. (2003). Black like who? Writing black Canada. Insomniac Press. Williams, I. (2021). Disorientation: Being black in the world. Random House Canada. Wilderson, F.  B., III. (2010). Red, white $ black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. antagonism. DUP.

CHAPTER 7

The Geo-cultural Politics of Space and the Poetics of Race Dominic James Aboi

Introduction This chapter concerns itself with the root cause of migrants across Europe and North America, particularly the period of colonial conquests (1881–1914) as it affects racial minorities or Black demographics globally, likewise its implications on the political economy of the West as well as the racial manipulations to justify its course. Though focused on the so-called Third World, among others, that have experienced colonialism, the chapter transcends cultural and national boundaries to delineate the situation-­ ship of migrating people under a globally entrenched imperialism. Many have forgotten that most of the destination countries for present-­ day migrating people by virtue of having invaded or colonized countries of these migrants, have involuntarily left future invitation letters to their own countries at the point of departure, thereby “creating a fault line that lives on” (Mbembe, 2017: 6). This is to say, the migration challenge is not

D. J. Aboi (*) Department of English and Literary Studies, Faculty of Arts, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_7

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only a problem that colonized nations have to grapple with but also a Western problem. One could argue the situation is akin to that of a prisoner and the warden being paradoxically yoked under incarceration: the prisoner-nations for their wealth of resources and the warden-west to watch over the prisoner-nations as keepers of their treasures. The migration/diaspora challenges fit into the Panopticon concept of surveillance where the observers are also implicated in their observation and by so doing have their fate bound up with the observed (Bentham, 2000: 177; Foucault, 1995: 204, 207, see also Bentham, 1995). The intrusion of the African space on the so-called civilizing missions, for example, has played the West into a compromising position of dependence and reliability for sustenance. One then wonders whether it was the African or non-Western worldview that birthed colonialism. Or, should we believe that the erosion of non-Western cultural values will make Western thought the gold standard for rights (re)presentation, social justice, and racial equality? The issue of diaspora/migration is a modern world problem because of its globalizing effect on the socioeconomic and political histories of the global North and the global South. Akyeampong (2013: 170) is right in stating that “the history of the modern world cannot be divorced from the historical processes of slavery and indentured labor” because it triggered off the initial migrations of racialized people that have caused the present challenges of belonging, forging a new identity to fit one’s demographic space or adopted space. While a surging interest locates instances of moral miscalculations and geopolitical divisions that have been caused by the migration crisis, our focus interrogates the West’s attraction—appetite, for black wealth, and how the politics of occupied spaces influence the technicalities of race/racism. This chapter explores the praxis of new historicism and postcolonial discourses to delineate histories of colonization as spurred by capitalist explorations that instigate the formation of diasporic consciousness. It interrogates limitations of migrants in the context of their “conditional situation-ship” which transcends cultural and national borders by holding colonial conquests responsible for the dispersal of populations, particularly the creation of boundaries for economic exploitations in the global South. The chapter interrogates how a migrant consciousness is formed, thematically delineates the role of colonialism in the creation of the diaspora/ displacement, as well as demonstrates the capitalist implications of colonial

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boundaries. It also indicates how power dynamics and the politics of denial of the global North are responsible for the initial batches of migration, and how regions—spaces—inform and influence the poetics of race.

Formation of a Migrant Consciousness C. L. R James (1989) referred to the hero of one of the most successful enslaved people’s revolutions in recorded history saying, “Toussaint [Louverture] did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint” (x). In tandem with the present challenges of movement, it could be argued that the colonized nations did not create the migrant, but it is the colonial powers that create the migrants and the problems in-­ between. Though contemporary migration has shown a leaning toward Third-Worldism, in the sense that most migrants are from nation-states in Latin America and Africa and have struggled economically and politically, spurring batches of migrants to look elsewhere, is important to understand that contemporary migrations are not necessarily decided along racial, ideological or religious lines; rather, they are united in a transnational world by their situation or a “cultural mobility” (Greenblatt, 2010) that the challenges of the present have imposed on them. Along this line of logic, the migrants fall short of reclaiming control of their lives and situations, and it is therefore important to delve into the history and roots of the creation of this “situation-ship,” and those responsible for it which in most cases concern more than one nation or state. In light of this chaotic atmosphere, the notion of cultural mobility by Greenblatt et al. (2010) is significant: We need to understand colonization, exile, emigration, wandering, contamination, and unintended consequences, along with the fierce compulsion of greed, longing, and restlessness, for it is these disruptive forces that principally shape the history and diffusion of identity and language, and not a rooted sense of cultural legitimacy. At the same time, we need to account for the persistence, over very long periods and in the face of radical disruption, of cultural identities for which substantial numbers of people are willing to make extreme sacrifices, including life itself (2).

The issue of migration is one of life and death. There are people whose prevailing circumstances are worse than their fears of facing border patrols or being alienated from spaces they have taken up residence or found themselves by geo-political accidents. What often traps migrating people

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in a complex web of possibilities is the struggle to “negotiate the tension between articulating a sense of self (in its wholeness and unity) and interrogating a sense of a finished self (on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality)” (Saul, 2006: 130). To deal with the diaspora is to confront a “roaming subject” caught up in a tension of relational selves and a restless wave of circumstances. This sophistication is teased out of the migrant experience to which Rushdie (1991) posits: The effect of mass migration has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves – because they are so defined by others; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier (124–125).

The masterstroke of Rushdie’s assertion concerning this new breed of migrants is the pluralism of their experiences, sense of acculturation, and willingness to improvise on the journey of self-identification, and definition in spite of the views of racial absolutists. It aligns with the position of Soyinka (2011) in his discussion with Tommie Shelby on the concept of the Global Black when he posits, “you can be what you are and yet have an allegiance to what unites you with other nationalities within the same newly-created state border” (40). It is this desire to transcend both the structure of the nation-state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity that Gilroy (1993: 19) advocates in The Black Atlantic. Gilroy (2002) observes that “it is the terrifying prospect of conquest by aliens that is for many Brits, the most vivid and constant form of elemental jeopardy” (xxvii). Ironically, the declassification of this racial register is what Coates (2015) celebrates about being at Howard University—called The Mecca—because individuals accepted their migratory status but with rights as citizens or permanent residents. This culminates fears in the hearts of neocolonialists whether at the edges of Western borders or administrative blocks of the metropole. They would have to understand that industrialized economies and the growth of modern industries will certainly birth a color problem, at the root of which are urbanized or detribalized natives (Mamdani, 1996: 6; see also Du Bois, 2015: 15). It is to this city space that “the migrants, the

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minorities, the diaspora come to change the history of the nation, marking the liminality of cultural identity, producing the double-edge discourse of social territories and temporalities” (Bhabha, 2000: 320). But racism has not been taken as a measure of modernization or national progress, it was “generated in part by the move towards a political discourse which aligned ‘race’ closely to the idea of national belonging and which stressed complex cultural difference rather than simple biological hierarchy” (Gilroy, 2002: xxxiv; 1993: 10). Mamdani (1996) further suggests that the way to “stabilize racial domination (territorial segregation) was to ground it in a politically enforced system of ethnic pluralism (institutional segregation), so that everyone, victims no less than beneficiaries, may appear as minorities” (6). This, too, is unreliable as it could be inferred that the quest for expanding capital markets demands more hands and more expertise to sustain it and therefore changes the migrant population at any given time. There are efforts in recent history to segregate migrating people from Africa, for instance, through a door-keepers’ law that cherry-picks on passports and sometimes demands unassailable requirements claimed to be well-intentioned for the safety of the host, but will never be reversed in the case of the Other (see Chap. 6). Boehmer (2017) argues that “the nation is a space on which the people and the state entity ‘collude’ in generating and exchanging the signification of power, while narrative at once reflects on, and participates in, this process” (141). If the nation-state is a formation of colluding ideas, a rainbow of differences unified by a shared narrative, who then is the migrant? How do we disambiguate the claim made by Quayson and Daswani (2013: 4) that the “diaspora of whatever character, must not be perceived as a discreet entity but rather as being formed out of a series of contradictory convergences of peoples, ideas, and even cultural orientation?” This is why Greenblatt (2010) submits that “even in places that at first glance are characterized more by homogeneity and stasis than by pluralism and change, cultural circuits facilitating motion are at work” (5). Whatever becomes the defining tenet of our nationhood “is imbricated in the overriding logic of exploitation and deception” (Boehmer 143). This is so because the “diaspora are often regarded as posing challenges, if not threat, to nation-states, because the very ‘construction of diasporas is fundamentally about the efforts to sustain social boundaries across space and time to make oneself at home in the world” (Al-Rustom, 2013: 480). Bhabha (2000) attests to this when he submits that “it is by living on the

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borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity” (320). The tension of the migrants’ makeshift existence robs them of a sense of themselves and sometimes the space they try to occupy. This displacement is captured by Mphana (2021) as follows: “I am often a stranger to myself. I have no place of origin, no home. I keep remembering everything in two time zones at once. Who knows, maybe I myself am called something other than myself” (18). The poem is culled from a collection titled The Rinehart Frames, which ironically resonates with Rinehart, a character in Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1995) in which the Black protagonist is “invisible” because White people refused to see him and therefore resolves to be irresponsible stating that “responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement” (19). In the context of this chapter, the diaspora or the migrants have become invisible and subaltern subjects, because their rights are not only unrecognized but have been denied representation. By enunciating the plight of the migrant, Mphanza suggests he might be called something other than himself, which is true, because the migrant is also called diaspora. Ethno-politicized divisions and wars of conquests or religious crusades for territorial expansion have spurred migrations of every type. Of all these forces whether internal or external, the most outstanding factor in the historiography of migration or the diaspora is colonialism and its contingent forms of imperialism.

Colonialism and the Creation of the Diaspora The migration narrative is as old as every civilization and peculiar to every group. It is important to locate this movement through a new historicist discourse because it helps to foreground how the “migration crisis” presently being witnessed gained momentum and the implication of seeing it as a challenge to both the global North and South. There have been series of migrations across Africa which are considered internal and external in minor cases, but the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 was a monumental period that triggered a cause and effect on the African exodus. It is worthy to note that authoritative British imperialism, as C.A.  Bayly observes, came of age as early as 1783–1820, some hundreds of years before the

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Partition of Africa (Boehmer, 2005: 29). Though colonizers like King Leopold of Belgium was still in the Congo carrying out his executioner’s exploitation, Mamdani (1996) observes that “the end of slavery in the Western hemisphere underlined the practical need for organizing a new regime of compulsion, except this time with newly acquired African possession” (37). This Conference detonated the explosives of the major crisis that sparked African migrations, enforced and institutionalized the enslavement, exploitation, objectification, commodification, defilement of spiritual grooves, environmental assaults, desecration of the sociocultural fabric, and Afrocentric sensibility of the African people. It officialized the right of the European colonizers which disguised itself with an evangelical mission of saving the soul of the Noble Savage (more so in North America), to become a full-blown militarized capitalist venture where “writing in the form of treaties was used to claim territory” (Boehmer, 2005: 14). And this highlights one of the major concerns of looking at the migration challenge through a new historicist lens because it is a space where power relations are made visible. Ngūgı ̄ in A Grain of Wheat (2002) tells of this theatre of historical manipulation by illustrating how religion was first introduced, followed by men that carried “bamboo poles that vomit fire and smoke” (41), men who constructed the railways for carting away raw materials that served their interests. The welded weapons were used to create “masters willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves who gave in to their natural fear of death” (Fukuyama, 1992: xvii). Note also that not all the skilled Indian workers between 1887 and 1968 who were among laborers that constructed the Kenyan railways returned “home.” Some oscillated between the two countries, making Kenya a second homeland that gives them territorial and generational claim (Aiyar, 2015: 7). In the manner that Indians brought to South Africa for different purposes later became colonizers through the enslavement of Black South Africans, the Indians dislocated from their ancestral space—occupied by Britain—were imposed on Kenya, making this space occupation a migration anchored on double displacements. Unfortunately, the emphasis on territorial and racially bound scholarship on Kenya resulted in the historiographical marginality of Indians. This demonstrates the absence of Indians in mainstream Kenyan politics despite their contributions. It also illustrates that “being African, Indian, and Kenyan signified historically specific affiliations and concerns that shifted over time and space” (20).

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Colonizers, in general, always relocate influential leaders or oppositions. This is to say that the root causes of this relocation—migration—are both internal and external in the sense that it was caused by both European colonization as well as wars of conquests among indigenous peoples. An example could be drawn from the arrest and deportation of Nana Agyeman Prempeh I of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) in 1896 to Freetown Sierra Leone. Slaves from the United States were also relocated there and finally to Seychelles Island in 1900. Akurang-Perry and Indome (2018) posit that the British earlier on relocated King Amoaka Atta of Akyem Abuakwa and his royal family to Lagos (Nigeria) between 1880 and 1885 for alleged slave dealing (376). Falola (2009) avers that King Jaja of Opobo, for opposing the British advance into the interior market, was crushed and exiled in 1887; King Nana Olomu of Itsekiri on the Benin River was removed from his base at Ebrohimi in 1894; King Ibanichuka of Okrika was removed and exiled in 1898 (2); Oba Ovonramwen was exiled to Calabar in 1897 (11). Nigeria and Cameroon, for instance, fought over the Bakassi Peninsula which was finally ceded to Cameroon under the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in spite of thousands of Yoruba-speaking ethnic group identifying as Nigerians, thereby creating an internal diaspora. The geo-­cultural politics in play did not put into consideration the aspirations of the people in the lived spaces; it became a tussle between two superpowers—the English and the French, over a supposedly two independent African states. The colonialists, though powerful in their own right, were unfortunately “instruments in the hands of economic destiny” (James, 1989: x) because they were driven by capitalist gains, not the sociocultural factors at hand. This creates an “Intra-African diaspora,” which is the dispersion of African groups from one part of the continent to another (Anyaduba, 2016: 513). Thus, passports have been placed between a free space where the inhabitants not long ago did not need travel documents or called by a different name under a different constitution. This policy of forced migration as informed by intimidation, a divide-and-conquer mentality of the imperialists, has fast-tracked the conquering phases of European colonization. The Berlin Conference as supported by Article XI, Berlin Act of 1885 (Kyle, 1999: 13) which was the division of people “into policies and stocks” (Coates, 2015: 61), becomes the enabler of most migration that happened during colonization and “was at the root of the epochal inception of this new imperialism and the rivalry that defined its hegemonic promulgation” as captured by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

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(Chandler, 2021: 41). This very act “offered a macabre bouquet of total colonization of Africa to the imperialists who effectively occupied their spheres of influence” (Akurang-Perry & Indome, 2018: 375). It also marked what Chandler calls the “single most distinctive form of accumulation within what is now thought of as Western Europe derived from the trade and exploitation of these rivers of Black Gold” (41). The gravity of this venture caused James (1989) to assert “it was easier to find decency, gratitude, justice and humanity in a cage of starving tigers than in the council of imperialism” (282). Western powers only had 25 percent of Africa in 1878—which is already too much for a continent of the size of Africa, but as at the eve of WWI (1914–1918), it held 90 percent. France had the largest share, followed by Britain, Germany, Italy, Belgium—King Leopold took Congo as a personal trust—and Portugal exerted almost similar shares (Chatterjee, 2012: 269). Chatterjee notes that while writing in 1916, Vladimir Lenin observed that the colonial policies of the capitalist countries have completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories of our planet. This means that in the future, territories could only pass from one owner to another (269). This raises the question of what prompted WWI: European loss of power and living space, its balance, or the fight for relevance? The forceful seizure of spaces once belonging to Africa is informed by the poetics of race. Hence, the need to justify it. In 1739, the Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences under Louis XIV set up a prize to justify blackness which was in tandem with growing dependence of European economies on African slave labor. For over a century, they defined human variation in terms of hierarchy and fixed categories with anatomical or humoral claims, including embryology, divine providence, and blackness as a moral defect among other reasons (Gates & Curran, 2022: 109, 133, 266). Thus, from Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume, G. W Hegel, and Immanuel Kant who justified the inferiority of the Black race by challenging anyone to cite black intellectual acumen either in science or human relations, to Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (1859), the notions of race and matrices of belonging were ideologically and geographically encrypted at the same time targeted to serve Western interests (Kant, 2011: 58; Hume, 1888: 614). Ironically, in the present dispensation, individuals with exceptional skills are sometimes offered incredible opportunities in order to maintain them if they contribute to the agenda of their host communities. Taken together, Konadu (2018) surmises how the past centuries have witnessed unprecedented forms of forced migrations,

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overlapping cultures and histories that coalesced into servile and racialized categories bordering the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic Ocean (942). Large populations were dispersed in this struggle; there are those relocating to safety or caught up in the mayhem midway to their destinations. What was more important in this division was not about who got what but that the economic zones have been safeguarded for the financial groups and their interests (Fanon, 2004: 27). Akurang-Perry and Indome (2018) observe that in the early colonial period, “migration was the movement away from colonial conquest, while in the late colonial period, voluntary migration was the pull of social change and urbanization” (373). They further stated that the mode and manner of the implementation of colonial policies by imperialists to a large extent determined the forms and timing of African migration (374). It is regrettable that in the course of this movement, as Falola (2002) observes, in exchange for productive labor and tropical products, Africans received goods of less significance like firearms to fight more wars to create more slaves that were beneficial to Western political elite (110). Slave raiding during this period depleted populations of exploited societies as war parties were forced to travel distances to reduce chances of successful raids (Lovejoy, 2002: 29). This caused streams of migrations, particularly by minorities who sought fortunes elsewhere.

The Capitalist Implications of Colonial Boundaries on Migrants One of the most instrumental phenomena that has spurred colonialism and inspired the abolition of slave trade, propagated the creation of the diaspora, is the hunger for raw materials and cheap labor for Western industries. This did not happen from mere justification of cultural difference; it comes in the form of violation of national boundaries which ironically was the benchmark of sovereign states in the Europe of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries after the 30-years war. Europe during this period created treaties to mark their territorial limits, but when they found empires overseas, they were unconcerned about violating the sovereignty of the conquered nations. They claimed “there was no international law; the only law that prevailed was the law of force and conquest” (Chatterjee, 2004: 93). This gave colonial explorers and merchants like the Niger or

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East Indian Company the impetus to invade territories or indigenous spaces on behalf of The Crown. It is in line with this imperialist posturing that most of what came to be called The Horn of Africa comprising Somalia, Ethiopia, and parts of Sudan bordering the Red Sea was brought under subjugation by three key actors of the Scramble for Africa: Britain, France, and Italy. Following the colonial style of seizing territory by running up one’s flag, rendering it territorium nullius—as “uninhabited and masterless land,” and overriding natives’ rights and having sovereignty over it (Ghosh, 2020: 95; Mbembe, 2001: 183), Italy acquired the territory that later became Eritrea in 1869. The French took Somaliland and some parts of Djibouti in 1885 and Britain took a slice of it in 1887 (Woodward, 2002: 15). This region became a site or a confiscated space for superpower rivalry. Taking a step back, the Suez Canal was built in 1869 by a Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and bought by Britain (from a single individual not minding territorial violation) who in 1882 seized control of Egypt. Woodward (2002) argues that this strategic rivalry for Egypt has been seen as the spring from which European Scramble for Africa flowed. Cajetan (2018) contributes to this discourse when he interrogates postcolonial resistance and ecological violence that has bestridden an African space like Somalia where incessant civil wars “opened the environment up for exploitation” and the country’s territorial space became “subjected to illegal fishing and dumping of toxic waste by Western vessels” (14). This single act ruined the source of livelihood of the people and displaced them from their ancestral space. Even if they were to remain, they will not be able to compete with commercial farmers with modern vessels smuggling out its resources with impunity. It is important to also state that thousands of migrants scattered all over the world came from this region. But most part of the problem—if not the first—concerning ethnic rivalries and civil wars (1977–present) that spurred phases of migrations from this region was due to the international boundaries bequeathed by the departing imperial powers (Woodward, 2002: 3). Another compelling example of the formation of White boundaries for the exploitation of Black labor, or “turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals” (Hannah-­ Jones et al., 2021: 108), is the American history of the Black experience. Baldwin who at a point had to migrate from the United States to France due to the racial discrimination (recounted in Nobody Knows My Name, 1993) has in his much-publicized debate with William Buckley Jr. at the

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Cambridge Union in 1965 lamented how the America soil is filled with corpses of his ancestors for over 400 years while his citizenship status is still being questioned. The African American experience is central to the discourse of migration because they are one of the most transitional groups that have been dislocated from their homelands and traded as chattels throughout the Americas. The conditional situation-ship of enslaved migrants corresponds to the industrial potentials of the South when it mattered to their “masters,” but lacking compensation for their labor even after a Civil War (McPherson, 2015: vii). Enslavement “was one of the central mechanisms through which European [and American] pretension of universal domination was made manifest” (Mbembe, 2021: 57). The insignificant factor of the Self and Other driven by skin pigmentation continues to disenfranchise Africans, African Americans, among other demographics that contributed to its success and emergence as a World Power. Chattel slavery was the very spine of the country’s rise that one of its apologists claimed it “was the nursing mother of the property of the North” (Desmond, 2021: 353). Of the many instances where Blacks have been cheated out of their inheritance, two formidable examples stood out in relation to race and migration: the Great Migration, and the attack on Elaine and the Greenwood District. The Great Migration of African Americans was roused after the promises of Reconstruction failed to redistribute land to former slaves which would have changed the southern economic landscape, as it also led southern states to restore a racist oligarchy in their social and political system (Gates, 2019: 61–66; Kilson, 2014: 9). The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) armed themselves with Jim Crow Laws and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that permitted the forceful return of fugitives from slavery residing in free states (Hannah-Jones et al., 2021: 404), thereby causing a northbound migration from the South. Wilkerson (2010: 24) posits that these migrations started in batches from about 1882, 1915, and was at its peak in 1919 and through WWII to the 1970s (see also McPherson, 2015; Fabre & O’Meally, 1994). The year 1919 is very significant in the discourse of identity and race which is tied to belonging because it marked the arrival of the 369th Infantry Regiment that fought WWI to Harlem. But the triumph was short-lived as White people were intimidated by the prospects of African Americans in uniforms with rights to claim full citizenship. It sparked a race riot so bloody that it was called Red Summer (Tally, 2007: xv).

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Another fitting example is the year 1919, in the town of Elaine, Arkansas, when a dispute broke out between wealthy landowners and African American sharecroppers and lives were lost. Blacks who escaped left the town for good (Anderson, 2021: 486). A similar example could be drawn when the 4th Tennessee Infantry Regiment destroyed Black homes because a kind sheriff tried to spare a Black man from a White lynch mob (488). Another crucial incident was the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. White people backed by law attacked Greenwood District which was one of the wealthiest Black towns that it was referred to as the Black Wall Street—the original Wall Street was built by the enslaved at a site that served as the city’s first organized auction in 1711 (Miles, 2019: 40), leaving behind deaths and damaged businesses (Alexander & Alexander, 2021: 933). This state-sanctioned violence has been reenacted in Levittown, Pennsylvania, in 1954 when a crowd mobilized to evict the first African American family—Bill Myers—to move to an all-White neighborhood (Rothstein, 2017: 196). These incidents historicize how the legacy of racial terror affects black wealth, diasporic movements, and migration. Incidents of this nature illustrate what it means to live on the margins of societies, and resonate with the view shared by Young (2004) that “the legacy of colonialism is as much a problem for the West as it is for the scarred lands in the world beyond” (165).

The Colonial Roots of Forced Migration and Power Dynamics Human movement is the most static variable in the development of human progress. However, it is important to note whose progress it is and to what degree and at whose expense? African migration intensified at the end of WWI and the beginning of WWII because the wars depleted the resources of the powers involved both at home and abroad. The French, for instance, tried to cushion their fall by embarking on a policy of compulsory cultivation of cotton in the Upper Volta, Mali, and Niger. This facilitated the forced migration of many French colonial subjects, particularly the Mossi and Dagari in the Upper Volta district to the Gold Coast. Akurang-Perry and Indome (2018) observe that in Kenya, for instance, the Resident Ordinance of 1918, the Labor Circular of 1919, and Native Registration Ordinance of 1920 aimed at making African laborers work on European

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farms and plantations—which was not theirs in the first place—caused massive migrations within and outside of Kenya. The Land and Freedom Army (LFA) dubbed the Mau Mau by the British revolted against colonial domination in 1952 (Ngūgı ̄, 2016: 11), causing migration challenges due to re-habitation that caused landlessness without reformulating the country’s long-standing agrarian policy of reserving Highlands for European settlers. Though unjust land ownership has been condemned by the Royal Commission of 1953–1955, aggrieved peasants who have lost out in litigation over land disputes also wish to benefit from opportunities presented by cash-crop farming (Maloba, 1993: 149). To ensure supply of free labor, housing was provided for Kenyans at farms and mines—of which wage and price of produce are determined by settlers—but legislation was needed to issue rooms at the urban settlements (Mosley, 2009: 125,134; see also Alao, 2006). Again, the activation of Private Location Ordinances of 1902, as practiced in Rhodesia, low employment, among other factors, contributed to armed struggles that displaced Kenyans to neighboring countries. In the case of Nigeria, the Collective Punishment Ordinance of 1909 empowered colonial officers to punish groups, villages, or towns for the transgression of a member (Falola, 2009: 26). This caused the displacement of people to more peaceful environments. Similarly, in the Belgian Congo, records have it that in 1935, over 900,000 peasants were involved in compulsory cultivation and production of cotton and rubber which had caused migration to other parts of the Congo with less demand after its wealth had been drained by the colonizers (Davidson, 2005: 219). In most of the occupied territories of Africa, British imperialists passed labor ordinances that triggered several batches of migrations. The imperialist instinct to push colonies to the brink for the benefit of Western economies continues to rear its tentacles across the globe and enhance forced migrations. If the global North complains about migrations from the global South, she had to look at how she destroyed indigenous communities, industries, and forced poor populations into seeking better fortunes elsewhere. Marx (2008) observes that England, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, for instance, was wrong, but concludes that “whatever have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution” (212). England has unconsciously played a vital role in spurring a migration revolution and sustaining its flow and narratives. The insurrections and mishandling of power led to the division and breaking away of Indian

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Muslims to Pakistan during the Partition. Similar friction created the state of Bangladesh in 1971 with refugee camps and squatter colonies in West Bengal and Calcutta (Chatterjee, 2020: 110; Hajari, 2015). Ironically, the Partition was a space for double freedom for Muslims in East Pakistan of 1947. They were freed from both British rule and the dominant Hindu ruling class (Chakrabarty, 2002: 116). The issue of genocides or the aftermath of mass atrocities cannot be understated because it has become one of the major veins pumping blood to every artery-corner saturated with migration challenges. Of much significance in this discourse is the colonial factor and its rationalization in the European imagination. Anyaduba (2021) contends that genocides occurring in the Postcolony are “derived mainly from the twin legacies of European colonization and modernity,” through the nation-state system foisted on the people. This is based on “the ideas of sovereignty, and political and moral subjectivity that the system enabled and depended on” (2). Mamdani (2012) sees the colonial powers as the first political fundamentalists who institutionalized discrimination through the racialization and tribalization of societies by creating “a hierarchy of rights as an entitlement of different races said to occupy different positions on the civilizational ladder” (50). This splitting of populations into privileging groups became the bedrock of mass atrocities in the Postcolony, igniting streams of migrations. In fact, the “colonial desire to divide and classify, to create hierarchies and produce difference, leaves behind wounds and scars” (Mbembe, 2017: 6) as witnessed in the Namibian, Sudanese, Congolese, Biafran, Burundian, Rwandan, and Armenian massacres. Prunier (2009) argues that the Rwandan massacre which has caused an unceasing stream of migrants across the world “could never have occurred without the manic cultural engineering of the Belgian colonial authorities” (xxx). Let us not forget that the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide was flunked during this massacre as the West had its media following its development, but without an immediate humanitarian response. Prunier again observes that the bureaucracy of the United Nations (UN), obsessed with its preferred goal, forfeited local opinions of those on board to counter it. After all, it is a “Third World” catastrophe.

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Of Western Sensibilities and the Politics of Denial The Brexit failed to proffer solutions to the challenges of migration in the United Kingdom (UK), and it seems to be getting worse as the influx of people mostly from formerly colonized nation-states are on the rise. Britain infamously devised a plan of relocating “illegal” migrants to Rwanda. The political calculation for this movement is ill-advised on several fronts. It highlights global inequality, especially for an African country not responsible for the migration. This also complicates why a country that has witnessed firsthand the tragic consequences of colonial divisions and instrumentalization should accept, decades later, to join forces with a former European power to deny human rights to migrating people, the majority of whom are Black and racialized people. The migration situation is akin to when slavery was woven into the British social fabric through its active participation (1560s–1807) but disguised as though it was an overseas event unfolding by itself. What makes it ironic and contradictory is the fact that the UK is inviting people just like the Macmillan Government did (Rushdie, 1991: 133), has armies of uncompensated volunteers of the Windrush Generation knocking at its doors (Gentleman, 2019: 141–152), but will grant High Potential Individual (HPI) visas to “the best and brightest” (Bubola, 2022) from the first 50 non-UK universities of the world. Beside China and India, Nigeria has the highest number of international students in the UK (International Student Recruitment Date, 2022), and the visa’s stipulation of non-UK graduates is a tactical, political, and steeped in racial exclusion associated with Third-Worldism. The political impulse accommodates contributors to its economy but robs local communities the agency of its budding societal transformers. This policy is steeped in geo-­ cultural politics of social difference and elitist or middle-class space creation. Chakrabarty (2002) observes a similar irony in British history of Colonial India and remarks that “the British became political liberals at home and at the same time as they became imperialists abroad” (85). It appears as a move to restock contributors to UK’s political economy lost in the Brexit movement. This is akin to the demand for indentured labor shortly after the exodus of slaves from the plantations during slavery. It challenges the moral right and cultural boundaries that inform modern identity and the politics of space in a globalized world. While it could be

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viewed against the backdrop of a European assumption of cultural superiority and political supremacy, it “had a salient effect of what one may call the interiorized realm of European experience – namely, the space of sense and sensibility” creation (Gikandi, 2011: 8).

Politics of Space and Its Interface with the Poetics of Race Quayson (2013) captures the crux of migration politics of space as it informs and is informed by the poetics of race when he submits that: Population dispersal appears to have been a central plank of colonial governmentality and space-making. Space-making itself involved not just the constitution of a geographically demarcated political reality but was first and foremost the projection of a series of sociopolitical dimensions onto geographic space. These sociopolitical dimensions involved society and politics as well as economy, culture, and a wide range of symbolic and decisive practices. Colonial space-making is thus to be understood in terms of the relations that were structurally generated and contested across interrelated vectors throughout the colonial encounter, with population dispersal being central to the entire process (144).

This demonstrates that the present migrants do not fit into the space structure of their modern societies as designed. It is easily forgotten that between 1630 and 1780, far more Africans than Europeans disembarked in Great Britain’s Atlantic colonies (Mbembe, 2017: 14) because it served its capitalist interests. Following this line of logic, Armstrong (2018) contends that spatial politics is at the heart of migration, especially “in cases where the politics of place and space is complicated by the politics of otherness present in many migration narratives” (224). Most importantly, the question of “who” the migrant is and “where” the migrant comes from informs the type of displacement experience. History shows a repetitive trajectory in the United Kingdom (UK) where manifestation of racial hatred sent Blacks “back” to Africa or the Caribbean. This is to maintain White racial purity by deporting Blacks in lieu of granting equality with Whites (Lowe, 2015: 68). For instance, Chinese and South Asian natives were “imported” to work in the West Indies, Peru, Cuba, Australia, Brazil, the United States, Hawaii, Fiji, South Africa, and Mauritius. However, the population dispersal policies of colonial governments in Britain sent

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London’s Black poor to Sierra Leone (1786–1791); indentured South Asian and Chinese laborers to East Africa and the Caribbean (1850–1920s); and much could be said about what their policies resulted to in the 1947 Partition of India (Quayson, 2013: 145). Following the historiography of modern slavery, it illustrates that the present deportation of migrants by Britain is the playing of an old script to a new audience. In Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power, Morrison (1992) argues that if self-hatred is the fruit of being hated, it also mirrors the “image of the aggressively inverted act of self-denial that is already at work in all racism, bigotry, or imperious nationalism” (137). This resonates with neoliberal critics that profess fair play and rights of space for all, but will arm themselves with policies that undermine the priorities of Others (migrants) under their protection. This reiterates the “temporary lowering of the physical, cultural and legal barriers that had been erected between the races and the people of the empire” to create a Million Black Army for WWI, on the one hand and, on the other, the demand that Blacks hired during the war be dismissed to make way for demobilized White men (Olusoga, 2016: 701, 741). This subdued “migrants” into a docile acceptance of their marginalized space. If most colonized peoples after independence view service to their countries as duty to their father lands, but under colonial imperialism, Britain was the motherland, how then could she tell her children not to come home to roost? Recent as April 2022, a 17-year-old Black British boy who never left England was arrested and detained by Immigration Enforcement. Home Office documents revealed a Nigerian identity was already imposed on him to enable deportation till his mother intervened (Abdul, 2022). This lends weight to the claim made by James (1989) that “the race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics,” because there are also non-Blacks being subjugated by their lack of means, and “to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental” though with a few exception (283). This also complicates why Euro-Americans could be relegated to an impoverished cluster of the Black population but will never be subjected to the ill-­ treatments faced by Blacks. This has always been the path travelled by the Black population of the world—“the wretched of the earth”—but has found expression in the global response to migration and diasporas. This “new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet” is what Mbembe (2021) calls “the Becoming Black of the World” (6).

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Though sociocultural and political forces, even failed leadership, have influenced migrations and notions of belonging, the history of colonization has been instrumental in the foundation that facilitates such movements especially in the context of racialized people or minority groups. A historical underpinning necessitates or helps to highlight the implication of race, space occupation, and the cultural politics in-between because “an intricate connection exists between an aesthetics object—a text of any work of art, and that all texts must be analyzed in their cultural contexts, not in isolation” (Bressler, 2003: 188). Thus, the geo-cultural politics of space and racial poetics stimulate the need to find common grounds of convergence among diverse races and creeds.

Conclusion From survivors of the slave trade to dislocated populations across borders is the monumental footprints of capitalism and its concomitant imperialist tentacles stretching across ocean floors and oil rigs of colonial wealth. It is problematic that the global North, built on, and still benefiting from a long history of suppression, acts as though it is doing the colonized a favor by letting it cross its borders. The chapter shows how the hunger for resources detonates the bombs of postcolonial crisis of revolutionary migrations and initiates a Darwinian tussle which could have been avoided if the “dominant power” respected the sovereignty, agency, humanity, and worldview of the subalterns. It exposes globalization as being structurally one-sided, and hence, the need to rewrite histories of colonialism within the context of the postmodern condition. Following traditions of imperialist subjugation, the currents of diasporic hurdles suggest that migrants are children of the future. This implies that ideologies of difference have to be dissolved through an honest interrogation of the past in order to weld a future soldered by the electrodes of justice, tolerance, and racial equality. Taken together, the history of multiple displacements, inconsistent variables lurking in the shroud of identity, race, and the crucibles of belonging challenges all to a cross-cultural understanding and meditation on Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narrator’s rhetoric: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

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CHAPTER 8

Exiting Whiteness and Patriarchy: Embracing Oneness, Breaking Free of Incarcerating Ideologies, and Enabling Pathways to Belonging Chuck Egerton

Introduction and Forethoughts Hell therefore, is not only other people, but one’s self too; symbolizing potentiality, possibility, movement, and life itself, exit is the ultimate freedom. It is through the ability to exit present circumstances into the abyss of the unknown—to imagine another way of existing that is reachable through leaving what one knows … a vision for a full and meaningful life.—Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot (2012) on Sartre’s, No Exit.

For you, my reader, to hear me, and for me to be heard and understood, we should be in a relationship of trust. As a whited and gendered man

C. Egerton (*) Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_8

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writing on these topics, I walk a fine line. I am thoroughly mediated by and saturated with the lying ideologies of whiteness,1 white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny. Even on my sixty-seventh trip around the sun— with most of those orbits on the task of liberation—I still have many blind spots and cannot claim to know whiteness and patriarchy better than those who are victimized by it. You are my whiteness and patriarchy background check. I invite your criticism, correction, and dialogue, and hope my stumbling efforts can help others find a pathway to belonging. In this I appeal to our ancestors, mine and yours, and the great expounders of the African Diaspora for aid, assistance, and blessings. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the depths of knowing one’s true core self. This is vital to the process of shedding the social constructions, myths, and lies that restrict, confine, and define us. When we begin to know the truth of who we truly are, in the present moment, we can heal, build, and repair unifying connections with all our relations.2 I will begin with a deep excavation of myself and my role in attempting to write about the paradoxes of diasporic identity, race, gender, and belonging as a whited man; that treason to whiteness and patriarchy is the exit leading to loyalty, to humanity (Garvey & Ignatiev, 1996).

What I Have Learned About Myself I came into this world with a male body, scant in melanin from Welsh and Irish roots. It was not my decision to be born as I am, but I can choose to accept my embodiment as a lifelong teacher. I choose to contest the imposed social constructions I have inherited through my embodiment, my colonizing identities of whiteness and patriarchy, and to seek freedom in the integrity, wholeness, and healing identity of my relationship belonging to the diverse oneness of humankind. I am a Bahá’í whose core belief is that my reality is spiritual, that all humanity is a single race, that every sense of superiority and prejudice should be weeded out for us to build a common community of peace and justice, that cherishes our diversity. It teaches that I have been endowed with a rational soul that endures beyond physical death, a soul that “has 1  Whiteness is white ideology, a false doctrine of white supremacy, not white people. Thanks to my brother Dell Campbell for this insight. 2  “All my relations” is an indigenous statement of interconnection. See more: https:// firstnationspedagogy.com/interconnection.html

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no gender, race, ethnicity or class, a fact that renders intolerable all forms of prejudice” (The Universal House of Justice, 2013, March 2). Each of us has been entrusted with this indivisible reality by the Creator.3 For me, life’s purpose is to educate the soul, to align it with the Creator’s truth and justice and the understanding that all humanity, all my relations, are as “one soul in one body” (Baháʼuʼlláh 1976). This sense of purpose guides my life’s project. Being born into this light-skinned body did not make me white. I was not born white, I was whited (Thandeka, 1999) by a racial indoctrination process into the false ideology of whiteness, a tactically imposed lie of normalcy that centers its own superiority, imposing its will on everyone who is seen as white. This cultish belief in whiteness was “inherited from [my] own nation,” imposing a “fallacious doctrine of racial superiority” (Shoghi Effendi, 2006). This racialization process instilled in me an idolizing and emotional infatuation with whiteness, blinding me to my own infection. I was raced. In humility, and at risk of sounding disingenuous, I will call myself racist because the stain of white supremacy cannot be completely washed out, and even as I am washing the staining continues. I know “racist”4 is an accurate term for me because I benefit from whiteness and am complicit in harming Black (Crenshaw, 1988),5 indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). This harm is manifested by receiving and accepting the unearned power, entitlements, and bestowals of whiteness both consciously and unconsciously, every day. I am in a deep process of accounting and atoning for this failure to humankind, which I believe if left unchecked is a negation of my own faith (Shoghi Effendi, 1973). My silence, inaction, and ignorance have no excuse. 3  The Creator can be whatever the reader choses it to be, the First Great Cause, Nature, Science, God, the Void, or the Big Bang. 4  Racism is defined by this formula: racial prejudice + power = racism. The false ideology of whiteness is the origin of racism. Whiteness has no color and as an evil ideology can infect anyone. In my view “power over,” societally, legally, or institutionally, must be present for it to be called “racism.” 5  I use the term “Black” throughout the paper for the reasons articulated by Professor Kimberle Crenshaw. I share her view that “Blacks, like Asians, Latinos, and other ‘minorities,’ constitute a specific cultural group and, as such, require denotation as a proper noun.” Cited from Kimberle W. Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law, HARV. L. REV. 1331, 1332 n.2 (1988) found in Harris, Cheryl, Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review. Jun., 1993, Vol. 106, No. 8 (1710).

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What I have learned is that whiteness as a social invention is a deadly contagious disease that causes physical, psychological, and spiritual violence on the body politic. Whiteness is not white people; anyone can be whited regardless of skin color. The fallacious doctrine of whiteness is manifested and enforced by the legal, social, and conceptual structures that make whiteness the norm. Fear of the “other,” greed, hubris, and willful ignorance are major catalysts of this disease. The whited must be held accountable and accept full responsibility for the damage done by our moral choice to embrace whiteness. It is not so much the crime, but the denial that one has committed a crime that is “a much more sinister matter” (Baldwin, 2010). In this process we should ceaselessly strive to learn about the lived experience and atone6 for the daily devastation and harm our choices have had on our dear sisters and brothers of African descent and all those labeled as Black, Indigenous, People of Color. I have learned that because whiteness is an ideology, not white people, or a skin color, it can infect anyone. White-bodied people are not white supremacists, but we can support, participate in, and maintain the structural operationalization of whiteness. Whiteness as a disease is a false doctrine, an ideology with an obsessive attraction, based on counterfeit reality that anyone can bank as illicit tender. White supremacy7 is a system built on the ideology of whiteness and is manifested by racism. Evidence of this process is that all melanin anemic immigrants to North America must learn to internalize whiteness to be accepted in the anti-­ Black “racial contract” (Mills, 1991). My Irish ancestors, like all immigrants to the United States, did not arrive as white. They were co-opted as tools to maintain and perpetuate white supremacy and anti-Blackness,8 and were promised the higher status of “whiteness” if they did (Ignatiev,  Atone in the sense of sincere engagement in repairing the damages we have done.  “By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and un- conscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.” Frances L. Ansley, Stirring the Ashes: Race, Class, and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship, 74 CORNELL L. REV. 993, I024 n.I29 (1989). 8  Whiteness was specifically established as a legal definition of people of European descent in 1671 in Virginia after Bacon’s Rebellion. Whiteness as an ideology holds up the false ideal of white racial superiority. Its sole purpose was a justification for oppressing, demeaning, and enslaving people of African descent in the Americas. Whiteness “others” and oppresses all peoples who are not considered white and is the underlying ideology used to justify the 6 7

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1995). As Baldwin (1985) writes, it was the “price of the ticket” to become American “because part of the price of the black ticket is involved— fatally—with the dream of becoming white. This is not possible, partly because white people are not white: part of the price of the white ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are.” I posit that whiteness morally poisons those who drink in its lies. As a belief in an inherent superiority, it assumes a right to power, privilege, and entitlement over all people of color,9 but especially expressed in a virulent anti-Blackness aimed at those of African descent. It is a social invention we center and normalize, tricked to believe it is inherent and a natural social hierarchy. I have also come to know that being born in a male body I was gendered, but my chromosomes, hormones, and sex organs are not a significant factor in my internalized patriarchy. I was not born with toxic masculinity or a sense of male superiority, but I was gendered by a social indoctrination process into the false ideology of male supremacy. It is a tactically imposed normalcy that men are superior to women and all others on the spectrum between those binaries. This obsessive attachment to the false ideology of male supremacy was inherited and taught. I have chosen to contest the social constructions of colonizing male superiority and patriarchy, and to seek a new healing identity of the oneness and equality in all our differences. I must in all honesty, and again at risk of sounding insincere, name myself a sexist and misogynist because the stain of male supremacy (like whiteness) cannot be completely washed out while I am continuously stained. I know I am sexist because I benefit from and am complicit in harmful misogynist acts and behaviors. I receive the unearned entitlements and bestowals of male superiority both consciously and unconsciously. I must account and atone for this unjust failure to humankind, and if I do not seek new understandings of my masculinity and whiteness, it is in essence a negation of my own humanity. I cannot claim my silence, inaction, and ignorance as an excuse. Like whiteness, male superiority is a spiritual disease, a social infection bringing a deadly oppression to the body politic. Male superiority is manifested in structural patriarchy and enforced by the legal, social, and genocide of first nations and indigenous peoples in the Americas, which continues today. Source: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/inventing-black-and-white 9  Critical Race Theory (CRT) posits that “race” has no biological reality and that all designations and separations based on skin color are false and have been weaponized to build and support a hierarchy of structurally oppressive racism based on the lie of white supremacy.

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conceptual structures that support a social norm of male superiority, marginalizing women and others who do not conform. This structure jealously centers, protects, and enforces our infatuation with this colonizing disease. It is my conclusion that male superiority was created as anti-­ woman-­ness, misogyny, fear of femininity, and homophobia, and is weaponized against all who do not subscribe to its ideology. What we have learned from Audre Lorde’s profound statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” rarely includes what she wrote next. “They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the narrowest parameters of change are possible and allowable” (Lorde, 2020). The colonizing master’s house was not built by whiteness and patriarchy alone, anyone can be raced10 and gendered11 to enable these oppressions, many BIPOC and women do, as do people on the 2SLGBTQA+ non-binary spectrum.12 Patriarchy and whiteness were the tools that built the master’s colonizing house and are the tools that maintain it. In our exit we must utilize new tools to rebuild just human connections. The gendered ideology of male supremacy is the disease. Sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinities are its symptoms. Patriarchy is the structural expression of male supremacy, the framework, or pathogenesis. Masculinity is the learned performance of a gendered role that has little to do with biology. Patriarchal masculinity is toxic, feminist masculinity is not (Hooks, 2004a, b). Toxic masculinity has many scripts and roles. These are cast onto whomsoever chooses or is socially conditioned to perform them. As an ideology of dominance and infringement on others, it permeates the conditioning of women, and all performances and expressions of sexuality and sexual embodiment along the 2SLGBTQIA+ non-binary spectrum. Male supremacy/dominance is a socially constructed disease that is learned by and assimilated into all people, many of whom do not identify as cis-gender.13 Anyone can enable and act out patriarchy’s performance and be shamed, broken, and traumatized by its powerful internalized oppression through believing its lying ideology of traumatic inferiority.  Socially constructed racialization process centering whiteness.  Socially constructed process of genderizing, centering men. 12  2SLGBTQIA+: two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual +. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8084556/ 13  cis-gender: a person whose gender identity is the same as their sex assigned at birth. 10 11

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My doctoral thesis (Egerton, 2020) was informed by the transformational statement of the Bahá’í International Community that “[m]en must come to realize that under current conditions of inequality, the development of their full potential is not possible. It is they who must find the moral courage to convey and model new understandings of masculinity and who must challenge and question the narrow roles that society and the media have assigned to them” (Bahá’í International Community, 2015). These are the “narrow roles” of toxic, patriarchal masculinity. Whiteness, I believe, when blended with toxic patriarchy, could describe the underlying causal forces of the tragic world-wide diaspora. This great dispersal has both inner and outer aspects, physical and spiritual implications. Physically, these forces incited the movement of millions of human beings, forced, enslaved, lynched, and gassed, or worked to death, denied the basic human needs to live and survive—done by other human beings with the power and evil will to accomplish it for their own benefit. This dispersal served whiteness, its greed, imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy (Hooks, 2015, December 10). Spiritually these forces have created a deep inner conflict. “Humanity is gripped by a crisis of identity, as various peoples and groups struggle to define themselves, their place in the world, and how they should act. Without a vision of shared identity and common purpose, they fall into competing ideologies and power struggles. Seemingly countless permutations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ define group identities ever more narrowly and in contrast to one another” (The Universal House of Justice, 2019, January 18). None of us entered this world incarcerated by whiteness and patriarchy. None of us were born addicted to these powerful drugs, but we can find the keys to freedom and recovery together. But how is this to be done?

Changing Clothes This transformation is not as simple as taking off one suit of clothes and putting on another. Ideology is a foundational set of beliefs—a worldview that once established and entangled with self-identity can be resistant to transformation because we conflate it with our true self. But whiteness and patriarchy like “the emperor’s new clothes” are nakedness, a fantom of humanness, yet socially they exercise a dominating power (Andersen, 2011). This transformation has spiritual implications because to take this exit one must reconnect with one’s soul-home, what we can call our place

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of deathless indivisible reality, with “ties that interlace all created things within the universe” (Abdu’l-Bahá, 1978). Martin Luther King, Jr., gives us a clear historical context. Ever since the birth of whiteness as legal property in the 1600s, it has always been a moral choice by the rich and powerful (Harris, 1993). He points to the fact that “the social obstetricians who presided at the birth of racist views in our country were from the aristocracy: rich merchants, influential clergymen, men of medical science, historians, and political scientists from some of the leading universities of the nation … It became a structural part of the culture. And men then embraced this philosophy, not as the rationalization of a lie, but as the expression of a final truth” (King, 1994). The insidious infection of whiteness instills into its victims a lack of empathy and compassion, prioritizing ends over means. The whited must learn both the lies that the infection conceals within it and the truth of our loving nature it obscures. Since humanity is tied together in a “single garment of destiny” (King, 1986), the importance of weeding out these lies and cultivating truthful, genuine cross-racial relationships is essential to the work of exit and transformation. “Identity would seem to be the garment,” write James Baldwin, “with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one’s nakedness can always be felt and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes” (Baldwin, 1976). Whiteness, Blackness, and the spectrum of melanin between are social constructions given power by a false ideology of white superiority and dominance. “Perchance we may divest ourselves of all that we have taken from each other,” Bahá’u’lláh14 penned in a prayer of liberation, long before Baldwin, “and strip ourselves of such borrowed garments as we have stolen from our fellow men, that He may attire us instead with the robe of His mercy and the raiment of His guidance and admit us into the city of knowledge” (Bahá’u’lláh, 2002). These borrowed garments cloak the pristine “nakedness” of our whole and integrated selves, not stigmatized by race. Naked am I, O my God! Clothe me with the robe of Thy tender mercies. I am sore athirst; give me to drink of the oceans of Thy bountiful favor. I am a stranger; draw me nearer unto the source of Thy gifts. I am sick; sprinkle upon me the healing waters of Thy grace. I am a captive; rid me of my bond Bahá’u’lláh, (1817–1892), The Prophet Founder of the Bahá’í Faith.

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age, by the power of Thy might and through the force of Thy will, that I may soar on the wings of detachment towards the loftiest summits of Thy creation (Bahá’u’lláh, 2001).

This bondage inflicts the whited, like a poisonous cancer that eats away our humanity. Consider the following metaphor in the context of changing clothes and our nakedness beneath.

A Metaphor A Mockingbird sings loudly nearby on this warm spring afternoon in North Carolina. It is a bird like other birds but without a song of its own,15 only a repertoire of other bird’s calls, borrowed (or stolen), then belted out in rapid succession. Its song blends the calls of the Hawk, Catbird, Blue Jay, Finch, Cardinal, Robin, Sparrow, Crow, and others. The distinct samples link together like notes in an odd and disjointed, staccato phrase. The Mockingbird reminds me of my position in the world. This performance of repeated sounds (sometimes including crickets, car horns, alarms, and sirens) gives the Mockingbird its distinct identity, one based on appropriation, a collection of otherness, that like a metaphor for the heart of whiteness and patriarchy, they defined by what surrounds their vacant core, disconnected from reality. Whited ideology, like the Mockingbird’s calls, is a looting. Whiteness has no ethnicity. By appropriation it utilizes a driving imperialistic acquisition, a stealing and grabbing, that greedily revels in its congealed spoils and in patriarchy’s imperialism. Its chameleon-like illusion fools us into thinking it a new form of identity and being. It has contributed nothing of its own, like the emperor’s new clothes, it is nakedness. Coming to this atoning realization I remind myself that I am a whited European immigrant-­ settler man, raced and gendered by my society, and holding a deed to stolen Tuscarora land. The inner diaspora is a departure from the mediated self, tearing down the Veil, that separates us from each other (DuBois, 2015a, b, c, d, e). It is to exit the divisive ideologies that confine us, allowing a new liminal space for transformation. It is to reclaim our humanity. I need only look at 15  To clarify my utility of the Mockingbird as a metaphor, beyond what it is most known for, science reveals it does have its own call, distinct from its imitation of other birds and sounds, perhaps that is its underlying ancestry?

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myself and my family to see that the currencies of whiteness and patriarchy have no value. They run counter to the deepest Welsh, Irish, and Scottish roots of my ancestors, who when infected by patriarchy and eventually whiteness became full of contradictions. Their acquired hubris, violence, conflict, aggression, and trauma belie their ties to mother earth, the drum, and ancient teachers sent by the Creator. And yes, it belies their ancient origins in mother Africa too. Whiteness and patriarchy stripped those connections away, and like the Mockingbird they appropriate and attempt to justify themselves with no rightful connection. Healing from this trauma requires this kind of inner diaspora. What I mean by the inner diaspora is a spiritual departure from one’s mediated self, a dispersal from or stripping away and abandonment of appropriated garments of culture and ideology, removal of false, disparate, and invented identities that have defined and confined who we believe we truly are and who we truly belong to. Just as an exit implies an entrance, this inner spiritual diaspora implies finding a new space, a new home, and new garments where unity lives in diversity and is expressed in belonging to a common humanity (Lorde, 2002). This process of transforming from what the world has made us (whited and gendered) entails aspects of exile, separation, union and reunion, amity and calamity in search of our true selves. It is also a process of undulating advances and reversals, in or out of the duality created by the Veil, in or out of “second sight” and “double consciousness,” (Dubois, 2015a, b, c, d, e) all in the urgent search for the exit to find belonging and authentic self. Bahá’u’lláh writes: “True loss is for him whose days have been spent in utter ignorance of his self” (Baháʼuʼlláh, 1988). If I am a stranger to myself, then I see everyone as a stranger.

Metabolizing Trauma There are four well-known responses to oppressive trauma: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. To fawn is to please and appease. In our context, fawning is to accommodate and comfort the oppressor, attempting to reduce or avoid the impact of the trauma they inflict (Ryder, 2022). These four f’s are hidden in the oppressor too. No one can commit such harm without damaging themselves. An oppressor, a person who performs and inflicts toxically traumatic, violent patriarchy, and whiteness, suffers another kind of inner trauma against their own humanity, integrity, and authenticity. In the act of

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manifesting direct, psychological, structural, and cultural violence toward women, and those who do not comply to whiteness and patriarchy, they deeply damage themselves (Menakem, 2017). “Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates,” writes hooks, “we cannot address male pain. We cannot demand for men the right to be whole, to be givers and sustainers of life … they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health” (hooks, 2004a, b). hooks names patriarchal masculinity a form of incarcerating insanity. Pain, loss, suffering, oppression, and exile are powerful teachers. But only if we can metabolize their trauma (Menakem, 2017) and let them teach us. To metabolize trauma is to process it. To acknowledge one is in a state of brokenness, aloneness, dislocation, homelessness, abandonment, without bearings, incomplete, and smitten by suffering and loss, is the first step toward seeking spiritual reality and healing. Yet we know that no oppression or exile is good; that no imprisonment or abuse, torture or forced labor, slavery or suffering is good; and that no one willingly walks into a burning house.

The Relationship Between Patriarchy and Whiteness Patriarchy and whiteness function by utilizing similar modalities to operationalize oppression, both under the cloak of their fallacious and harmful ideologies. They are both about power over and self-centering, both claiming a false superiority. They are not the same, nor are they equal. Patriarchy like whiteness is a form of ignorance, as Mills writes, “it presumably does not need to be emphasized that white ignorance is not the only kind of privileged, group-based ignorance. Male ignorance could be analyzed similarly and clearly has a far more ancient history and arguably a more deep-rooted ancestry in human interrelations, insofar as it goes back thousands of years” (Mills, 2017). Patriarchy’s ancient history makes it seem more intractable and, since it is wrapped up in our sexual relationships, hormones, and procreation of the species, gives it a complexity of layers that wrap themselves around whiteness. The genetic human differences between skin colors and ethnicities are much smaller than the genetic differences between women and men (and those along the spectrum). Women and men are equal, but our physical differences and bodily functions are often weaponized by patriarchal masculinity which, when combined with whiteness, mixes a toxic cocktail, each feeding on the other within this distorted paradigm of oppression.

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This toxic cocktail took on an extremely violent form in the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. Both were patriarchal masculine massacres by eighteen-year-old men, one white(d) who murdered primarily elderly Black women, and one Latino who murdered Latinx school children and teachers. Patriarchal masculinity mixed with toxic whited-ness can breed violent misogyny and deadly oppression.

How Does DuBois’s Metaphor of the Incarcerating “Veil” Apply to All Humanity? Both the white (Matias, 2016, p. 117) and male gazes (Sampson, 2015) are tools to objectify, for selfish, immoral, and dehumanizing ends, those caught in their laser-focused beam. Their narrow frame of reference warps the dominant social norm and attempts to control how those entrapped in their gaze are enslaved, dominated, demeaned, commoditized, objectified, or killed. Eventually some are forced to internalize that warped vision and see themselves (and each other) through the same lens of white and male dominance, exploiting and justifying this dehumanizing oppression of BIPOC and women. The narrow vision of these gazes is like viewing a tiny piece of a much larger photograph, separating it from meaning and context, as in a cropped photograph that zooms in on a piece of an image separating it from its context. Another way I understand DuBois’s Veil metaphor is to compare the ideologies of whiteness and patriarchy to a windowless cell whose walls are an impenetrable Veil, within which its victims are constantly under surveillance from above. It seems to me that this also relates to DuBois’s concept of double consciousness, when Black people must see themselves with a double vision, navigating the dehumanizing way white people see them for their own safety and survival, in contrast to the way they see themselves as fully valued human beings. Whited people are entrapped as the oppressor/custodians of the Veil. In a chilling description of the Veil, DuBois writes, “sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. As one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet it hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White-­ between You and Me. Surely it is a thought-thing, tenuous, intangible; yet just as surely is it true and terrible and not in our little day may you and I

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lift it” (DuBois, 1920). DuBois describes how the Veil imprisons, confines, and dominates the core and integral self, stifling and colonizing the potential and humanizing contributions of the so-called people of color to the greater society. It is also like the gaze of the Panopticon mediating who we think we are and can be (Foucault, 2020). One can serve a life sentence behind that Veil and under that gaze, unable to reach the life beyond—unless they can find an exit. “The most grievous of all veils is the veil of knowledge,” writes Bahá’u’lláh (2003), because “structured ignorance” (Yancey, 2008) attempts to present itself as knowledge. And “[t]hus have their superstitions become veils between them and their own hearts and kept them from the path of God, the Exalted, the Great” (Bahá’u’lláh, 1985). “But as we work and climb,” DuBois continues, “we shall see through streaming eyes and hear with aching ears, lynching and murder, cheating and despising, degrading and lying, so flashed and fleshed through this vast hanging darkness that the Doer never sees the Deed and the Victim knows not the Victor and Each hates All in wild and bitter ignorance.” And like the camel threading a needle,16 to penetrate or climb beyond the Veil’s “ancient suffocating design,” most of who one thinks they are, must be left behind. The foundational false identities spawned by whiteness and patriarchy must be painfully, surgically sacrificed, stripped away to climb to an exit. This Veil described by DuBois maliciously separates two sides, one concealing and sealing in the oppressed who are dominated, made invisible and victimized by anti-Black racism, and confined to a mediated existence. On the other side of the Veil lives the “dominator culture” (hooks, 2003) of whiteness and patriarchy, in a cloud of ignorant bliss, a manufactured freedom, a mythological existence of physical prosperity and happiness, yet, this is their spiritual death that denies their own incarceration as custodians of the Veil. Although this Veil is a social fabrication, evil and corrupt, selfish, and dominating, it is upheld, protected, maintained, and defending by this custodial white ideology—with deep cultish fervor. This doctrine inflicts death, deep trans-generational suffering, and trauma to those it curtains and surveils. In my evolving understanding, I conclude that who we think we are is who we have been told we are, both oppressed and oppressor. Who we think and feel we belong to is who we have been told we belong to. Who  Matthew 19:24 retrieved: https://www.biblestudytools.com/asv/matthew/19-24.html

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we feel we are superior or inferior to is exactly who we have been told to feel superior or inferior to. Those who seek an exit must unlearn these dominating and comforting lies, struggle for liberation and belonging by embracing our oneness and interdependence. Race is indeed a lie with no biological or scientific foundation—a cardinal truth expressed in Critical Race Theory (CRT). Of whiteness and Blackness James Baldwin writes: “It’s up to you. As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you. As long as you think you’re white, I’m going to be forced to think I’m black” (Thorsen et al., 1990). I readily admit it is beyond the scope of this chapter (and my limited perception as a whited man) to address the invention of Blackness and what that means to Black people. Where we find our feet planted is so often where we have been told they should be. DuBois writes: “I remember well when the shadow swept across me … it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others … shut out from their world by a vast veil” (DuBois, 2015a, b, c, d, e). The Veil can also stand as evidence of the two natures of human beings. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá17 writes, we have a “spiritual or higher nature and [a] material or lower nature …” The material or lower nature “expresses untruth, cruelty and injustice,” while our higher spiritual nature exhibits “love, mercy, kindness, truth, and justice.” “Every good habit, every noble quality belongs to [one’s] spiritual nature, whereas all [one’s] imperfections … are born of [one’s] material nature” (Abdu’l-Bahá, 1972). This is another understanding of how the Veil separates materiality and spirit.

The White Gaze, Double Consciousness, and Tragic Duality The tragedy of whiteness and patriarchy is found in our failure to live integrated and spiritually whole lives, where our professed moral beliefs align with our actions and thoughts. We learn from DuBois’s description of “double consciousness” that the surveillance of the “white gaze,” the diseased myopic vision of whiteness, has caused enormous suffering and inner struggle to people of African descent. DuBois describes this as being “a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in 17  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844-1921) Eldest son of Bahá’í founder Baha’u’llah, who DuBois invited to speak at the 1912 NAACP Convention.

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this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-­consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (DuBois, 2015a, b, c, d, e). This “two-ness” forces a dispersal from one’s true self. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., sees the whited on the other side of the Veil, with a cutting diagnostic lens. He writes: “Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans … What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillation? It lies in the ‘congenital deformity’ of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception” (King, 2010). We must ask, how can knowing this help us find an exit to belonging? This “fallacious doctrine of racial superiority,” according to Shoghi Effendi (1990), is a double-edged sword, cutting deep into the humanity of its victims, and crippling the humanity of the oppressor. The cuts of this sword are not equivalent, and its injuries and deep wounds are not symmetrical for the oppressed and the oppressor. DuBois’s concepts of the Veil and “double consciousness” focus on the wounds suffered by the oppressed behind the Veil. Martin Luther King’s declaration of a “tragic duality,” “schizophrenia,” and “congenital deformity” focuses on the oppressor’s wounds, which are largely self-inflicted—outside the Veil. They articulate that the Veil marks a boundary between two segments of a damaged humanity, that must be bridged and healed to find true belonging (King, 2010). Paulo Freire defines the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor as crucial for the liberation of both. “In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their

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humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both … This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well … The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from … the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both” (Freire, 1993). Freire offers a vision of hope that through accompaniment, we will find an exit. I acknowledge that this accompaniment is the key to liberation.

No One Is White, a Historic Paradox “No one was white before he/she came to America,” writes Baldwin. “It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country … America became white—the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation … on so genocidal a lie … It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves” (Baldwin, 1984). This paradox feeds cognitive dissonance and uncertainty. “The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. … Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” Freeing ourselves from untruth and knowing our reality is essential to liberation. Summarizing Baldwin’s “interrogation of whiteness,” Eaton writes, “historical amnesia and mythologizing have catalyzed a psychosocial split in white people that led to an invented postulation of whiteness as concept and identity. White identity is a concept constituted through psychosocial maladies of denial, fear, pain, and terror. … whiteness is continuously upheld through systemic power structures such as the Christian Church, capitalist economic systems, policing, prisons, … whose functions are denial of black people’s humanity and morality (through various forms of violence and destruction), while simultaneously destroying any hope for humanity and morality in white people themselves.” This is indeed the tragic situation of the whited.

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Here Baldwin echoes King’s assessment of whiteness as suffering “schizophrenia,” “tragic duality,” and a “congenital deformity.” Eaton writes that because of this “white people have refused to understand, examine, interrogate, and converse with themselves about whiteness as shaping a false system of reality. Therefore, white people have no grasp on reality …” To find reality, “white people need to interrogate this curriculum of whiteness …” (Eaton, 2020). Further emphasizing the above point, Baldwin writes, “Those innocents who believe that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality.” Baldwin’s compassionate pity for the whited continues in terms of love and accompaniment when he writes, “[b]ut these men are your brothers - your lost, younger brothers … we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it” (Baldwin, 1991). The love expressed by Baldwin toward the “innocents” is profound and echoes Freire’s (1993) emphasis that the oppressed hold the means of liberation, but the work must be done in mutuality and love.

Conclusion: Treason to Whiteness and Patriarchy Is Loyalty to Humanity To summarize and conclude my thoughts, it is important to visualize the future of (or exit from) whiteness and patriarchy. Matias and Allen (2013) write with great insight into the beginning and ending of the false social construct of whiteness, the authors “reimagine a different set of norms and values through a critical humanizing pedagogy of love, one that can only be realized when whites learn to ‘love whiteness to death.’ That is, whites need to find not just the political will but also the emotional strength (i.e., vulnerability) necessary to eliminate the white race as a sociopolitical form of human organization and free themselves and others from the shackles of the institution of race … If treason to whiteness really is loyalty to humanity, then the greatest act of love whites can show humanity is to end whiteness itself, to love so much as to send whiteness to its grave. This is no utopia, since whiteness is a modern human creation; that is, there was a time before whiteness. As such, there can be a time after whiteness for we can choose to demolish whatever we have built.” There can be a time after patriarchy too.

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Regarding the hard work required of the whited, Matias writes, “[T]he quandary over defining the self is a forever project … [in] the emotional grief of losing one’s whiteness … [o]ne must grieve over what was once there but is no longer, and yet it forever remains in one’s mind – as well as the heart of humanity. Undergoing the emotional labor of racial justice is a necessary project Whites must engage with in order to share in the burden of race. Unless they do so, how can they bind their racial repression of whiteness to the racial liberation of people of Color?” (Matias, 2016). Our liberation is one, we are bound together in a mutual transformation. To summarize, patriarchy and whiteness are structural, ideological foundations supporting political, economic, and emotional systems of dominance that indoctrinate, surveil, and vigilantly guard to perpetuate themselves. They instill anti-Blackness and misogyny in all bodies, if we do not resist them. These sister oppressions are interlocked systems with common mechanisms of operationalization. They both must go. To arrive at a sense of belonging means to have found an inner space where you know who you are, where you come from, and where you are going. This is a unique and challenging landscape to navigate, one that does not depend on physical time and space, or embodiment. It is primarily and fundamentally a spiritual state of being, to belong to oneself as created, and in that reunion, moving beyond the separating Veil of individuality to the collective sense of belonging to all our relations, “beholding the entire human race as one soul and one body,” as an expression of embracing difference in the uniqueness of our oneness (Baháʼuʼlláh, 1976). The redemption hidden in oppression can only be discovered in finding a hinge point,18 enabling transformation, freeing one from a false and imposed self-hood, to become one’s true self as created. Finding this liminal space is essential for both the oppressed and the oppressor, who are tied together by destiny in this dance of the human condition. Both will suffer unique trauma—one the oppression of giving up their humanity, the other the oppression of having it taken away. Our true destiny is engaging in a process of mutual liberation to spiritually metabolize our inner traumas without harm to others. Liberation cannot be realized until all, in relationship, are liberated by the consciousness of the oneness of humankind (Freire, 1993).

18  A hinge point, in this meaning, is that interstitial, liminal space that signifies transition, movement, and change, the ability to pivot.

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“But the struggle to be more fully human,” writes Freire (1993), “has already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation. Although the situation of oppression is dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle.” What this means to me is that I must humble and decenter myself to learn from the lived experience of those who are oppressed. We must implore the Source of our being, and all our relations, to guide us to liberation. As we learn to disrobe from these oppressive garments and false ideologies, we must learn to clothe ourself in a new decolonizing gospel, an ideology of divine justice defending, nurturing, and protecting the oneness and wholeness of all humanity. Oppressors speaking out against these oppressions is essential if we are to atone and engender trust between us. This requires boldly crossing the “Veil” (Dubois, 2015a, b, c, d, e) of color and gender barriers and building authentic relationships. We must strive shoulder to shoulder for a common goal, the oneness and solidarity of all people. I feel this is the only way to find a balance and harmony to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization of humanizing love on our planet while simultaneously embracing our precious diversity. One thing I know is, if we are to have peace and justice in our world, we need a oneness that “implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced … [calling] for no less than the reconstruction and the demilitarization of the whole civilized world—a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of its life … and yet infinite in … diversity” (Shoghi Effendi, 1991). To conclude with Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot’s admonition, “[it] is through the ability to exit present circumstances into the abyss of the unknown—to imagine another way of existing that is reachable through leaving what one knows … a vision for a full and meaningful life” (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2012).

References Abdu’l-Bahá. (1972). Paris Talks (pp. 60–62). UK Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Abdu’l-Bahá. (1978). Selections from the writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (p. 57). Bahá'í World Centre.

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Andersen, H. C. (2011). Hans Christian Andersen’s the Emperor’s new clothes: And other stories. Miles Kelly Publishing. Baháʼuʼlláh. (2001). Prayers and meditations by Bahá’u’lláh (pp. 102–103). Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Bahá’u’lláh. (2002). Gems of divine mysteries (pp. 14–15). Bahá'í World Centre. Bahá’í International Community. (2015, February 1). Toward a new discourse on religion and gender equality (pp. 6–7). Retrieved from https://www.bic.org/ statements/toward-­new-­discourse-­religion-­and-­gender-­equality-­0 Bahá’u’lláh. (1985). Bahá’í prayers: Tablet of Ahmad (p.  212). Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Bahá’u’lláh. (2003). The Kitáb-i-Íqán: Book of certitude (p.  173). Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Bahá’u’lláh. (1976). Gleanings from the writings of Baháʼuʼlláh (p.  214). Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Bahá’u’lláh. (1988). Tablets of Baháʼuʼlláh, revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (p. 156). Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Baldwin, J. (1976). The devil finds work (p. 30). Vintage. Baldwin, J. (1984). On being white … And other lies. Essence, 14(12), 90–92. Baldwin, J. (1985). The Price of the ticket: Collected nonfiction 1948–1985 (p. 11). Beacon Press. Baldwin, J. (1991). The fire next time (pp. 19–21). Vintage International. Baldwin, J. (2010). The white problem. In R. Kenan (Ed.), James Baldwin: The cross of redemption: Uncollected writings (pp. 72–79). Pantheon Books. Crenshaw, K.  W. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law. HARV. L. REV. 1331, 1332 n.2 found in Harris, Cheryl, Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review, 1993, 106(8), (1710). DuBois, W.  E. B. (1920). Dark water: Voices from within the veil (p.  246). Harcourt, Brace, and Howe. DuBois, W. E. B. (2015a). The souls of black folk. (xxiii). Yale University Press. DuBois, W. E. B. (2015b). The souls of black folk (p. 4). Yale University Press. DuBois, W. E. B. (2015c). The souls of black folk (pp. 1–2). Yale University Press. DuBois, W. E. B. (2015d). The souls of black folk (pp. 1–2). Yale University Press. Re: Second Sight. DuBois, W. E. B. (2015e). The souls of black folk (pp. 1–2). Yale University Press. Re: Double Consciousness. Eaton, P. W. (2020). James Baldwin’s curriculum for white people. Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative: 37. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern. edu/cssc/2020/2020/37. Presentation shared by the author. Egerton, C. (2020). Being and becoming: A photographic inquiry with Bahá’í men into cultures of peace. https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/xmlui/handle/1993/ 34847

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Foucault, M. (2020). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (pp. 295–345). Penguin Classic Books. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (pp. 44, 47). Penguin Books. Garvey, J., & Ignatiev, N. (1996). The New Abolitionism. Minnesota Review, 47, 105–108. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/438721 Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1707–1791. Hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope (11). New  York: Routledge. Hooks, B. (2004a). The will to change, men masculinity and love (p.  111). Washington Square Press. Hooks, b. (2004b). The will to change, men masculinity and love (p.  38). Washington Square Press. Hooks, B. (2015, December 10). New York Times, The Stone. bell hooks interview with George Yancy. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs. nytimes.com/author/george-­yancy Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. Routledge. (v) Cites Frederick Douglass, May 10, 1853, “The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro … Sir, the Irish American will one day find out his mistake.” King, M. L. (2010). Where do we go from here: Chaos or community? (pp. 72–73) Beacon Press. King, M.  L., Jr. (1986). Why we can’t wait. Beacon Press. Letter from Birmingham Jail. King, M. L., Jr. (1994). Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community (p. 79). Beacon Press. Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (2012). Exit: The endings that set us free (p. 247) -commenting on Sartre’s No Exit. Lorde, A. (2002). “Unity does not require that we be identical to each other.” Morris: Audre Lorde: Textual authority and the embodied self. Frontiers, 23(1), 174. Lorde, A. (2020). Selected works of Audre Lorde (p.  54). Roxane Gay Ed. W.W. Norton & Company. Matias, C. (2016). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education (p. 112). Sense Publishers. Matias, C. E., & Allen, R. L. (2013). Loving whiteness to death: Sadomasochism, emotionality, and the possibility of humanizing love. Berkeley Review of Education, 4(2), 302. https://doi.org/10.5070/B84110066 Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies (pp. 36, 68–75). Central Recovery Press. Las Vegas.

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Mills, C. W. (1991). The racial contract (pp. 9–44). Cornel University Press. Mills, C. (2017). Black rights/white wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism (p. 58). Oxford University Press. Ryder, G. (2022, January 9). The fawn response: How trauma can lead to people-­ pleasing. Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/health/fawn-­response. Sampson, R. (2015, October 27). Film Theory 101 - Laura Mulvey: The Male Gaze Theory. Retrieved from https://www.filminquiry.com/film-­theory-­basics-­ laura-­mulvey-­male-­gaze-­theory/ Shoghi Effendi (1973). “For a Bahá’í, racial prejudice in all its forms, is simply a negation of faith, an attitude wholly incompatible with the very spirit and teachings of the cause.” (pp.  60–61). Directives of the Guardian. Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Shoghi Effendi (1990). The advent of divine justice (p. 39). Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Shoghi Effendi (1991). The world order of Bahá’u’lláh (p.  43). Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Shoghi Effendi (2006). The advent of divine justice (pp.  26, 59–60). Bahá’í Publishing Trust. Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be white: Money, race and god in America (pp. 39, 70, 73). Continuum Publishing Company. The Universal House of Justice. (2013, March 2). Letter to Bahá'ís of Iran. Retrieved from https://universalhouseofjustice.bahai.org/involvement-­life­society/20130302_001 The Universal House of Justice. (2019, January 18). Letter. Retrieved from https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-­texts/the-­universal-­house-­of-­ justice/messages/#20190118_001 Thorsen, K., Miles, W., Dempsey, D. K., Lenzer, D, & Baldwin, J. (1990). The price of the ticket. California Newsreel (released. Film). Yancey, G. (2008). Black bodies, white gazes: The continuing significance of race. Rowman & Littlefield. (xxxii, 39).

PART III

Belonging: Cross-cutting Issues

CHAPTER 9

Migrant Women’s (Non)Belonging in Pandemic Times: An Intersectional Analysis of Home/Land Anoosh Soltani and Holly Thorpe

Introduction This chapter explores ways in which migrant women experience belonging at the intersection of migration, culture, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Belonging has been a recurring theme within political, social, and academic debates, particularly its critical role in the ever-changing fabric of multicultural societies and transnational communities (Jardim & Marques da Silva, 2021). Studies have revealed that migrants are constantly re-­ negotiating their sense of belonging in relation to spatial characteristics of destination places and homeland (May, 2013). Furthermore, the health

A. Soltani (*) Independent Researcher, Bordeaux, France H. Thorpe Te Huataki Waiora - School of Health, University of Waikato, TT, Hamilton, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_9

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emergency precipitated by the COVID-19 outbreak has raised alarming concerns about immigrants’ unequal access to and exclusions from social and health support based on who belongs as ‘citizens’ (Lin, 2020; Teixeira da Silva, 2020). Migrants’ multiple positions of occupying several geographical places between home and homeland bring forth the centrality of intersectional conceptualisation of spatial concepts such as belonging and integration (Marcu, 2014). For the purposes of this chapter, we theorise the concept of belonging in relation to space, which brings forth the fluid construction of multiple senses of belonging through experiencing feeling ‘at home’ and ‘safe’ in relations with others, culture, and spatial characteristics of places (Jardim & Marques da Silva, 2021; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Further, we examine ‘belonging’ focusing on the multiplicities of social identities and positioning, constructed at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, religion, and race across power relations of place and time (Gilmartin & Migge, 2016; Wessendorf, 2017). We analyse the ways in which migrant women living in Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter Aotearoa, the indigenous word for New Zealand) during the first two years (2020–2022) of the COVID-19 pandemic forged different senses of belonging and emotional attachments. Here, we specifically focus on how migrant women’s idealisation and practice of belonging were reshaped in relation to ‘home’ (Aotearoa) and their homelands1 and cultures.

Insights from the Literature Much of the literature on processes and experiences of migration has a strong focus on belonging, citizenship, and national identity (Radford & Hetz, 2021; Gilmartin & Migge, 2016; Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Yuval-Davis, 2006). In this section, we first review the scholarship exploring aspects of belonging and non-belonging among migrants. Then, we introduce a feminist and geographical conceptual framing of belonging to analyse the findings of our study. 1  We acknowledge that Home and Homeland are contested concepts that are understood and defined in diverse ways, and they play important roles in the development of identities and emotions (Valentine 2001; Blunt and Dowling 2006). In this study, however, we considered home and homeland as two geographical sites across where migrant women forge a sense of belonging. In this way, we referred to Aotearoa as ‘home’ of migrant women, where they actually live during the COVID-19 pandemic, and ‘homeland’ refers to their countries of origins, where they were born.

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Belonging and Non-belonging Among Migrants Geographers have highlighted the complex ways in which migrants deploy different strategies to practise and re-imagine belonging through homemaking processes in destination communities (Gilmartin, 2008). For example, studying the British Asian community, Tolia-Kelly (2004) highlights how cultural materials and objects are used by migrants to create a sense and a place of ‘home’ in host societies. The migrants in her study utilised objects to visualise their multiple belongings, as well as cultural, embodied, and religious attachments to actualities and memories of homeland. Johnston and Longhurst (2012) studied the relationship between ethnicity, language, culture, and belonging to a place for a group of migrant women in Aotearoa. Their work illustrates that some migrant women develop affective ties to their new home country through sensorial and cultural activities, including sharing ethnic food. They argue that such ties not only create a sense of belonging but also improve the general wellbeing of migrant women (Johnston & Longhurst, 2012). Focusing on youths with transnational identity, Huynh and Yiu (2015) argue that migrants constantly (re)negotiate and maintain affective ties with their homeland. Thus, their sense of belonging is constructed across scales and, importantly, in relation to their cultural heritages. Empirical research on immigrants has shown that belonging to homeland induces both behavioural and emotional reactions (Baldassar, 2015; Fokkema & Ciobanu, 2021). The former actions may include organising trips between actual home and homeland, staying connected with people in the homeland, and sending material gifts and remittances, with the emotional attachments including nostalgia, homesickness and longing for co-presence of kin and friends (Baldassar, 2008). A strong theme within this literature of belonging is the relationship between migration policies, transnational identity, and belonging. Reviewing EU border policies over 20 years, Marcu (2014) highlights that transformation in EU border regime informed the extent to which Romanian migrants developed a sense of belonging to their destination land, Spain, and to their homeland. Adapting a political perspective on belonging, Radford and Hetz (2021) examined how Hazara Afghans negotiated their multiple identities to both create attachment to the destination country and overcome negative representations of Muslim refugees in Australia. Their findings demonstrate that Afghans that obtained Australian citizenship developed a sense of belonging that not only includes

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their religious, ethnic, and former refugee identities but also their Australian nationality, through taking social responsibilities and contributing to the receiving society (Radford & Hetz, 2021). Arguably, belonging is a contested concept with multiple layers expanding across various spaces, and for migrants and (im)mobile people, their sense of belonging is often imagined, felt, and practised across different geographical borders. A closer look to empirical studies of belonging, however, reveals a number of gaps and shortcomings. There is scant research on an intersectional approach that examines the effects of gender, ethnicity, and migration on migrant (non)belonging during the pandemic. To contribute to this literature, we explore ways that migrant women living in Aotearoa expressed and performed their sense of belonging during the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim to understand further the relationship between wellbeing, belonging, and migration during crises. Theorising Belonging Scholars from various disciplines have focused on theorising belonging, as an important process of social cohesion and identity construction, yet many continue to struggle to fully understand the dynamic nature of belonging and its multiple dimensions (Jardim & Marques da Silva, 2021; Wessendorf, 2017; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Some geographers argue that one’s sense of belonging is constructed socially, and people realise this sense through emotions and feelings, which are then experienced and expressed with and through the body (Nayak, 2011; Pile, 2010). In this way, belonging could be understood as emotional bonds and affective attachments that connect individuals to place, culture, religion, and certain groups (Yuval-Davis, 2006). According to social scholars and geographers, physical places, including the home, schools, parks, streets, and supermarkets, are relational spaces where spatial encounters, among people, nature, and objects, occur and produce various positive, negative, and ambivalent feelings and memories about spaces of belonging (May, 2013). Such feelings and experiences are important in developing a sense of belonging, non-belonging, and exclusion. Therefore, the relationality of spaces must be included in analyses of belonging to grasp how people connect to places. Further, it is crucial to examine how spatiality of places enables people to feel ‘at home’ and safe, not only in terms of physical safety but also in terms of social safety to express their religious and

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cultural belongings without fear of discrimination (Jardim & Marques da Silva, 2021). Anthias (2002) contends that migrants’ feelings of belonging are not only constructed to places and people but also to certain social categories, which include ethnicity, religion, and culture. Importantly, while discussing belonging, it is inevitable to discuss the perspective of what Yuval-­ Davis called ‘politics of belonging’. By this term, Yuval-Davis (2006) argues that there exist politically designed systems with certain project defined ethics, values, and embodied characteristics with which people judge their own and other’s right to belong. In other words, ‘politics of belonging’ is concerned with ‘demarcations’ of who is ‘in and who is out’ of communities and societies, and who has the power to make and reinforce such boundaries (Christensen, 2009: 25). This politics often manifests in debates around citizenship at the political level, such as during elections and when resources are stretched during disaster and pandemic. As various studies have illustrated, many contradictions exist between policy, politics, definitions, and practices of belonging and citizenship in multicultural societies (Anderson et  al., 2011). These contradictions have been expressed elsewhere, through terms such as autochthony, cosmopolitanism, citizenship, and indigeneity (Geschiere, 2009). As Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) points out, intersectionality is about recognising the multiplicities of identities, including race and gender, and the ways these identifications interlocked with power structures to (re)shape people’s (particularly Black women’s) experiences of inequalities. In the same vein, Yuval-Davis (2006) argues that individuals’ experiences and feelings of belonging are dynamic, temporal, and constructed in relation to their multiple social locations and identification, that is race, gender, employment, among other qualifiers. This reinforces the importance of intersectional understanding of belonging, because so much of the political discussions on (non)belonging attempt to homogenise people into rigid categories such as women, forced migrant, skilled migrant, refugee and so on. Importantly, however, not all women and/or migrants occupy similar positions within social structures and power relations (at the levels of family, community, and society). Thus, their experiences of spaces and places, and sense of belonging, vary considerably (Yuval-Davis, 2006; Christensen, 2009). Geographers and feminist scholars have placed emphasis on the spatial and temporal aspects of migrants’ sense of belonging, and argue that places such as the home, neighbourhood, and cities are sites where a sense of belonging is expressed, challenged, and embodied

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(Ahmed, 2000; May, 2013; Yuval-Davis, 2006). However, how these sites of belonging and non-belonging are experienced by migrants will differ based on a range of factors, including proficiency of destination language, ability to find a job, opportunities to connect with the wider community, changing role within the family, financial and social resources, and family support (Fathi, 2022). Drawing on works of geographers and feminist scholars, we theorise belonging as spatial processes, embodied practices and emotional attachments (Christensen, 2009; Fathi, 2022; Yuval-Davis, 2006; Tolia-Kelly, 2004). Belonging is considered as multiple attachments with cultural, social, and emotional implications across a range of spaces including bodies, home, city and beyond. Further, we argue that feelings of non-­ belonging are constructed at the intersection of social identifications including gender, migration, and culture (Anthias, 2002; Jardim & Marques da Silva, 2021). Our case study demonstrates that migrant women often experience the weight of multiple layers of intersectionality and sources of inequity and injustice (i.e. gender, class, culture, ethnicity, citizenship).

Context and Methodology This study focuses on (non)belonging (feelings of inclusivity, exclusion, and Othering) and emotional attachments of migrant women living in Aotearoa during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Aotearoa government initiated a multi-pronged and science-informed approach in response to COVID-19 in 2020 and the first half of 2021. Along with various nationwide and regional lockdowns and highly regulated physical distancing, the strategy included travel restrictions for all and the closure of the border to all non-residents for more than two years (Baker et al., 2020). The lockdowns and border closures had considerable social, economic, and psychological implications. Yet the effects of these measures were not evenly felt within different social groups. Some groups were affected more severely compared to the rest, such as women of colour (Bedeschi-­ Lewando et  al., 2021). Similar to the rest of the world, research in Aotearoa has shown that the pandemic heightened ethnic and gender discrimination, seen through access to health services and public places (Officer et  al., 2022), with women of colour often most dramatically impacted (Huckle et al., 2021; Bradbury-Jones & Isham, 2020). As our

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research reveals, border closures were felt deeply by migrant women unable to fulfil caring roles and responsibilities for family in the homeland. Following ethical approval from the University of Waikato, the wider research team of feminist scholars recruited women from within their own networks and communities from late 2021 to early 2022. The aim was to understand how the pandemic was impacting women’s wellbeing and everyday life. Accordingly, a total of 39 semi-structured digital interviews were completed during this period with women from diverse socio-­ economic and cultural backgrounds. As well as speaking to a series of questions about their experiences during the pandemic, participants were also invited to bring to the interview a selection of meaningful objects that evoked affective responses related to their identities, memories, and sources of inspiration during the pandemic (Thorpe et  al., 2022). Interviews lasted from 45  minutes to 1.5  hours. Interviews were audio recorded and professionally transcribed. We draw upon a sub-section of this data for this chapter, focusing specifically on 12 migrant women living across Aotearoa during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ages of the migrant women in our sample ranged from 24 to 43 years old. They were employed fulltime, and each had obtained tertiary education and thus categorised herein as ‘middle-class’. They come from various ethnicities, nationalities (i.e. India, Jordan, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Canada) and religious orientations (i.e. Muslim, Buddhism, Hindu), and with different experiences of migration. Many of these women brought along symbolic objects to the interview that elicited feelings of belonging and emotional attachments to land, home, culture, and religion. Pseudonyms have been used to mask their identities with some professions modified to avoid the risk of identification within a relatively small and well-connected migrant community. We made use of Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis as a guideline for analysing the data. We began by familiarising ourselves with transcripts and individually making notes about initial themes. We then brought these themes into discussion, focusing closer attention to the migrant women’s self-identifications and the ways they explained their relations and feelings towards their homeland or place of origin, their home in Aotearoa, as well as their emotional relations within and across disparate spaces.

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Findings and Discussion Drawing upon the concept and practice of belonging as theorised by geographers (Yuval-Davis, 2006; Tolia-Kelly, 2004), three main themes were identified: (i) emotions and connection with homeland in a context of forced immobility (extended border closure following the arrival of COVID-19), (ii) intersectional belonging and (iii) stigmatisation and non-­ belonging. Adopting an intersectional conceptualisation of belonging was useful to recognise the relationships between emotional attachments, experience of ‘being at home’ and exclusion from certain public and social realms based on participants’ multiple identities including gender, migrant status, ethnicity, and cultural background. Transnational Belonging, Emotions, and Border Closure All interviewed women indicated that as migrants, they have always held a multidirectional and multidimensional sense of belonging across (at least) two different geographical zones: their countries of origin (homeland) and Aotearoa. The pandemic, however, significantly complicated the geographies of belonging for these women. They all spoke of a strong moral responsibility and emotional attachments towards their homelands. Pri, working in a leadership role for a governmental agency, explained, In India there was a period where things got really bad where there were no hospital beds, where they were cremating bodies on the sides of roads, where ambulances weren’t available, and people were dying at home. At that time, volunteers were triaging the cases but there were not enough people to do that, so I became a volunteer to triage cases from here. Because I had worked in hospitals as a psychologist before I came [to New Zealand], I had lots of sleepless nights over that period. I was getting calls in the middle of the night asking if I knew people, if there were any beds available. Well, I had to do it because at 2 am when my phone rang, I would think if I don’t pick up that call, someone might die. Then in the morning you have to go back to work here [New Zealand]. It felt like I was living in two realities, two different lives; that the life here had no idea about my other life and my other life had no idea about the things that I had to do here. But none of those lives stopped for me, they kept going.

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Pri’s experience indicates that feelings of attachment and belonging to multiple geographical locations with different pandemic realities created a compounding burden of responsibilities and feelings (Xhaho et al., 2021). Like many of the migrant women in our sample, Pri held a strong sense of service (to help others in need) and a moral responsibility (ethical obligations and duty to care) toward her country of origin, India. At the same time, she identified herself as a citizen of Aotearoa and continued working in a governmental agency and doing important community work to ensure a fair and equal society for all women and ethnic minorities in Aotearoa. Such dual belongings have performative power such that Pri invests her energy and efforts both at home and work, and the homeland, sacrificing sleep, leisure time, and wellbeing to care for her people living thousands of kilometres away and struggling with an overstretched health system. Stories such as Pri’s demonstrate the migrant women’s capacities for ‘multiple belonging’ (Webb & Lahiri-Roy, 2019) as a necessity engendered by emergencies such as the global health pandemic. Most participants spoke of Aotearoa as their home and expressed how they have developed feelings of love and belonging to their destination land. The migrant women showed and performed such emotions through ‘quiet acts’ of care2 among their local communities (Askins, 2015). For example, Maryam was dealing with her own mental health struggles during the pandemic but continued to engage in offering care for migrant and refugee communities in Aotearoa as her religion and culture places premium on volunteering to help those in need: I work [voluntarily] with [a nationwide non-profit organization]. We noticed that families were struggling a lot, especially the new refugees and immigrants. It’s the next level that they can’t even buy groceries to feed their families. I will email them or I will call them up to check on them … We arranged this food parcel mechanism that we had about 90 families in the system. We would deliver food, meat, rice, lentils, really essentials, oil, flour, and stuff like that to the families every two weeks.

2  This term was developed by Kye Askins (2015) to refer to everyday, small acts of kindness by ordinary people in quotidian spaces, which are part of ‘a broader continuum of movements for change’ in order to promote social cohesion in societies. Recent examples of such quiet acts of caring include the voluntarily distribution of food and masks for seniors and sick people during the lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in several countries.

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As previous research has demonstrated, transnational belonging appears through emotions and behaviour such as volunteer care (Fokkema & Ciobanu, 2021). The strong moral commitments of the migrant women toward providing informal and unpaid care for others, especially their families and communities, intersected with border closure, prolonged separation from family, and inability to perform practical care for their family in the homeland. In this way, the border closure placed a significant toll on their own mental and physical health and wellbeing (FresnozaFlot, 2021). Respondents revealed that loss of control (not being able to travel to the homeland) and fear of losing loved ones led to mental health issues including severe depression and panic attacks (Maehara, 2010). For example, Sarita, who is a nurse in Aotearoa and originally from Nepal, revealed: The biggest challenge and change would be my loss of control … About a year ago, the cases of Covid in Nepal were increasing so rapidly, so I used to be really scared to open the social media because so many places would pop up, rest in peace, rest in peace, rest in peace. I was really scared at that time. I remember once my mum sneezed and I was so panicky, like I asked her ‘make sure you get tested, make sure you look after yourself’. That kind of insecurity, not able to see your family when they really need you, not being able to be with them.

Like many other migrant women, Sarita’s sense of belonging and emotional attachment to her homeland and people, including her parents and siblings, produced a strong sense of commitment to provide service for her kin. While an important measure for protecting Aotearoa’s diverse population (with a chronically underfunded health system, and the indigenous and Pacific communities with many co-morbidity factors as a result of past and ongoing effects of colonialism), the border closure disrupted the migrant women’s opportunities to practise their belonging, which led to the feeling of guilt, helplessness, and loss of control (Baldassar, 2015; Christensen, 2009). Sarita’s feelings of depression, distress, and panic attacks corelate to her inability to travel and be with her parents. To negotiate her physical distance, she regularly contacted her parents and extended family through digital technologies to monitor their health and would often try to watch the local news in Nepal to keep abreast of recent pandemic-related

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developments. Yet such digital connections did not fully address her longing to provide practical care to her kin during critical situations of the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, most of the respondents, as middle-class migrants, returned regularly to their homelands or hosted their family members in Aotearoa (Joseph et al., 2022). These visits were crucial for these transnational families in terms of providing and arranging personal care for their kin and sustaining familial ties and emotional bonds (Baldassar, 2008). The COVID-19 principle of border closure, however, disrupted the ways migrant women’s experienced and expressed their connection to their homelands and loved ones therein. Jasmin, an educator, described how the pandemic and border closure surfaced her often hidden feelings of longing to stay connected with kin and land of origin: [Before the pandemic] I only saw my family once a year during Christmas, but now, because of Covid I could only see them digitally. Every day we’re video calling each other, if not twice then at least once a day. Mum had always been telling me she missed me, but I was just so busy, but it kicked in that actually this year in June, I felt “oh my gosh, I miss my mum”, and I called her to tell her that. Like if something were to happen [crying], it would be quite hard—not hard; it would be impossible to get to her, so I told her, “You better stay healthy and postpone any illness until I can be with you.”

Forced immobility and separation induced feelings of being trapped, prompting distress and sadness, but the forced distance also prompted Jasmin to recognise her feelings and express them more openly and regularly to maintain her intimate connection with her mother. Jasmin recounted that the forced immobility had triggered a period of depression, where she stayed on her sofa and was not able to leave the house for many days. Similarly, many of the interviewed migrant women spoke of different coping strategies: work as distraction; escapism through reading or television; religion and prayer; exercise; arts and crafts; and cooking. These strategies enabled them to deal with increased emotional tolls of forced separation and lockdowns. In the next section, we discuss the multiplicities of migrant women’s belonging during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Multiplicities of Belonging Several studies have revealed that following physical relocation, migrants continue to develop multi-scalar and cross-cultural sense of belonging (Anthias, 2002; Basok & George, 2021; Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Radford & Hetz, 2021). The women in our study expressed their belonging and emotional attachments in a variety of complex ways, with some using the objects they brought to the interview (i.e. prayer mat, jewellery, photos) as ways to speak to some of these experiences during the interview. Here, we explore the complexities of their sense of belonging through participants’ narratives of spaces that gave them feelings of being grounded, staying connected and peaceful during the stressful times of the pandemic. The migrant women generally considered Aotearoa as their ‘home’ too, and the most significant aspect of their emotional belonging to Aotearoa was expressed through their affective attachments to the natural environment. When talking about significant places that helped her overcome social isolation and hardships of forced separation from parents, Jasmin (educator) spoke of some of her favourite places to spend time in Aotearoa: There are a few favourite places that just give me this huge sense of “the world’s going to be okay, I'm going to be okay.” It’s a spiritually healing thing, Raglan is the first beach that we went to as children, after coming to New Zealand, so that’s why I have quite a particular connection with the West Coast. If there’s one part of New Zealand that I can call home, it’s Raglan. It’s my childhood, it’s my upbringing. Another place, Wairere Falls (in New Zealand), and probably Medina in Saudi. It’s one of those places where no matter where you are, you have this feeling of inner peace. That feeling that I feel in Medina is what I felt going up Wairere Falls.

The foregoing reflects the relationship between different aspects of Jasmin’s religious identity and her multi-scalar sense of belonging. The enchantment of beautiful landscape, beaches, and safety in Aotearoa enabled Jasmin to forge a sense belonging (Jardim & Marques da Silva, 2021). Interestingly, Jasmin makes a connection between the emotional attachments that she has to Aotearoa nature-based places (i.e. beach and waterfall) with memories of Medina, a sacred city for Muslims. As this example illustrates, some of the migrant women (re)developed a sense of belonging to their place of residence, focused particularly on natural places where they have experienced a sense of joy and security with their families (Ward et al., 2010).

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For some, their sense of belonging is strongly attached to ethnic and community spaces in New Zealand. For example, Ekta, a project administrator, explained how the Nepalese community helped her overcome border closure and the long separation from her family: Because of Covid, I think for me, the biggest thing is not meeting my family at the end of the year. Everybody had to adjust with that. My parents were like, okay, have patience, the border will open. Other than that, we’ve got a very good Nepalese community in Hamilton. For me, that was a blessing really because I could just get connected. I could speak my language. Fortunately, I had that place to go to and just feel I belong. At least there was some people I could speak to. Language is the biggest stuff, isn’t it? When you can speak and express in your language, it just makes you feel at home.

As gleaned from Ekta’s comments, some migrant women forged a sense of belonging through their connections and interactions with a community of people with whom they have a shared culture and history. This reality highlights the important role of migrant associations as sources of cultural identification and support (Jardim & Marques da Silva, 2021). It became apparent during most of the interviews that objects carried significant cultural and spiritual meaning for the participants, facilitating feelings of connection with people, family and place during the pandemic. This was particularly the case for gifts from family and friends at home in Aotearoa and the homeland. These meaningful objects revealed a cross-­ cultural and hybrid sense of belonging and emotional attachments of the migrant women. Such affective and cultural sense of belonging have much to do with their identities and life history. Consider Silvana’s (a manager from Chile) testimony: I have this necklace, it’s a Māori gift, my greenstone. It means binding together but also bringing cultures together. In my work, some colleagues gave me for bringing culture so now this symbol really became more than anything, the stone feeling, that is what I like. Really when I am feeling stressed or I need to feel grounded, I hold it tight. It really grounds me and that is something that calms me. I think the only really object that I feel like that …

For Silvana, receiving this taonga/gift from the indigenous people of Aotearoa, Māori, functions as a spiritual, healing object that helps her

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bring different aspects of her identity together, assuring her that she is accepted as a Spanish migrant woman and a valued part of the culturally diverse society of Aotearoa. That is why touching the ‘green stone’ that carried spiritual meaning for Māori helped Silvana to feel calm and grounded during a stressful period of lockdowns and social isolation. Silvana’s story shows a spatial and intersectional construction of the multiple dimensions of migrant women’s identities and sense of belonging (Radford & Hetz, 2021). Other women spoke of objects that strengthened their sense of belonging and connection to the homeland and to family histories with such objects giving them strength to deal with the difficulties of border closures, forced separation, and social isolation. For example, during the interview Jasmin spoke to the cultural and emotional significance of a key as family heirloom: My grandparents were Palestinian refugees and when they were exiled, all they did was lock their houses with a key and say we’ll come back to our home one day and no one will live in it, but obviously, if your country’s got new people in it, your house will be gone. This key, this necklace was gifted to me by my grandmother before she passed away. It’s quite a symbolic piece of jewellery. The key pretty much is a symbol for Palestinians that would like to return to Palestine one day and the key signifies the opening of your homes. This necklace reminds me of my roots … of the bigger purpose, it reminds me of … how far my ancestors—the journey that my grandparents and parents have gone through to bring me to where I am today. It reminds me of what people of Palestine are going through—what we’re going through with Covid is an inconvenience; their entire existence is an inconvenience. It helps me by reminding me of the reality of the world that we live in and it reminds me that there’s still so much more to do.

Jasmin’s necklace is a symbol that sustains affective ties with her ancestral land in Palestine. As Yuval-Davis (2006) writes, collective stories inform formation of identities and ideas of (non)belonging. Collective stories also carry emotional investment and are dynamic and changeable in time and place (Fathi, 2022). For Jasmin, the ‘key’ carries historic memories of her Palestinian ancestors and their persistent hope to go back to their ‘home’. In this way, this object not only carries affective ties, it also reflects connections—imagined or real—to her homeland. While this cultural object was important before the pandemic, it took on new significance during the challenges of COVID-19, providing a cultural and spiritual source of

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inspiration to persevere. It also served as a reminder to keep igniting the collective hope of returning home (Jardim & Marques da Silva, 2021). As these examples highlight, our participants’ sense of belonging were constructed and maintained through memories, places, and specific cultural objects. Further, such emotional attachments to spaces, objects, and places often induced peaceful feelings and being grounded (or emplaced) ‘at home’, which empowered them to cope with negative effects (and affects) of border closure, social isolation, and confinement. Their sense of belonging, however, is not static and can be changed and altered depending on the political and social climate in their homeland/s and in Aotearoa. In the next section, we elaborate on this point with stories of the migrant women’s experiences of Othering during the pandemic. Othering and (Non)Belonging Transnational belonging is ambivalent and can be broken and/or strengthened across space and time (Fokkema & Ciobanu, 2021). Radford and Hetz (2021) argue that immigrant feelings of ‘being at home’ are influenced by ‘a sense of being accepted’, recognised and valued by the host society. Research in Aotearoa, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, reported instances of racism and discrimination against people of colour, especially migrant women, and particularly during the employment process (Jasperse et al., 2012). Another study revealed high levels of xenophobia, with one in five New Zealanders believing that settling of migrants from distinct culture, particularly Asian migrants, weakens New Zealand culture (Ward et  al., 2010). Some of the interviewed migrant women (particularly the Muslim women) reported that their feelings and experiences of discrimination and exclusion from mainstream New Zealand society were already heightened following the Christchurch terrorist attacks of March 2019 that killed 50 Muslims during a peaceful prayer session (Greaves et al., 2020; Salahshour & Boamah, 2020). Such feelings were further exacerbated during the pandemic, which negatively impacted their emotional attachments to Aotearoa as ‘home’. For example, Maryam explained how she feels ‘out of place’ in Aotearoa after heightened anti-immigrant sentiments: It [racial attacks] resurfaced quite a bit after the pandemic. I go for a walk down the street and suddenly a car drives past, and someone just screams, shouts at you because you’re wearing the hijab or because you look ­different.

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One of my friends, she goes for a walk around the lake. A person, a man, a grown up professional, he looked normal, he spat at her face … Acceptance is really important for me to have wellbeing in life, it’s not going to be in New Zealand. It has to be in a community where I’m accepted. I go outside for a walk, someone shouts at me, screams at me, or throw a beer bottle at me. I get terrified for my life. How do you expect me to have wellbeing when no one in the society accepts you?

This example highlights the spatial, dynamic, and intersectional dimensions of belonging. During our interview, Maryam pointed to her sense of belonging to New Zealand and described various actions that clearly demonstrated her efforts to contribute to the community and to build connections with colleagues including by volunteering to distribute food during the pandemic: I grew up here, I came here when I was eight years old. I’m literally as Kiwi as it gets. But the same time, in order for them (New Zealanders) to accept you as one of your own, you have to show them that. Sometime with my colleagues I am like ‘hey, are you guys going for drinks, even though I’m not drinking [as a Muslim] I’ll come and join you guys,’ to show that I’m a part of them.

However, during the pandemic, she experienced episodes of racially motivated attacks that negatively impacted her sense of belonging to New Zealand. These incidents made Maryam to feel ‘out of place’ in Aotearoa. Although Maryam is a New Zealand citizen, such experiences significantly impacted her sense of belonging. Maryam’s experiences align with previous literature that revealed how experiences of racial discrimination undermine migrants’ sense of civic-belonging (Fathi, 2022; Radford & Hetz, 2021). For migrants to experience belonging, it is critical to feel that they are recognised and valued by other members and official institutions of receiving societies (Valentine et al., 2009). Other migrant women in our study attest to the discursive Othering that contributed to the deterioration of their emotional attachments and sense of belonging to New Zealand. For some, being excluded and ‘othered’ by governmental rhetoric and policies that increasingly segregated ‘New Zealanders’ from migrants and immigrants prompted feelings of anger, frustration, and dislocation. Keeja, a postgraduate student, commented on how she felt excluded and unwanted in Aotearoa based on border control policies:

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I used to always feel like this [New Zealand] is home, they welcomed me when I arrived here. Suddenly with Covid I just felt less welcome … Yeah, they would give exceptions for let’s say a New Zealander who lives in Australia, has Australian residency, to come because they had a death in the family and they would make all these emotional arguments. And if I had a death in my family, I can’t go, I can’t leave and it doesn’t matter, whether or not this person is contributing to New Zealand or lives in New Zealand, they’re in Australia but their emotions matter, their loved ones dying matters but my loved ones, “oh screw you, you’re from another country.”

Keeja’s feelings of exclusion through COVID-19-specific policies that prioritised citizens show that space and time are crucial factors in (re)defining belonging, and emotional relations with ‘home’ are shaped by a range of factors (i.e. state’s policy) (Bowlby & McKie, 2019). In contrast to her feelings of belonging prior to the pandemic, Keeja felt that the COVID-19-­ related approaches and policy language constructed a feeling of being ‘Othered’, with her emotions and needs mattering less than citizens of Aotearoa and Australia. Such laws and policies based on partial definition of citizenship can lead to the process of Othering by excluding and marginalising individuals (i.e. migrants, refugees) who are not included in the dominant definition of citizenship. Altogether, Keeja and Maryam’s stories stressed that social and legal recognitions are important elements that shape and reshape migrant women’s sense of belonging to a country of residence (Mattes & Lang, 2021). In the context of the pandemic in which new policies were made quickly, the full implications of the language and assumptions underpinning such documents and related media coverage were not fully considered. During and beyond health crises, policy makers working to promote social cohesion and integration should consider the affective, political, and social dimensions of belonging as a dynamic process, and the neglection of each aspect could lead to exclusion and sense of non-belonging in immigrants. It is also of note that during the COVID-19 crisis, visible signifiers of race, religion, and gender as well as citizenship became markers of (non)belonging. Bodies that stand out of these ‘desirable’ markers of national identity could be excluded, marginalised, and Othered as they were not assumed as citizens, with such exclusions felt violently in and through the bodies of migrant women (Gilmartin, 2008).

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Conclusion Taking inspiration from feminist and cultural geographers’ work on migration and migrants’ experiences of belonging, we discussed how the pandemic affected migrant women’s experiences of (non)belonging to their new home in Aotearoa and their initial homeland. For migrant women, belonging is a multidimensional process that cannot be confined in a specific geographical space but rather expands across different scales of home, country of residence, country of birth, and beyond. Drawing upon interviews with 12 middle-class migrant women living in Aotearoa during the COVID-19 pandemic, our findings reflect feminist geographers’ ideas that ‘emotions do things’ and inform individuals’ interaction with social spaces and places (Ahmed, 2000; Johnston & Longhurst, 2012). The pandemic stories of migrant women show that emotional geographies of COVID-19 and associated prolonged border closures created feelings of insecurity, longing to be with family in the homeland, uncertainty, exclusion, and Othering, with these feelings impacting their sense of (non) belonging. Importantly, these feelings did not disappear as soon as the borders reopened. Feelings of belonging and/or non-belonging exacerbated during the pandemic have performative and emotional implications in the lives of migrant women and their families, and their ongoing connection to and relation with Aotearoa. Belonging is also an embodied and affective experience (Mattes & Lang, 2021). Our findings show how seeing, feeling, and touching objects, and thinking of special places, carried cultural and spiritual meanings, helping migrant women develop a sense of hope, strength, connection, and belonging to spaces in difficult situations within and beyond the borders of Aotearoa. Pre-pandemic research has shown that individual and community sense of belonging and strong affective bonds are crucial elements for societies’ processes of recovery during and following a crisis (i.e. natural disaster or health pandemic). Our findings highlight that in a multicultural country such as Aotearoa, the multiple belongings of its transnational people must be considered while developing protection and recovery strategies to avoid future systematic spatial exclusion based on gender, ethnicity, and migrant status. Finally, the discourses within policies and media are powerful tools in creating and/or damaging sense of belonging, social inclusion, and social cohesion during times of disruption, especially for migrant women of colour. Overall, our findings reinforce the importance for

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leaders and decision makers to consider the implications of crisis policies and regulations for newcomers and other culturally diverse groups who constitute the diasporic community.

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Jardim, C., & Marques da Silva, S. (2021). Belonging among young people with migrant background in Portugal: Local, national, and transnational identifications. Social Identities, 27(2), 229–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463 0.2020.1816459 Jasperse, M. L., Ward, C., & Jose, P. E. (2012). Identity, perceived religious discrimination, and psychological well-being in Muslim immigrant women. Applied Psychology, 61(2), 250–271. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597. 2011.00467.x Johnston, L., & Longhurst, R. (2012). Embodied geographies of food, belonging and hope in multicultural Hamilton. Aotearoa New Zealand. Geoforum, 43(2), 325–331. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.08.002 Joseph, D., Belford, N., & Lahiri-Roy, R. (2022). Transnational daughters in Australia: Caring remotely for ageing parents during COVID 19. Emotion, Space and Society, 42, 100864. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021. 100864 Lin, C.-Y. (2020). Social reaction toward the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Social Health and Behavior, 3(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.4103/SHB.SHB_ 11_20 Maehara, N. (2010). Emotional ambiguity: Japanese migrant women in mixed families and their life transition. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(6), 953–966. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691831003643371 Mattes, D., & Lang, C. (2021). Embodied belonging: In/exclusion, health care, and well-being in a world in motion. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 45(1), 2–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-020-09693-3 Marcu, S. (2014). Geography of belonging: Nostalgic attachment, transnational home and global mobility among Romanian immigrants in Spain. Journal of Cultural Geography, 31(3), 326–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/0887363 1.2014.945719 May, V. (2013). Connecting self to society: Belonging in a changing world. Palgrave Macmillan. Nayak, A. (2011). Geography, race and emotions: Social and cultural intersections. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(6), 548–562. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14649365.2011.601867 Officer, T.  N., Imlach, F., McKinlay, E., Kennedy, J., Pledger, M., Russell, L., Churchward, M., Cumming, J., & McBride-Henry, K. (2022). COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and wellbeing: Experiences from Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(4), 2269. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19042269 Pile, S. (2010). Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(1), 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1475-5661.2009.00368.x

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Radford, D., & Hetz, H. (2021). Aussies? Afghans? Hazara refugees and migrants negotiating multiple identities and belonging in Australia. Social Identities, 27(3), 377–393. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2020.1828851 Salahshour, N., & Boamah, E. (2020). Perceived discrimination as experienced by Muslims in New Zealand universities. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 40(3), 497–512. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2020.1819130 Teixeira da Silva, J.  A. (2020). Stigmatization, discrimination, racism, injustice, and inequalities in the COVID-19 era. International Journal of Health Policy and Management, 9(11), 484–485. https://doi.org/10.34172/ijhpm. 2020.87 Tolia-Kelly, D. P. (2004). Materializing post-colonial geographies: Examining the textural landscapes of migration in the south Asian home. Geoforum, 35(6), 675–688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.02.006 Thorpe, H., Brice, J., Soltani, A., Nemani, M., & O’Leary, G. (2022). Methods for more-than-human wellbeing: A collaborative journey with object interviews. Qualitative Research : QR, 146879412211293. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/14687941221129374 Valentine, G., Sporton, D., & Nielsen, K. B. (2009). Identities and belonging: A study of Somali refugee and asylum seekers living in the UK and Denmark. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(2), 234–250. https://doi. org/10.1068/d3407 Ward, K., Fagan, C., McDowell, L., Perrons, D., & Ray, K. (2010). Class transformation and work-life balance in urban Britain: The case of Manchester. Urban Studies, 47(11), 2259–2278. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009359030 Webb, S., & Lahiri-Roy, R. (2019). Skilled migrants and negotiations: New identities, belonging, home and settlement. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40(2), 190–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2019.1577225 Wessendorf, S. (2017). Migrant belonging, social location and the neighbourhood: Recent migrants in East London and Birmingham. Urban Studies (Edinburgh, Scotland), 56(1), 131–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/004209801 7730300 Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Intersectionality and feminist politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/135050680 6065752 Xhaho, A., Çaro, E., & Bailey, A. (2021). Empowerment or a double burden? Work, family, and agency among Albanian migrant women in Greece. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 28(10), 1431–1451. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2020.1817872

CHAPTER 10

How Social Enterprise Can Facilitate the Inclusion of Highly Skilled Newcomers to Canada Ireoluwatomi Oloke

Introduction The degree of belongingness that highly skilled immigrants experience in a new country is influenced by their socio-economic accomplishments in the receiving country, and they may feel out of place until they attain a level of career success similar to that which they had in their home country. Highly skilled immigrants who have attained significant career success before leaving their home countries are often surprised to find that their credentials may not be recognized in Canada and that they must restart their career.

I. Oloke (*) Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice, St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_10

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This is particularly so for racialized1 individuals migrating from less economically developed countries, who often feel like they must prove their worth in the new country. Socio-economic injustice begins to manifest when there are significant hindrances to the retraining and hiring of these newcomers. This is also a manifestation of socio-economic exclusion and may leave these individuals feeling frustrated, inadequate, and like outsiders until they have accomplished their career and attendant socio-­ economic goals. These employment-related challenges to economic integration can be addressed to some extent by non-government organizations like social enterprises. While such organizations are not a panacea to solving the fundamental structural problem caused by socio-economic exclusion, they can serve to make the retraining and employment integration process more manageable for newcomers, thereby minimizing the negative effects of this undertaking on their psyche and sense of belonging and/or integration into Canada. This is based on an understanding that a deprived economic condition of either unemployment or underemployment can weaken the level of attachment and sense of belonging immigrants have to their new country. Employment plays an essential role not just as a source of livelihood but also as a basis from which identity is derived. This chapter explores the extent to which social enterprises can contribute to addressing socio-economic exclusion and injustice experienced by highly skilled newcomers to Canada, particularly those who are from less economically developed countries, based on the findings of a research study that reviewed the general ability and capacity of social enterprises. The research study was carried out by this author in 2020 and was composed of interviews with 20 work integration social enterprise2 (WISE) managers and developers located in Manitoba, Canada. The purpose of this study was to identify the roles that social enterprises can play in addressing structural injustice. Manitoba (Canada) was selected as the research site due to its vibrant social enterprise community and its accessibility to the author.3 While most of the WISE managers interviewed for the study 1  “Racialized” individuals in this study refer to those who are considered socially different from the ethnic majority. In Canada, racialized individuals are essentially non-white people or people of color. 2  Social enterprises are conceptualized in this study as organizations that operate in the marketplace to create social outcomes. 3  See Oloke (2021) for more information about the research study, including the methodology employed.

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did not run immigrant focused organizations (except for two, who offered training in low-skilled roles to groups that included immigrants), insights from their discussions provide a useful understanding of the roles that social enterprises generally play, and how they relate to the socio-­economic inclusion of highly skilled immigrants. The first section of this chapter provides a context for the discussion by outlining the nature of the socio-­ economic marginalization experienced by highly skilled newcomers to Canada. This section also reviews the validity of explanations for why new immigrants may seem to maintain a strong sense of belonging despite poor employment outcomes. The second part of this chapter provides a critical analysis of the social enterprise model in order to highlight the analytical basis of this chapter— that underlying this discussion of the role that non-government organizations can play in improving the employment conditions of highly skilled newcomers is an awareness of the truism that social policy ought to be the purview of the state. It is only devolved to non-government organizations like social enterprises in a bid to avoid state responsibility as part of the “small government” neoliberal agenda. The final section explores social enterprises’ capacity to facilitate the socio-economic integration of highly skilled newcomers to Canada. It identifies the role social enterprises can play in the economic inclusion of highly skilled immigrants by addressing the barriers to employment, purposefully facilitating social inclusion, advocating on their behalf and collaborating with other actors to expand their social impacts.

Newcomers’ Experiences of Socio-economic Marginalization in Canada Paula and her husband James4 were an upper middle-class Nigerian couple who had two children. She was a university professor, and he was a nurse. They were very comfortable and had two houses, three cars and their children attended one of the most exclusive private schools in Lagos—all significant markers of upper middle-class wealth in the country. James’ sister had moved her family to Canada from Nigeria five years earlier. When James and his family visited his sister’s home in Canada, the 4  Paula and James are not specific individuals but are a composite representative of the experiences of a significant portion of the Nigerian community in Canada within which the author has lived experience.

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Canadian life seemed very attractive to them—they were captivated by the constant power supply that eliminated the need to have a back-up generator running all night, the level of security, the ease of travel that came with having a Canadian passport, and the wide range of opportunities available to the children. After deliberating for a few months, James and Paula decided to apply for Canadian permanent residency. With their educational background, work experience, near perfect language test results, and James’ sister’s status as a Canadian citizen, their immigration application was quickly approved. James and Paula were realistic; they knew it would not be easy to become established in their professions when they arrived in Canada. James would undergo a few assessments before receiving the approval needed to take the nursing qualifying exam. Paula would have to see about getting a post-doctoral position and perhaps even a Canadian degree to enable her to find a teaching position at a university. They believed that the few difficult years it would take them to requalify in Canada would be worth it, especially for their children, who would have more opportunities than they would if they remained in Nigeria. After seven years in Canada, Paula and James were still unable to practice in the fields in which they were trained and practicing in prior to arriving in Canada. James was working as a healthcare aide and struggling to take the pre-requisite courses needed to gain admission into a nursing program. He had finally abandoned the nursing assessment process he was undergoing at the College of Registered Nurses. The assessment process that had been presented to him as a straightforward process prior to his arrival in Canada continued to drag on with no end in sight. The process seemed to be designed to constantly question and undermine the years of nursing education, experience, and skills he had acquired in Nigeria. After the fifth year of trying to gain approval to practice as a nurse in Canada, James finally gave up and shifted to trying to gain admission into a nursing program. Paula was in a similar situation. She had worked in a post-­ doctoral position for two years after arriving in Canada. Afterward, the only roles she was able to find were contract instructor positions at a local college where she had to apply every semester to teach one or two courses. Since she earned next to nothing from this, Paula supplemented her income by working full time as an office assistant in a government department. Paula and James had grown disillusioned over time, with frustration slowly producing a lack of hope that they would ever rise to anything near the level they were at in their careers before they left Nigeria. However,

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this did not keep them from making continuous attempts at reskilling and trying to acquire new employment. Paula and James were always willing to discuss their unfortunate situation with anyone they felt could relate to their experiences, and these often happen to be racialized individuals like themselves. They learned to find some satisfaction in the fact that their children were thriving in school and in extracurricular activities. Or at least this is what they always told anyone who would listen. It was as though they were trying to convince themselves that they’d made the right choice in moving to Canada. The story above is a familiar one for many racialized, highly educated, and experienced immigrants who relocated to Canada and other parts of the global North. This is evident from the findings of extensive primary research that has been conducted into the challenges with economic integration experienced by highly educated and qualified immigrants to Canada (Aycan & Berry, 1996; Hira-Friesen, 2018; White et  al., 2015; Wilson-Forsberg, 2015; Wu & Penning, 2015). These studies have found that immigrants to Canada experience declining economic prospects, a lack of recognition of their foreign credentials and work experience, difficulty relicensing in their professions, as well as emotional challenges associated with being unable to find suitable employment. Racialized immigrants in Australia also have a similar experience where their qualifications and skills are devalued by their employers due to a disregard for their country of origin (Pietsch, 2017). This particularly impacts immigrants from less developed regions, who “may have lower income levels during their early years in Canada since, initially, their human capital may be less transferable as a result of potential issues related to language, cultural differences, education quality, and discrimination” (Crossman et al., 2021, p.3). While poor economic prospects may not be sufficient by themselves to negatively impact immigrants’ acculturation into Canada, if individuals consider their socio-economic condition in Canada to be worse than that of their country of origin, they may develop a negative sense of belonging toward Canada (White et al., 2015). The concept of belonging5 as used in this study refers at a basic level to “feelings of safety … or simply a general feeling of inclusion” (Pearce, 2008, 12). At the same time, belonging is also conceived of as much more than a feeling that remains fixed but as an ongoing process that fluctuates 5  Other terms used interchangeably with “sense of belonging” in this study include acculturation, social integration and socialization.

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depending on the time, place, and people being interacted with (Samura, 2022). Belonging is closely related to individuals’ self-identity, in terms of how they perceive themselves and where they live, and this conception of self-identity can both affect and be affected by an individual’s sense of belonging. The inability to gain employment in the fields they have practiced in for an extended period of time can negatively impact newcomers’ perception of self (Aycan & Berry, 1996). More generally, economic outcomes can also influence the level of integration into the receiving society experienced by immigrants who see economic success as a significant indicator of their contributions to the receiving society (Hou et al., 2018). A poor socio-economic status also has a tangible impact on immigrants, as they may be more prone to precarious socio-economic conditions than native-born individuals due to their more limited access to safety nets to fall back on during dire conditions (Agyekum et al., 2021). Since the late 1960s, Canada has focused on inviting economic immigrants (White et al., 2015). As of 2020, the economic immigration class continued to be the largest source of permanent residents admitted to Canada, making up about 58% of all immigrants admitted into the country as is in line with the trend in the four years preceding (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 2021). Despite this emphasis on recruiting highly skilled immigrants to fill labor market gaps in Canada, the employment earnings of immigrants have declined significantly compared to the earnings of Canadian-born workers (Picot & Sweetman, 2012; Reitz, 2007). While the gaps in the employment rate of recent immigrant men relative to Canadian-born men has diminished significantly, the gaps in the weekly earnings of both groups have continued to widen (Crossman et al., 2021). This suggests that while immigrants may be finding jobs, these are often lower paying roles than the opportunities available to Canadian-born individuals. Immigrant men earned 24.2% less than their Canadian-born counterparts in 2015 and the trends for women are similar (Crossman et  al., 2021). The socio-economic advancement of immigrants and Canadian-born individuals is not mutually exclusive as there are currently wide gaps in the Canadian labor market that immigrants can help to fill. The Canadian government has identified this need for immigrants to address the country’s labor market shortage as a motivation behind its current immigration policies (Government of Canada, 2022). Furthermore, because they’re unable to find full-time employment in the fields they have training and experience in, many economic immigrants

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in Canada are often restricted to working in peripheral positions adjacent to their desired field (Dean & Wilson, 2009; Grant & Nadin, 2007). Individuals admitted into Canada based on their professional experience and skills tend to be people who consider their occupations an essential part of their identity, and their inability to be successful in the labor market could impact their degree of integration into a society that seems to have rejected them (Wilson-Forsberg, 2015). It is extremely ironic that immigrants are admitted to Canada based on their foreign education and experience, but then these credentials are not always recognized for employment purposes when they arrive in Canada (Bauder, 2003). In fact, the most highly educated newcomers are more prone to having to work multiple jobs to survive in Canada (Hira-Friesen, 2018). Unable to outsource domestic work in Canada as they did in their country, immigrant women, in particular, may experience greater socio-­economic exclusion than their male counterparts as the burden of childcare and domestic work falls to them in the new country (Wilson-­Forsberg, 2015). The most commonly provided explanations for why highly trained immigrants experience difficulties in finding employment in their field include language barrier and non-recognition of foreign education and experience (Aycan & Berry, 1996; Hira-Friesen, 2018; Krysa et al., 2017). Critical scholars have however considered these justifications, especially the overemphasis on Canadian credentials and experience, as simply pretexts to rationalize exclusion. As Wilson-Forsberg notes, “[Canadian] educational and professional credentials are an instrument used by the dominant class to restrict access, privileges, and opportunities for the subordinate classes. However, in occupations that are not highly desired by Canadian-born residents, the requirement of Canadian experience usually does not exist” (2015, p. 472). This may be a latent form of racism, given that it is exacerbated for racialized individuals who also experience prejudice, discrimination, and other forms of overt and covert racism that limits their integration into the conventional labor market, particularly when they first arrive in Canada (Madibbo, 2016). As the following sub-section will explore, despite the concerning situation where economic immigrants are experiencing challenges with socio-economic integration, such discontent does not always totally eradicate the sense of belonging new immigrants to Canada experience.

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Strong Sense of Belonging Among Newcomers Despite Poor Socio-economic Outcomes The worrying narrative above, which indicates that a significant number of economic immigrants have not experienced socio-economic success, may lead to the assumption that many of these immigrants will not be acculturated into Canada. However, socio-economic discontent does not always eradicate the sense of belonging new immigrants to Canada experience. Some studies (e.g., Hou et al., 2018; Pearce, 2008) have found that only between 5% and 7% of immigrants feel like they do not belong to Canada while over 90% have a strong feeling of belonging to Canada. The high percentage of individuals with a strong sense of belonging means that unemployed and underemployed individuals would likely be present in this category. This raises the question of how these individuals are able to maintain this strong sense of belonging despite their socio-economic status and career situation. As the following discussion will consider, this could be due to factors such as the socio-economic success or lack thereof, and the attendant strong sense of (un)belonging it produces, is based on a comparison of life in Canada to life in the source country, as well as the newcomers’ optimism about future improvements in their finances and overall life prospects. White et al. (2015) believe that the reason why Canadian newcomers continue to have a strong level of loyalty and positive perception of Canada despite their declining economic prospects is because their assessments of Canada are typically based on comparisons to their lives in their source country. Because a considerable number of economic immigrants emigrate with the intention to build a better life, resentment toward the receiving country only tends to set in when life in the receiving country is considered to be less economically productive than life in the country of origin. Furthermore, individuals may not consider themselves as having a weak sense of belonging because while they are not as economically accomplished in Canada as they were in the source country, they may feel their lives in Canada are better in terms of the access to essential amenities, a safe environment, and individual rights and liberty they now enjoy (Hou et al., 2018). Optimism about the future is another reason why immigrants may continue to feel positive about Canada despite a low financial condition relative to other Canadians—in the hope that their finances and overall prospects will improve over time as they stay in Canada longer (White

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et  al., 2015). Also, many immigrants are expectant not just about their personal career accomplishments in Canada, but they also hope their children will be able to access better and sustainable educational and career opportunities because they live in Canada (Alaazi et al., 2020). For these reasons, underemployment may not be enough to send people longing for their countries where they feel the overall situation is much worse than in Canada. They may still believe they made the right choice by immigrating. However, immigrants in this situation will also often still make side comments like “if things were working well in our country, we wouldn’t be here enduring these indignities.” This indicates an underlying resentment from those unable to be established in the careers they have experience and qualifications  in, and calls into question the quality of the acculturation experienced by such individuals. Furthermore, it would be difficult for such surveys like those mentioned above to provide an accurate portrayal of individuals’ state since they only provide snapshots of people’s experiences at specific times. As Samura suggests, “how belonging is measured can perpetuate a view that one’s belonging remains constant and consistent, overlooking the fact that ‘belonging’ can actually fluctuate over time. Belonging … is measured through surveys, but surveys are only snapshots” (2022, p.11). Furthermore, the exact nature of the societal interactions these immigrants are engaging in may also need to be investigated to determine the true level of integration they are experiencing. If these immigrants are only participating in homogenous associations (whether religious, ethnic or cultural), they may not be properly integrating into the wider society even though these groups may help to enhance their connection to the community (Agyekum et  al., 2021; Pearce, 2008). The attachment to homogeneous in-groups is not necessarily due to a desire to be excluded from the broader society but because these are often the groups readily available for people to interact with. One thing that most immigrants who survive in Canada possess, whether or not they are ultimately able to find work in the careers they were trained in, is the ability to adapt effectively even in the face of adversity. As Wilson-Forsberg notes, “whether low-skilled, highly skilled or deskilled; whether they view their experiences with employment … as positive or negative, the … immigrants who participated in this study persevere” (2015, p.  485). Overall, the socio-economic marginalization experienced by highly skilled newcomers to Canada has the capacity to significantly impact their sense of belonging, though this may not always

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be in overt ways. Given this link between socio-economic exclusion and belonging, the following section explores the concept of social enterprises as a basis to evaluating the potential role these organizations can play in facilitating the social inclusion of newcomers.

The Social Enterprise Model Within the neoliberal context,6 non-government organizations like social enterprises are increasingly promoted as a major path to addressing social challenges such as the unemployment and underemployment of new immigrants to Canada. While this chapter will ultimately identify the roles that social enterprises can play in improving employment outcomes for highly skilled immigrants, the intention is not to suggest that this role should be exclusive to social enterprises in an ideal world. Hence, this section undertakes a critical analysis of the political economy of social enterprises. The purpose of this inquiry is to acknowledge that underlying the narrative of social enterprise as a path to addressing the structural injustices experienced by highly skilled immigrants is a deep awareness that social enterprises in this situation, like in many others, play social welfare roles that should fundamentally be performed by the state purely out of necessity (Oloke, 2021). Social enterprises are conceptualized in this study as organizations that operate in the marketplace to achieve social outcomes, which can range from the provision of basic human needs to increasing access to education and employment. Social enterprises have societal goals that differentiate them from conventional businesses—alongside profit-making objectives, social enterprises also focus on carrying out activities that positively impact people and the environment and are typically organized as non-profits (Defourny & Nyssens, 2010; Murtagh, 2016). The specific form of social enterprise explored in this study is work integration social enterprises (WISEs), which are social enterprises that focus on providing marginalized individuals with the employment training, support, and development they require to be integrated into the mainstream workforce. In Canada, social 6  As the dominant worldview in most Western states since the 1980s, neoliberalism embodies a political philosophy and an economic belief that markets will produce largely efficient economic outcomes when allowed to operate with minimal government intervention (Palley, 2012). The usage of neoliberalism in this chapter focuses particularly on the way that this concept encouraged state retreat from social policy designed to address structural injustice (particularly of the economic kind) faced by members of marginalized groups.

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enterprises are set up to serve a diverse group of individuals, including Indigenous people, women, immigrants, children, youth, people with mental health challenges, and people with disabilities, among other groups (Elson et al., 2016). The Canadian Community Economic Development Network surveyed 1350 Canadian social enterprises and found that 20% of these organizations include immigrants among the populations they serve (Elson et al., 2016). Canadian WISEs that serve immigrants provide a range of services, including translation/interpretation, language assessment, workplace essentials training, as well as other customized employment services geared toward both newcomers and organizations being urged to recruit them. A critical theory of social enterprise is not so much a critique of the social enterprise model but of the political-economic state structure that has increasingly placed responsibility for social policy, particularly policy that targets marginalized groups, on organizations like social enterprises. The state is more capable of handling social policy7 because non-­ government organizations do not possess the economic capacity and political mandate to effectively deliver social goods (Nega & Schneider, 2014). However, such social work is often left to non-profit organizations like social enterprises who carry it out entirely out of necessity because the state has abdicated its responsibility in these areas (Oloke, 2021). To understand the significance of state retreat from the provision of certain social goods, we must consider how the welfare state emerged in Western liberal democracies and how organizations like social enterprises gained prominence in the neoliberal era. Western liberal democracies emerged from liberal capitalist states where the government served to protect the rights of the wealthy class to own property (Louw, 2010; Macpherson, 2011). Economic and political inequality was embedded into the liberal capitalist system, which was ultimately transformed into a liberal democracy when the right to vote was extended to the non-wealthy, though the elites retained control of the state (Macpherson, 2011). The major factors that propelled the state to extend the right to vote to the non-propertied classes include struggles by the working class and divisions within the ruling class (Macpherson, 2011; Therborn, 1977). Although the extension of voting rights purportedly 7  Social policy in this study refers to actions (social welfare or services) designed to address “wicked” societal problems of a structural nature that impact the economic, political and social welfare of members of a community.

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eradicated political inequality, the economic inequality inherent in capitalism remained and the welfare state was created to meet the economic needs of the workers and prevent them from carrying out a violent revolution (Elson, 2000). Though the welfare state did not eradicate economic inequality, it played an essential role of maintaining civility in liberal democracies. However, as the neoliberal era unfolded in the late 1970s, the state in many developed nations began to retreat from the provision of essential social welfare services. The erosion of the welfare state under neoliberalism is largely linked to a major concept that undergirds neoliberalism, the logic of “self-help,” which essentially suggests that individuals be solely responsible for their development with minimal assistance from the state. The irony is that while individuals were encouraged to raise themselves up by their bootstraps, government policy focused on supporting big businesses and corporations through subsidies and tax incentives. As part of the neoliberal policy of downsizing the state championed by Reagan and Thatcher, Western states in the 1970s and 1980s began to promote development as a fundamentally local affair, hoping to save money and improve the efficiency of public programs by passing responsibilities to local government and voluntary organizations (Bryden, 2010). Social enterprises emerged as part of the range of local organizations that filled the gap left by government cutbacks on welfare provision, particularly in Canada, the US, and Europe (Hulgard, 2010; Zahra et al., 2009). Gilbert (2002) notes that both sides of the political spectrum accepted the use of non-government organizations as a near replacement for the state’s provision of social welfare because the entrenchment of such institutions suited the political Left’s fascination with civil society and the Right’s emphasis on the idea of a free market. Other issues that led to a broader acceptance of social enterprises as part of the organizations that took over some of the welfare state’s functions include the significant level of structural unemployment that existed as well as the need to minimize budget deficits (Defourny, 2001). Social enterprises and other social economy organizations were not the only non-governmental organizations tasked with the provision of social welfare. Rather, there was a mix of public and private for-profit organizations involved in the process (Defourny, 2001). Governments have become increasingly interested in social enterprises as they seek to reduce spending on social problems, and although “advocates of social enterprises do not view themselves as being motivated by the neoliberal agenda of small government, the influence of

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these policies is a stimulus for the development of this form of ­organization” (Quarter et al., 2017, p. 108). The small government ideology of neoliberalism, which minimizes the critical role the state’s provision of essential social services plays, often co-­ opts the idea of local ownership of development projects as a reason to diminish the welfare state. As Friedmann (1992) notes, approaches to alternative development often frame the state as an obstacle to development. Some proponents of social enterprise even take part in this process of emphasizing the state’s ineptitude (Dees, 1998). The implication of such studies is often that the ineffective state needs to cease the provision of essential services and allow non-government organizations like social enterprises that can do the work more efficiently to do so. The foregoing discussion highlights how government retreat from social welfare in the neoliberal era was accompanied by the devolution of social welfare provision roles to non-state organizations. Peck and Tickell (2002) reported that Western states shifted from the roll-back neoliberalism of the 1980s that emphasized deregulation to the roll-out neoliberalism of the 1990s which involved state involvement in the development of financialized social policy. This shift to social policy that emphasizes social workfare and job readiness over welfare was an attempt to address the failures of the neoliberalism of the 1980s (Peck & Tickell, 2002). Consequently, social enterprises were somewhat part of the organizations “rolled-out” to respond to the failures of the 1980s neoliberalism and put the onus for self-help on marginalized individuals. Hence, social enterprises inadvertently participate in the privatization of public services even as they seek to meet the needs of marginalized individuals facing barriers to the fulfilment of their professional potential. Roy and Hackett (2017) argue that to prevent social enterprises from becoming a tool for the neoliberal state to avoid its responsibilities for providing social goods, the potential for such a co-option must be highlighted. Having indicated an awareness of the reality of a neoliberal co-­ option of the value of social enterprises, it is important to note that social enterprises can and do still contribute to addressing unequal socio-­ economic structures (Oloke, 2021). Even when social enterprises are fundamentally set up to meet the needs of those who have been excluded from an inequitable socio-economic system in a way that seems to be upholding the flawed socio-economic structure and keeping it from collapse, their roles remain critical. A more surface-level assessment may perceive those who run social enterprises as being content to be an essential

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part of a flawed socio-economic system that functions in a way that increases the survival of this system (Westley et al., 2014). Yet, as the discussion in the following section will show, the essential support supplied by social enterprises and other organizations in the social economy serves to address the barriers that inhibit marginalized individuals (such as newcomers) from accessing opportunities within the mainstream economy. Having recognized the fact that social policy should primarily be the state’s role and only falls to non-state actors like social enterprises when the state fails to perform, the remainder of this chapter explores the roles that social enterprises can play in facilitating the integration of new immigrants into the Canadian labor market.

Social Enterprises and the Inclusion of Highly Skilled Newcomers The tangible and intangible needs of the socio-economically excluded individuals served by social enterprises, including belongingness, are fundamentally rooted in structural injustice. In the context of this chapter, the structural injustice experienced by immigrants manifests in the form of a lack of access to rewarding employment in the field they have training and experience in due to their status as newcomers to Canada. More specifically, structural barriers manifest in the form of challenges that keep immigrants from accessing mainstream employment such as non-recognition of foreign education and experience, and racial discrimination (Hira-Friesen, 2018; Krysa et al., 2017).8 Social enterprises can contribute to addressing these barriers in a way that transforms the structures that produce exclusion. While immigrants’ socio-economic situation may gradually improve as they stay longer in Canada (White et al., 2015), the period of retraining may leave lasting psycho-social impacts on them and distort their degree of belongingness even after they have become economically accomplished. Although there will certainly be a period of settling in when new immigrants will face challenges associated with adapting to the receiving country, the negative impacts of this time can be significantly mitigated to

8  This raises the questions of why it seems to be so difficult to fairly assess educational achievements and work experience from other countries and whether this might be a way for trade unions and professional licensing agencies to ensure Canadian workers retain exclusive access to professional jobs.

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ensure that it does not leave lasting adverse impacts on the psyche and ability of the concerned immigrants to integrate. This section draws on the findings of the aforementioned research study carried out by this author with work integration social enterprise (WISE) managers and developers located in Manitoba, Canada. This study provides useful insight into the roles that social enterprises play in creating social impact, and how this can be utilized in facilitating the socio-­ economic inclusion of highly skilled immigrants. The specific roles that social enterprises can play as identified in the study, which will be explored below in relation to the economic integration of highly skilled immigrants, include providing supports to address the barriers to mainstream employment facing their participants, facilitating social inclusion of their members, engaging in advocacy on behalf of participants, and collaborating with actors in the public, for-profit and non-profit sectors to expand their social impacts. Social enterprises can facilitate the integration of highly skilled immigrants by providing them with the supports needed to address the barriers to mainstream employment. The first step to mitigating the traumatizing aspects of the economic integration period would be to ensure that intending immigrants receive accurate information about what is required for them to become established in their occupation in Canada. This will help them to make informed decisions on what is best for them, their family and their career. This presupposes, of course, that the plan is to bring these individuals into Canada to become professionally established. A more critical outlook might suggest that the system is fundamentally set up to ensure that highly skilled immigrants do not find professional roles comparable to those they were working in their source countries, but ensures they are relegated to roles they are over-experienced for. The Canadian points-based economic immigration system is set up to select the best educated and experienced professionals, many from global South countries, only to bring them to Canada to oftentimes perform menial jobs. This is particularly so for individuals in the medical field, with many often struggling with the arduous assessment processes set up for them to become licensed to practice in Canada. Non-profits like work integration social enterprises (WISEs) can assist in bridging the knowledge gap by helping newly landed immigrants to understand what the process of becoming licensed to practice in their profession entails. These organizations can help newcomers determine whether they are able to undergo the retraining process as needed or if it

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will prove too challenging for them. If it is determined that these newcomers have the motivation and ability required to undergo this process, WISE can also provide support on how to navigate this process of retraining and help them obtain the additional resources they need to succeed. If these social enterprise consultants, in conjunction with the concerned immigrants, are able to determine that retraining in their original profession might not be the best approach, they can work together to determine what other options such individuals can explore. WISEs seem especially poised to play this supportive role for immigrants to Canada given that their organizational function typically involves providing a wide range of supports and training to address the various barriers to mainstream employment facing their participants. WISEs have been set up to play this role for a wide range of groups that have experienced socio-economic exclusion in Canada, particularly Indigenous people, women, disadvantaged youth, and people with disabilities (Elson et al., 2016; Oloke, 2021). This process often goes beyond work training, as WISEs support those they serve in other areas including parenting, budgeting, and financial management classes (Brandon & McCracken, 2016). This provision of extra and necessary supports required to be successful in the mainstream economy is a capacity-building process (Alvord et al., 2004) that ensures that other skills needed to effectively utilize the job training experience are in place. WISEs also contribute to the process of socio-economic integration by supporting participants to gain self-­ confidence (Chan, 2015), a sense of purpose, and even connections that can help them to access mainstream employment. Some WISEs also provide social supports such as social workers to participants who have experienced trauma (Donkervoort, 2013). Extended to highly skilled newcomers, these varying supports will equip such individuals with the tools they need to address current and future challenges related to and beyond employment. Social enterprises can also serve the specific purpose of facilitating the social inclusion of highly skilled newcomers. In addition to more practical supports like assistance with retraining, acquiring employment related skills, and gaining employment, WISEs are well placed to support the development of a genuine sense of belonging among new immigrants to Canada because of how they fundamentally facilitate social inclusion. WISEs’ contribution to mitigating socio-economic injustice goes beyond just meeting the economic needs of those they serve, as the access to the mainstream economy that WISEs provide is also part of the process of socially including these

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individuals. When the economic needs of marginalized individuals are met in some significant ways, these individuals’ capacity to access and utilize their social, political, and civic capacities is increased (Friedmann, 1992; Sen, 1999). Hence, meeting immigrants’ economic needs is an important precursor to genuine inclusion into Canadian society. Other factors that could improve socio-economic inclusion of immigrants include workplace training that addresses occupational segregation and racial or religious discrimination, intercultural training, and the adoption of inclusive practices within workplaces (Ertorer et al., 2020). Social enterprises can make broader positive impacts on the socio-economic system that excludes highly skilled immigrants by engaging in advocacy and collaborating with other actors on behalf of their participants. Transformative actions through organizations like social enterprises do not always have to be overt in the form of activism (Dey & Teasdale, 2016) but can be expressed through advocacy. Social enterprises can operate in the realm of advocacy through a more muted approach to challenging problematic societal structures alongside other stakeholders (Oloke, 2021). Social enterprise practitioners can advocate for support for highly skilled immigrants from relevant stakeholders who are able to advance the process of making professional assessment processes more accessible to these immigrants. Social enterprises serving immigrants should also collaborate with actors in and outside of the social economy to expand their impacts. Collaboration allows social enterprises to access resources that they may not be able to easily acquire on their own or that would require them to expend a significant amount of effort that could be more effectively directed elsewhere. As aforementioned, social enterprises are only part of the medium needed to transform the inequitable socio-economic system and cannot accomplish this transformation on their own. Hence, for their work to have broader systemic impact, social enterprises require support from the public sector (Nega & Schneider, 2014; Roy & Hackett, 2017), as well as partnership with organizations in the for-profit and non-­ profit sector. Social enterprises can collaborate with for-profits to show these businesses the benefits of making social impact and encourage them to integrate concerns around hiring and/or supporting highly skilled immigrants wherever possible into their business models. The aforementioned study on social enterprises found that for-profit businesses that are still being run by their founders have the greatest potential to be interested in making

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social impact, and so social enterprises should seek opportunities to work with and advocate to such businesses that have a “heart” so that they can become even more socially minded. Collaboration with for-profits typically takes the form of social enterprises bringing their knowledge and community contacts while for-profits provide the much-needed resources that allow social enterprises to focus on producing social impacts. When social enterprises are involved in cooperative endeavors with for-profit businesses, they can influence these organizations to be more aware of and intentional about creating positive social impacts. This suggests that rightly motivated individuals and organizations, irrespective of whether they are organized as social enterprises, can contribute to the social integration of newcomers by developing their own peculiar approaches to addressing the barriers that have excluded them from the mainstream economy. Social enterprises serving newcomers require support from the public sector in particular, because of the distinctly public nature of their work. The government is a significant beneficiary of the work of social enterprises because these organizations fill in gaps that the social policy system is unwilling or unable to address (Newey, 2018; Borzaga & Solari, 2001). Walk et al. found in a review of the social return on investment generated by a social enterprise that provides immigrant women with job and skills training that “in terms of social impact, each Canadian dollar invested in human and financial capital through the job and skills training program yields a return of just over two Canadian dollars” (2015, p.141). This highlights the benefits and additional return on public investment that social enterprises serving immigrants can provide. When formerly socio-­ economically excluded immigrants access mainstream employment and fill shortages in essential professions, the entire system benefits from this adequate use of human capital. Hence, social enterprises can and should advocate for the state to support them in carrying out the public service they render by facilitating the acculturation of newcomers that the state should be doing in an ideal world.

Conclusion There is a fundamental interconnectedness between economic and social inclusion within any society. Those who are socio-economically excluded from a community due to underemployment may find it difficult to genuinely experience a sense of belonging to their community. The

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socio-economic inclusion of foreign trained, highly skilled immigrants to Canada through social enterprises will make for a more successful and productive society because it can help to produce a tangible sense of belonging among these individuals. When people feel included in this way, they are more likely to be interested in further contributing to the success and productivity of the country (Byrne et al., 2018; Reimer et al., 2015). The inclusion into the mainstream economy and society enabled by WISEs facilitates not just an improvement in the quality of the lives of the immigrants concerned but also of the community that has now made them an integral contributor. The benefits that immigrants can enjoy from WISE are not just limited to acquiring information about the process of retraining but also include the attendant interpersonal experiences arising from the process of participating in a social enterprise. Because socio-economic exclusion disconnects marginalized individuals from their communities (Greffe, 2007), WISEs are engaged in an essential form of integration that helps these individuals regain community connections. Most of the existing WISEs in Canada that serve immigrants are focused on providing access to low-skilled employment opportunities. However, the WISE model can also be used as a means of supporting high-skilled immigrants to find comparable employment in their profession if properly engineered through advocacy, collaboration with relevant actors and the involvement of skilled managers that possess adequate business and social skills. In 2009, the Canadian Community Economic Development Network created an initiative to promote the potential for the social enterprise model to be used as “an effective tool for immigrant settlement and integration” (CCEDNET, 2010, p. 4). However, most of the immigrant social enterprises they surveyed were engaged in the provision of basic products and services including crafts, catering, cleaning, and translation. While it is remarkable that there are work integration social enterprises to create opportunities for newcomers who need low-skilled employment to access it, similar services and supports are required for high-skilled newcomers to find employment in their profession. Canada can either work to harness the economic advantage that comes from having highly skilled immigrants working in the areas in which they have experience or continue to welcome these talents to the country only to have them performing low-skilled jobs. Ultimately, when highly experienced immigrants are able to work in their professions, it will be of immense benefit to Canada and help to fill the significant shortage of personnel the country is currently experiencing in certain occupations,

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particularly in the medical field. Besides the strong sense of belonging among highly skilled newcomers this is bound to generate, the potential to absorb newcomers in the labor market gaps seems like a rational reason for the state to focus on facilitating the provision of tangible and useful supports to these immigrants.

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CHAPTER 11

Racialized Skilled Immigrants in the Canadian Labour Market Alka Kumar

Introduction I begin by situating myself in my dual role and in my work as a researcher and a practitioner in migration studies; and I share my reflections on my doctoral research that explores the economic integration experiences of racialized immigrants and newcomers who come to Canada. The focus of this study, conducted as part of my doctoral research, was on highly skilled, also known as internationally educated professionals (IEPs). The next section of the paper dives more generally into challenges and problem issues in relation to the job market that this cohort of immigrants find themselves confronting, particularly in their early years of settlement in the country. My qualitative research study was geographically located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and while the labour market is contextualized locally, and is specific and variable—based on labour shortages and the

A. Kumar (*) CERC in Migration and Integration, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_11

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availability of jobs in specific sectors in different locations at any given time—many of the barriers experienced by these individuals are structural and endemic too, being multilayered and intersectional. Some examples of these systemic challenges are licensing processes and credentialing structures that apply to regulated professions in Canada, like Engineering and Medical fields (see Government of Canada website for list of regulated and certified professions; link provided in the Reference List). The section that follows makes an argument for the potential of interdisciplinary approaches for the purpose of developing a holistic understanding of the situation described above, with the objective of considering solution building. The concluding part of the chapter discusses some relevant theoretical insights and methodological approaches from the interdisciplinary Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), arguing for the potential of looking through a PACS lens to help us conceptualize migrationrelated scenarios so we can also understand them as intractable conflicts that raise complex issues. Further, a practitioner-focused approach, also an integral aspect of the PACS framework, can help researchers and practitioners, as well as service providers and policy makers, consider alternative ways of moving forward to create more sustainable and transformative solutions. The scholar-practitioner, also known as a “pracademic” (Volpe & Chandler, 2001; Posner, 2009) can play an important role in facilitating these.

Context In my doctoral research, I explore the immigrant experience from the perspective of visible minority professionals and skilled workers who migrate to Canada and settle in Winnipeg (Kumar, 2020). For some additional context, it may be helpful to note that visible minority individuals are among four designated groups in Canada, eligible for employment equity status and benefits. Employment equity is the provision of working conditions free of barriers which in turn corrects disadvantaged conditions in employment, and helps promote the principle that employment equity requires special measures and the accommodation of differences. Employment equity is a factor in selection. Applicants are requested to indicate in their covering letter or their résumé if they are from any of the following groups: women, Aboriginal people, visible minorities, and persons with disabilities (Government of Manitoba, 2004). Employment equity is mandated for federally regulated industries, Crown corporations,

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and other federal organizations with 100 employees or more, as well as portions of the federal public administration identified in Schedules I or IV and V of the Financial Administration Act by order of the Governor in Council, which includes the Canadian Forces and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). In addition to stories of migration transitions told by immigrant professionals through interviews and focus groups, key informants who participated in the research  also provided good data that was useful for the purpose of triangulation. Broadly, the aim of the study was to build better conceptual and empirical understanding around processes of migration, settlement, adaptation, and integration into the labour market and in Canadian society, as experienced by internationally educated professionals. In particular, the study focuses upon the “lived experience” of individuals as they seek economic integration through finding employment in their own professions or closely allied occupations. The researcher seeks to learn from the data collected, to get a better sense of challenges and triumphs on this journey, and to insightfully understand how this experience impacts processes of holistic settlement in Canada, and personal well-being, for men and women who have been in the city for at least two years and up to a maximum of ten years. This is a multi-method, qualitative study, and several ethnographic methods and tools were employed to conduct the research. It is also important to highlight that my interest in this particular topic emerged partly out of my own positionality as a skilled immigrant, being an academic and an educator in India prior to migrating to Canada. Moreover, my interest and passion to pursue professional work in this field grew deeper through being embedded in an environment where I was frontline staff supporting immigrant professionals navigate their migration transitions to attain the goal of meaningful job market settlement and integration. Previous to such a personal and professional location, in my work as an academic and a literary critic, I had pursued my research interests in diaspora studies, and more broadly, issues around identity including ethnicity, dual identities and identity-making, and inclusion; displacement and conceptualizations relating to home and loss; and questions related to representation of racism and colonialism in literary texts. Coming from such an orientation into research in migration-related issues, I was aware that I wanted to understand and study, with as much nuance as possible, the many ways in which immigrant professionals made sense of (or constructed) their own “lived experience” of their migration

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transitions, particularly how they saw their professional identities being impacted (and being re-constructed) in light of their employment-related experiences as newcomers and immigrants in Canada, specifically in Winnipeg. The persona of the researcher then had to be an important aspect of the research, and not only as an objective data-gathering recorder who would play the role of simply documenting and describing what they saw and heard. Further, given the overall methodological approach employed to envision and implement this study—with researcher positionality and reflexivity at its core—it was fundamental to understand that meaning-making was about constructing reality in a certain way, not just about discovering or receiving passively what was out there. My efforts to seek the right methodology for my study revealed several versions of grounded theory, as well as its many dynamic faces. For instance, Charmaz described the role of the researcher as follows: “The researcher’s perspective consists of more than philosophical stance, school of thought, and methodological strategies. It also consists of experiences, values, and priorities” (Charmaz, 1990, 1165). In addition to leading me to explore methodological directions that would help me understand grounded theorizing better, these words also pointed me in the direction of autoethnography. Ellis (2000) describes her own research trajectory by telling the story of her encounters with autoethnography, describing it variously, based on specific approaches, as follows, “self-ethnography, ethnographic novel, interpretive ethnography, experimental ethnography, autobiographical sociology, introspective novel, introspective ethnography, impressionistic tale, and personal narrative” (p. 310). I explored the relevance of such a methodology too, for the purpose of gathering my data. This was done through making my positionality explicit in the research process at all stages, from data gathering, to analysis, and writing-up of the findings. It helped me build relationships and rapport with my research participants, including helping me be reflexive about my role as a researcher, while engaging with research participants, being a kind of quasi-participant myself. Additionally, I utilized my own experiences by story-ing personal vignettes as interludes, interspersing them with the voices of my research participants as they shared their experiences of professional struggles and their ongoing process of integration. These seemed natural and organic starting points for me, aligning well with the

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social constructionist’s version of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2012), which resonated with my overall ideological and methodological perspectives.

Methodology The study pulled together several methodological perspectives to collect and analyse data. Research methods employed in this qualitative study rely upon inductive strategies including grounded theory (Aldiabat & Le Navenec, 2018; Busic, 2017; Lai et  al., 2017), narrative interviews (Hampshire et al., 2012; Holstein & Gubrium, 1997), as well as genres of new ethnography rooted in feminist and critical ethnography, researcher positionality and autoethnography (Anderson, 2006; Ellis, 2000; Ellis et al., 2011). These range from feminist methodologies, approaches situated in the interdisciplinary PACS field and ethnography, including auto-­ethnographic research methods (Coffey, 1999; Davis & Nencel, 2011; Bochner & Ellis, 1996). According to DeVault (1999, p.  3),  feminist research provides “smaller, more tailored, and more intensely pointed truths than the discredited ‘Truth’ of grand theory and master narratives. These are truths that illuminate varied experiences rather than insist on one reality.” Feminist ethnography and autoethnography align with the above paradigm, moving beyond post-positivist forms of thinking, with focus sharply on narrative inquiry. Through such an approach, autoethnographic narrative becomes research as the writer’s story connects to the social structure (Denzin, 2003), not just exploring it but heightening the relationship between the personal and the political. As previously noted, autoethnography, in the forms of “self-­ ethnography” and “interpretive-ethnography,” is present in this study both at an organic level through being part of the study’s conceptualization, data collection and analysis strategies, as well as manifest in the researcher-participant’s personal migration story told in her voice through vignettes interspersed throughout the study. This is also in line with Anderson’s view where he proposes the term analytic autoethnography to refer to research in which the researcher is (1) a full member in the research group or setting, (2) visible as such a member in published texts and (3) committed to developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena (Anderson, 2006).

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Additionally, as mentioned above, as an immigrant professional myself, I had experienced similar struggles and challenges, and it was this research interest and goal that drove my study. The objective was to help develop a deepened understanding so, in my capacity as a researcher practitioner, I could continue working actively with immigrants and immigrant-serving organizations to facilitate capacity building, through being part of teams where I can contribute in an ongoing way, to developing processes that enhance solution-building paradigms.

Personal Reflections: Storytelling and Autoethnography I wandered into migration studies quite serendipitously, through a stroke of what fate had in store for me all along, although I did not know that back then. This makes me wonder, do we decide our fate by the decisions we unknowingly make, without actually having a good understanding of where they might lead? This is especially true for migrants; as in the context of trajectories of migration, integration and belonging, there is a fine line between the start of a journey and its endpoint as so much can happen so fast in those in-between spaces that carry both a sense of urgency and timeless seamlessness. Certainly, with the advantage of hindsight now, I can say that as migrants and newcomers, I believe that we do end up creating our destinies based on the actions we take, although it is almost like going blindfolded into the future, hardly knowing where these new directions might lead or being fully aware of the how and why of that inexplicable process. All migration stories are in some ways different, being specific and unique, even when they share commonalities; and whatever it was, and however it happened, one of the life-altering decisions I made as part of my settlement and integration journey in Canada was that I embarked upon a disciplinary border crossing from the Humanities to the Social Sciences. More specifically, I made a shift from Literary Studies to Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) when I crossed the geographical border from India to Canada as part of a family move. Under the aegis of this interdisciplinary social science field—PACS—that contains at its core an emphasis on social justice, human rights, and a hands-on practitioner approach, I felt drawn to learning about the ways in which racialized skilled immigrants experienced their lives in the first ten years in Canada, particularly

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in relation to the challenges and triumphs that marked their labour market integration journeys. Another important detail that was important for me back then and is an essential part of this story is that the impetus for selecting this research topic came from my lived experience of migration, which was marked by the struggle to retrieve the self and the identity—as a professional—I felt I had lost as a result of the migration process. Always having self-­ constructed my own identity as a financially independent individual in my own right, a professional, an academic and a professor “back at home”— never needing to question all these core elements of who I was prior to moving to Canada as an immigrant—I now found myself labelled a newcomer in Canada, often being second guessed about who I “really” was or where I “really” came from; and this by people I did not know at all (see Chap. 2). All this while I was trying my hardest to blend in, “be” myself all over again through being comfortable in my own skin and demeanour, making efforts to “become,” one more time, a professional who was a contributing member in this new society and in my new home in Canada. As well, it was equally a striving I experienced, to integrate and to belong in my new home. The second significant catalyst for selecting this topic and the practitioner approach for studying it—and it is the very same reason that compels me to continue working as a researcher practitioner in migration today—is because this dual role affords me the space and the opportunities to work with individuals and organizations to support capacity building, utilizing my research insights (as well as the mindset and skills that such a researcher-­ situatedness can inform), and my voice to impact migration programming and practices. I hope at least in some indirect ways, my interventions also make a small dent in social and public policy in this area so that newcomers and immigrants in Canada can enhance their abilities and resources to achieve their dreams and thrive in their new home in the host country. In my day job back in my early years in Canada, in the role I played as a labour market specialist in the newcomer settlement sector and a researcher trying to understand the big picture, I worked with internationally educated immigrants who not only looked like me, but they also carried—just like me—their heavy backpacks of qualifications and work experience, as well as their aspirations and their disappointments. We were having similar experiences when we went out looking for work: sending out our resumes into what seemed like a black hole but not hearing back; encountering the enigmas of the hidden job market and stumbling against

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the overwhelming realities of the job search process; as well as feeling a sense of inadequacy when hiring personnel and potential employers failed to see what we brought to the table. I helped my clients to navigate their complex journeys of labour market integration, dealing as they did with the multilayered and intersectional challenges of career transition and a complex and unfriendly—often racist and discriminatory—job market while simultaneously trying to accomplish the goals of family settlement that often took up all the resources they had, not just financial but also intellectual and emotional, often leading to negative impacts on their well-being and their mental health. When I look back, it makes perfect sense that I was naturally drawn to exploring autoethnography as one of the qualitative research methods to make sense of this simultaneity with which the personal and the experiential were confronting me in my own migration trajectory, and what I was learning at the same time from the heartbreaking stories my clients and my research participants were sharing with me. The autoethnographic method, described by Tedlock (2005) as an approach that can “heal the split between public and private realms by connecting the autobiographical impulse (the gaze inward) with the ethnographic impulse (the gaze outward)” (467), aligned well with the manner in which I was experiencing my own location within the research field. Besides, it validated both “lived experience,” and also, as pointed out by Charmaz (2012) and Madden (2012), the multiplicities that emerged from an “emic” (insider perspective) as well as “etic” (outsider-researcher lens). Such perspectives and approaches were also well aligned with storytelling and with interpretive ethnography, as well as with post-positivist, situated, and reflexive methodologies. Having spent good years dabbling in narrative through reading, teaching, and research in Literary Studies and Literary Theory prior to migrating to Canada, the autoethnographic stance resonated with me also due to its creative and subjective slant; it gave me permission to sometimes interweave my personal story into the narratives of those of my participants, in the form of personal vignettes. At other times, being autoethnographic helped me to be the empathetic ear with which I listened closely, with a keen desire to understand, while being reflexive and transparent about my positionality. This process created a pathway for being authentic, helping me establish trusting relationships—grounded in values of equality and mutual respect—with my research participants. This experience also

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clarified the theoretical rationale and objective for my use of such a methodological lens, and I knew why such a method was the right one for me in the pursuit of this study. Fast forward to current times and continuing to learn from my experiences as a scholar-practitioner—through simultaneously focusing both on research and practice—I try through all the work I do in the migration field to strengthen the feedback loop that connects these two very different and separate worlds, attempting always to bridge the divide between these silos.

Searching for Solutions: Looking Through an Interdisciplinary Lens In general, as my research findings highlighted, there is much common ground between worldviews that emerge from migration studies, PACS, ethnography (including autoethnography), and constructivist life-design approaches (insights and principles from the last of these listed frameworks I have used with newcomers during career transition counselling sessions; and in my doctoral research, too). The coming together of fields that may appear previously as completely divergent also helps highlight commonalities shared between them, like relationship-building, positionality and reflexive practice. Certainly, more could be done to facilitate a dialogue between these disciplinary areas to explore these connections and their potential to target solution-based thinking. More specifically, this view flows from my interpretation that all these worlds have in them the inherent locus of the story, as well as the potential to make available an applied practitioner-based way of “doing” to help “capacity-building” in the context of immigrant professionals’ integration in a range of ways. Other traits shared by them include complexity and the propensity to be reflexive and relational, as well as collaborative and innovative in the search for solutions. A lot could also be said to reiterate the lack of alignment between the human capital-centred point system that shapes Canadian immigration policy and economic integration policies in Canada, or about social exclusion factors, including racialization and bias that is deeply pervasive at a systemic level, but those themes are not the central focus of this chapter. I will instead highlight a couple of relevant general considerations that are central to the economic integration issue as they apply to racialized (or visible minority) skilled migrants in Canada before going into the

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discussion in the final section that argues for the potential of employing a PACS framework to consider a solution-focused approach. Reitz (2001) shows the trend of highly qualified immigrants’ inability to optimally connect their foreign acquired skills to the needs of the labour market and knowledge economy in Canada as a serious and chronic challenge. Further, economic marginalization of this kind naturally has repercussions in social and political terms, and Reitz’s study reiterates ways in which racial prejudices interface with economic disparities to produce potential for intergroup tensions, cultural differences and misunderstandings that negatively impact race relations, highlighting the issue as one that relates to social justice. A labour market integration study on newcomers concludes: “They risk entering a perilous cycle in which poverty, a lack of job opportunities, concentration in low-income neighborhoods, discrimination and racism leading to long term exclusion conditions, even for the next generation” (Groupil, 2004: 9, cited in Moodley & Adam, 2012: 433). The discussion in previous sections becomes even more pertinent when we review the research about meaningful work, defining it as Schnell et al. (2013) do, as a “sense of coherence, direction, significance, and belonging in the working life” (543) and how it is analogous to finding meaning in life. As documented through perspectives and voices of individuals who participated in the research, employment in their area of interest and expertise was about more than a pay cheque, to include goal-setting, and as later expressed by one of the research participants, not just adding value to their own lives but significance to the lives of others. When a “meaning in work” (Schnell et  al., 2013: 543) ideology is applied to the context of migration career transitions, meaning of work collapses into finding meaning “in” work. Such a conceptualization is central to a subjective experience-ing of meaningfulness in an overall sense for professional migrants, and this is essential for family settlement, holistic well-being and a forward-looking attitude. When understood in these terms, the challenges of underemployment and underutilization that a majority of highly qualified immigrants  experience—for instance, like medical health professionals- this can seriously impact their ability to integrate and belong in the host environment. Absence of this meaning manifests through negative components like turnovers in employment, job disengagement, cynicism, exhaustion and stress (Schnell et  al., 2013; Claes & Ruiz Quintanilla, 1994; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).

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Meaning in work is further broken down in empirical research into positive outcomes like job satisfaction, performance, organizational commitment, and tenure. Most significantly, emotions and mindsets, positive or negative, can hardly be forced and are contingent on being in gainful employment that provides opportunities for self-actualization, financial stability and an affirmation of self-esteem.

Relevance of PACS Approaches in Migration Studies This final section explores only those particular theoretical and praxis-­ focused directions from the peacebuilding and social justice field that are considered as most relevant in the context of the discussion in this chapter so far. Firstly, due to the focus in this field on both process and outcome, processes that emerge from this interdisciplinary field can help to familiarize and provide the “pracademic” with a toolkit of approaches that can help create empathetic and inclusive structures, relationships, and behaviours. These are pragmatic and effective value-based processes and outcome-­oriented strategies that emerge from grassroots and bottom-up approaches; like elicitive and mindful listening, reframing, and storytelling; reflexive practices and mutual respect. Being sensitive to structural issues that make up the big picture is important. At the same time, insights that relate to real and specific ways in which systems impact individuals are significant too. How meaningfully these negotiations between the micro and macro levels can be achieved becomes a factor critical to success. For instance, from the perspective of a frontline worker, when I evaluate labour market experiences and outcomes for immigrant professionals, it becomes obvious fairly quickly that existing support structures and settlement processes in place are not sufficient by themselves but additional expertise (blended with empathy), and oftentimes, more customized programming supports, are needed too. Frontline staff can provide these kinds of supports if more emphasis is placed on their training, learning and professional development, including from a cultural competency and safety perspective. In fact, it can get more layered and nuanced, as it is primarily through building of relationships and rapport between immigrant clients and settlement staff in the cross-cultural environment that meaningful employment and career transition counselling can be delivered most meaningfully, with a better chance of leading to optimal outcomes. The focus on relationality within the interdisciplinary field of PACS and emphasis on

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dealing with conflicts arising from cultural differences can hardly be ignored, and these are some of the core shared aspects useful in their application to migration conflicts. Unit of Analysis Borrowing the level of analysis paradigm from international relations theory (see also person-centred approach, Grant, 2007), I make an argument for exploring the topic of settlement and integration from the perspective of the individual migrant, with focus on the nuanced, layered, and experiential filter of the story. Storytelling (Senehi, 2000) is, within the PACS field, one of the important and established methods of building understanding, analysis, and empathy for dealing with conflict. However, the micro level necessarily connects and conflicts with the system at the macro level, thus colliding with structures and institutions, like discriminatory practices in the labour market or racist gestures in the Canadian (multicultural) state. On the one hand, the utilitarian paradigm categorizes immigrants as “desirable” (or not) on account of demographics like ethnicity, educational qualifications, and professional expertise, while on the other, humanitarian grounds shift the needle of discussion to issues in relation to refugees, asylum seekers, and family reunification. This leads to implications that are ambivalent as they do both things simultaneously, producing Canada in the image of a welcoming, tolerant and inclusive nation state (see Krishnamurti, 2013) while failing to apply a humane perspective in the case of economic migrants. It is true that any attempt to compare refugees and asylum seekers to economic migrants may be akin to finding parallels between apples and oranges, and that is not the purpose of this argument. The case for more humane treatment to be meted out to individuals in the economic class is not so much a case for social justice or humanitarianism as it is about delivering on promises already made through the point system of assessment for entry into Canada, prevalent since 1967. It is also a call for immigration and settlement policy to be inclusive and streamlined so it is robust enough to achieve the greater common good and be a win-win for all parties. This can help alleviate the frustration and negative mental health impacts for migrant individuals and families, creating communities that feel safe in the ownership of their own belongingness to Canada; this in turn  is likely to lead to positive outcomes in the long term, individuals

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feeling more confident in their abilities to contribute their strengths to the new society and country that is now their home. Relationships and Grassroots Peacebuilding The PACS framework, with its range of multiple trajectories, can be viewed as an all-embracing set of analytical tools for understanding conflict at an individual and a systemic level. John Paul Lederach, one of the leading practitioners and theorists in this interdisciplinary field, develops an integrated framework through his nested paradigm (1997) that “underscores the need to look consistently at the broader context of systemic issues.” These emphases on the systemic and structural, as well as Lederach’s grassroots-led “elicitive,” approach are particularly resonant elements in his peacebuilding paradigm that can be applicable in the labour market context too. The elicitive approach is in opposition to the prescriptive one, and Lederach advocates it as one where grassroots voices are honoured for the knowledge and understanding of their own environment that they can share, with emphasis on building relationships and capacities of local actors (1995). In a framework such as this, collaboration is the key principle, as is an acknowledgement of shared vision and common goals so that mutually beneficial points of intersection between parties can be found (Lederach, 1995; Rothman, 2012). Lederach suggests that “at the subsystem level, we can experiment with various actions that promise to connect ‘systemic’ and immediate ‘issue’ concerns.” In the context of labour market integration as well, issues, challenges, and barriers exist at broad systemic levels so that huge and small policy gaps exist, and these lead to disruptive processes that negatively impact employment and overall settlement for skilled migrants. As is often the case, systems are not geared to take into account specific needs of each individual as several  variables are always  at play. Based on the diverse nature of multiple employment-related challenges, as well as the presence of several stakeholders that must come together and play their part, systemic solutions become challenging to achieve. Besides, as a result of differences between individuals, sometimes the same policies, practices, and processes may  affect them differently. As a result, people do fall through the cracks. Further, in accordance with Lederach’s (1997) integrated framework, one of the important areas of focus is upon relationships and elicitive frameworks that centre grassroots peacebuilding. His contention that each

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individual has his/her own understanding and vision of change and the path to get there (Lederach et al., 2007) is particularly relevant too in a context like multicultural Canada. Thus, approaches to bringing about individual and systemic change need to take this into account when programmes are designed and policy initiatives are considered. Lederach’s (1995) interventions in peacebuilding theory rely upon the model of sustainable conflict transformation through “equitable social structures that meet basic human needs, and respectful, interdependent relationships” (77). The objective here is to address root causes of conflict so that structures are enabled to be transformed so they may support more egalitarian relationships (Lederach, 2005, Miall, 2004). However, while the goal of conflict transformation is certainly a desirable one, in practical terms its limitation is that unequal power dynamics are not easy to eliminate, and these hinder the operationalizing and translating of aspirational objectives (like equitable structures) into reality. Even so, the peacebuilding model must have an integrated goal-centred approach and a timeframe, the research process focused upon facilitating dialogic spaces with participants so that desirable structural, systemic, and relationship goals can be met. Negative and Positive Peace, and Structural Conflicts Johan Galtung (1969), a pioneer in the PACS field, also called by some, the father of modern peace research (Bishop & Coburn, 2010; Weber, 2004), articulated fundamental understandings around conflict and peacebuilding. His conceptualization, differentiating between negative peace as the absence of war and positive peace as well-functioning sustainable communities with equal opportunities and rights for all, also led to the development of the notion of structural conflict. More and more scholars in this interdisciplinary field explore not geopolitical and state-building issues but focus on “intractable” problems that emerge from violence that is structural in nature. Poverty and other systemic inequities that lead to homelessness, gendered violence, human trafficking and environmental conflicts are only a few examples of structural violence. Migration conflicts are structural in nature too as employment-related barriers in the case of skilled migrants are to a large extent a result of systemic gaps in immigration policy, such as a lack of coherence and streamlining between the objectives based on which individuals are invited into the country, and what follows thereafter. At the policy level, this would

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imply that there is a lack of much-needed synchronization between immigration policy and integration policy-including specifically in relation to labour market integration. Moreover, there is an absence of coordination between multiple stakeholders responsible for integrating and supporting newcomers and immigrants, for instance, employers, credentialing services and licensing bodies. Banerjee, in a recent op-ed for the Globe and Mail (Dec, 2022), refers to Canada’s unprecedented post-COVID-19 immigration targets—an anticipated 1.4 million new permanent residents to be welcomed by 2025—as a strategy to tease out all these mismatches between high-level policy thinking and the overwhelming realities on the ground, be they related to the oversupply of high-skilled labour; to the discounting of foreign qualifications even at a time of serious labour shortages (as in health care); or to the lack of infrastructure such as affordable housing and other supports needed in abundance-and this at a time when they are already in short supply across the country. This absence of accountability and the missing political will for problem solving is both inexplicable and unconscionable when the objectives (supposedly) at centre of immigration policy are, in the short term, addressing labour market shortages in the Canadian economy; and in the long term, these goals are, (or should be), directed toward nation building. For example, as discussed previously in this paper,  on the one hand, before granting permanent residency, the point system assesses and calibrates the value (of migrants) to the Canadian economy in terms of their human capital, like their language proficiency and their age, as well as their potential to contribute to Canada, skills based on their educational qualifications, their training, and the work experience they have acquired in their home country. In reality though, for highly qualified migrants, there is little connection between the promise of being valued and achieving success based on their human capital, and realities of what actually happens once those same individuals arrive in Canada. The terms of contract established so far suddenly change and employers come at hiring processes from a different suite of expectations, such as Canadian education, Canadian work experience, and soft skills (rather than the hard skills the point system evaluates them on). The systemic barriers are further exacerbated when other difficulties begin to pile up as a result of qualification recognition challenges, unfamiliar expectations within modes of job search, a hidden job market, as well as a demand for social and cultural capital (see Chap. 10). Newcomers and

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immigrants go through what Galtung (Galtung, 1969; Maley, 1985) characterizes as structural and indirect violence, going through disadvantages caused by racist structures that discriminate against them on account of their racialized identities, their ethnicity and outsider status, their accents, or simply their overall appearance. Basic Human Needs Theory Burton (1987) argues for a needs-based approach as one of the critical principles of the field of conflict analysis and resolution. Maslow (1943) conceptualizes human development as based on fulfilment of basic needs that he grouped under five headings: physiological, safety, belongingness/ love, esteem and self-actualization. Further, Rubenstein (2001) explains that for Burton and others (like Lederach and Galtung, 1980; Rosati et al., 1990), the “concept of basic human needs offered a possible method of grounding the field in a defensible theory of the person,” as against paradigms prevalent at the time that focused on geopolitics and post-war issues. Burton asserted his understanding of social conflicts as based on denial of basic human needs like identity-recognition, security and personal development, and, according to Rubenstein, the purpose of his view was that it would provide a relatively “objective” basis for understanding sources of social conflict, going beyond local political and cultural differences. Three fundamental sets of basic needs variables, or basic needs criteria, are analysed by Cavanaugh: acceptance needs (recognition of communal identity), access needs (effective participation in society) and security needs (physical security, housing and nutrition). Denial of means of access—for example participation in political, social and economic institutions—leads to grievances, which, if not addressed in a timely manner, can lead to social conflict (Cavanaugh, 2000). The application of the above analysis in the context of economic migrants is on target as their aspirational goals are grounded in identity-­ making through finding meaningful and sustainable employment. The model of “thriving” (Spreitzer et  al., 2005) is an important domain of inquiry in literature that further reiterates this connection. Thriving as situated in the world of work relates to “feeling energised and being valued,” and as a consequence, about self-development, and actualization, meaning-making and well-being just as in the field of medicine, “failure to

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thrive” is a term commonly used as a marker of poor health (Spreitzer et al., 2005: 158). According to Laclau (1996), “in many societies, the state is an instrument of domination by privileged ethnic groups who engage in a form of cultural despotism” (35, cited in Byrne & Irvin, 2000: 119). It might be a pertinent question to ask then, do economic integration challenges faced by visible minority migrants, and social conflicts that they may experience as a result, point a finger in the direction of the Canadian multicultural state? Multi-track Diplomacy for Conflict Transformation Botes’s (2003) description of “conflict transformation” is “value-laden,” (20) and it emphasizes systems change through moving from conflict-­ habituated systems to peace systems. He observes, “social conflicts that are deep-rooted or intractable get these names because the conflict has created patterns that have become part of social systems” (7). As articulated through multi-track diplomacy (see Diamond & McDonald, 1993), the notion of conflict transformation is an ongoing, continuous, and never-ending process (Galtung, 1996; Lederach, 1997), and it is a way to create “new relations, institutions, and visions” (Vayrynen 1999, cited in Botes, 2003: 7). The model of multi-track diplomacy—for addressing conflicts and seeking solutions-targets systemic change through using multiple tools, actors, and stakeholders. The term, made famous by Diamond and McDonald through the publication of their book by the same name in 1991, emphasizes the need for, and the critical significance of, cooperation and collaboration as a way to develop integrated frameworks for working together in order to transform intractable conflict situations and achieve sustainable peacebuilding. Nine tracks in all, relevant for sustainable conflict transformation, are identified and discussed in this model. The first two tracks comprise state actors like governments and non-government professionals that could come from a variety of fields, and with valuable experience that they could utilize to advise and support track one diplomats. The rest of the tracks include other stakeholders who play a significant role of influence in the community and the world at large, like businesses, civil society, educators, activists, religious groups, funders, and different forms of media, including social media.

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One of the crucial gaps within systems that facilitate immigration and settlement in the case of economic migrants in Canada is the absence of synchronization between different processes, and multiple stakeholders that must indeed  work together so that seamless and timely delivery of programming, services, and policy initiatives can be ensured as and when needed by newcomers at every stage. The model of multi-track diplomacy described above is a useful framework that can provide direction regarding fostering cooperation and collaboration between stakeholders like all levels of government (track one), as well as the non-profit settlement sector (track two), and all the other tracks. Some examples of these would be employers in businesses and in the private sector; as well as the host society, especially if it practices ideologies that value welcoming communities (Esses et  al., 2010) as a way to facilitate two-way integration. Support could be provided by bodies that are ethno-cultural, and by religious communities; other cohorts like institutions that provide educational programmes, advocacy groups, corporate funders, and media organizations can also help to address anti-immigrant rhetoric that often creates a negative representation of immigrants.

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Hampshire, K., Iqbal, N., Blell, M., & Simpson, B. (2012). The interview as narrative ethnography: Seeking and shaping connections in qualitative research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 1–17. Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (1997). Active interviewing. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research: Theory, method, and practice (113–129). Sage Publications. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-­r efugees-­c itizenship/corporate/ publications-­manuals/operational-­bulletins-­manuals/temporary-­residents/ foreign-­workers/regulated-­certified-­occupations.html Krishnamurti, S. (2013). Queue-jumpers, terrorists, breeders: Representations of Tamil migrants in Canadian popular media. South Asian Diaspora, 5(1), 139–157. Kumar, A. (2020). How visible minority immigrant professionals experience their employment settlement in Winnipeg: Looking through a practice-based lens, seeking solutions. (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Manitoba). https://mspace. lib.umanitoba.ca/ser ver/api/core/bitstreams/0b8d35e9-­c 16d-­4 653-­ bd35-­4b4fccac8f7b/content Lai, D.  W. L., Shankar, J., & Khalema, E. (2017). Unspoken skills and tactics: Essentials for immigrant professionals in integration to workplace culture. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 18, 939–959. Lederach, J. P. (1995). Preparing for peace: Conflict transformation across cultures. Syracuse University Press. Lederach, J.  P. (1997). Building peace and sustainable reconciliation in divided societies. US Institute of Peace Press. Lederach, J.  P. (2005). The moral imagination: The art and soul of building peace. OUP. Lederach, J. P., Neufeldt, R., & Culbertson, H. (2007). Reflective peacebuilding: A planning, monitoring, and learning toolkit. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Madden, R. (2012). Being ethnographic: A guide to the theory and practice of ethnography (3rd ed.). Sage Publications. Maley, W. (1985). Peace, needs and utopia. Political Studies, 33(4), 578–591. Maslow, A.  H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–396. Miall, H. (2004). Conflict transformation: A multi-dimensional task. In A. Austin, M.  Fischer, & N.  Ropers (Eds.), Transforming ethnopolitical conflict: The Berghoff handbook. Moodley, K., & Adam, H. (2012). Shifting boundaries and flexible identities within a multicultural Canada. Intercultural Education, 23(5), 425–436. Posner, P.  L. (2009). An agenda for re-engaging practitioners and academics. Public Budgeting and Finance, 29(1), 12–26.

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Reitz, J.  G. (2001). Immigrant skill utilization in the Canadian labour market: Implications of human capital research. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2, 347–378. Rita Claes, S., & Quintanilla, A. R. (1994). Initial career and work meanings in seven European countries. The Career Development Querterly, 42(4), 337–352. Rosati, J. A., Carroll, D. J., & Coate, R. A. (1990). A critical assessment of the power of human needs in world society. In J.  Burton & F.  Dukes (Eds.), Conflict: Readings in management and resolution. The Conflict Series. Palgrave Macmillan. Rothman, J. (Ed.). (2012). From identity-based conflict to identity-based cooperation: The ARIA approach in theory and practice. Springer. Rubenstein, R. E. (2001). Basic human needs: The next steps in theory development. The International Journal of Peace Studies, 6(1), 51–58. Schnell, T., Höge, T., & Pollet, E. (2013). Predicting meaning in work: Theory, data, implications. Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(6), 543–554. Senehi, J. (2000). Constructive storytelling in intercommunal conflicts: Building community, building peace. In S.  Byrne & C.  L. Irvine (Eds.), Reconcilable Differences: Turning Points in Ethnopolitical Conflicts. Kumarian Press. Spreitzer, G., Sutcliffe, K., Dutton, J., Sonenshein, S., & Grant, A. M. (2005). A socially embedded model of thriving at work. Organization Science, 16(5), 537–549. Tedlock, B. (2005). The observation of participation and the emergence of public ethnography. In Y. S. Lincoln (Ed.), The sage handbook of qualitative research. Sage Publications. Weber, T. (2004). The impact of Gandhi on the development of Johan Galtung’s peace research. Global Change, Peace & Security, 16(1), 31–43. Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201. Volpe, M., & Chandler, D. (2001). In practice: Resolving and managing conflicts in academic communities: The emerging role of the pracademic. Negotiation Journal, 17(3), 245–255.

CHAPTER 12

On Blackness and Related Subjects: Concluding Conversation Ademola Adesola, Adey Mohamed, Christiane Ndedi Essombe, and Benjamin Maiangwa



Setting the Tone

Altogether, the volume presents a series of questions and interventions around the intersection of race, (de)territorialization, and migration specifically from Black positionalities. It reflects on the meanings of identity, home, and belonging in relation to contemporary Black experiences. In doing this, it offers important arguments about the uses, misuses, and limits of identity as a grammar of analysis. It accordingly offers both understanding and addresses solutions beyond the crises of modernity and

A. Adesola (*) Department of English, Languages, and Cultures, Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] A. Mohamed Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice, St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_12

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coloniality. The contributors engage with transdisciplinary scholarship to think through the Black experiences of home and displacement in Canada while, simultaneously, holding valence and relevance across the global postcolony. It is this focus on blackness that inspires this concluding conversation. The conversation aims to bring together some of the contradictions of the Black experience from the personal (i.e., emotional and affective dimensions of the lived experiences of the contributors) to the structural (the responses of the state institutions of power and control in less liberatory terms). The conversation was conducted on Zoom on June 20, 2021. The panelists included Benjamin Maiangwa (Moderator, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Lakehead University), Christiane Ndedi Essombe (Panelist, PhD Candidate in Psychology, University of Cape Town), Adey Mohammad (Panelist, PhD Candidate in Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Manitoba), and Ademola Adesola (Assistant Professor of English, Mount Royal University), who wrote the following introductory and conclusive notes. As already noted, at the heart of this conversation is the Black experience. In other words, the manifold experiences of peoples racially inauspiciously identified as Blacks in different parts of the human world. Crucial to those often-troubling experiences is the matter of the vexing concern of belonging. Why the resentment against blackness? Why is Black presence in varied places of the world considered improper, unbelonging, and outof-place? What fuels and reinforces the anti-blackness stances of times past and present? While these questions are age-long and, as such, are not new, their being raised and examined in this conversation helps to underscore the unrelenting pushbacks against the unconditional acceptance of Black peoples as full-fledged human beings. The engagement with blackness and

C. Ndedi Essombe Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] B. Maiangwa Department of Political Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

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the multivarious difficult experiences of Black peoples in this conversation reminds us that the project of multiculturalism in places like Canada is still zillions of kilometers away from the point of complete accomplishment that most Canadians wax eloquent about. As the scholar and fiction writer, David Chariandy, sees it, multiculturalism is “a policy and act that has often been celebrated as a unique ‘success’ by Canadians themselves and touted, across the world, as Canada’s ideological gift to less enlightened liberal democracies” (2007: 818). This understanding of the policy by most Canadians politely trivializes (i.e., whenever it deigns to acknowledge) the unpleasant experiences of the Black inhabitants of this superficially inclusive Canadian space and inconsiderately ignores the constant exposure of that policy as a forming aspiration rather than a settled reality. Although in the prematurely celebrated multicultural landscape of Canada, Black people are present as a visible minority group, the antiBlack racist structure and disposition therein make it impossible for this group to feel a true sense of belonging. The gradually increasing presence of Black peoples in Canada’s mosaic of racial and ethnic conurbations, through immigration and birth, simultaneously refreshes the long-existing animus of anti-blackness and invites attention to the erroneous notion that one’s physical presence within a given nation space necessarily proves that one belongs in and to that place. The four Black academics involved in this conversation bear witness to the un-belongingness of their own blackness and that of their fellow Black folks across Canada. It is noteworthy that all four have their provenance in what Valentin-Yves Mudimbe refers to as an invented Africa. Achille Mbembe speaks of that Africa, understood in “modern consciousness” as “the name generally given to societies that are judged impotent—that is, incapable of producing the universal and of attesting to its existence” (2017: 49). Back in their varied countries in that invented Africa they neither identified themselves as Blacks nor did they worry about its attributes. But they learned in Canada and in their other places of sojourn outside Africa that they are Black and that identity constitutes them, as a French traveler, Francois Le Vaillant, reported in his 1790 travel chronicle, as “the most atrocious creature[s] of the human race,” a kind of unsightly, indelible stain on the pristine canvass of humanity (cited in Achille Mbembe, 2017: 73). Further to this attribution of blackness is their individual but similar experience of the racist, absurd idea that to be Black is to be inferior (largely to another fantastical invention, whiteness or White person), uncivilized, dangerous, and bound to violence.

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Like many other Black peoples resident in White spaces, these four scholars have at various times encountered and endured the stings of the seemingly innocuous “elsewhere/origin question,” the one, to use Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, that “not-quite-not-citizens” (1993) are confronted with—“where are you (originally/really) from?” (Maiangwa, 2023). This pervasive but often misplaced question, which as Black scholar Debra Thompson argues, serves to remind the Black individual to whom the question is directed of their unbelonging to the place they reside in or are born into. Thompson examines that question thus: “Where are you really from, because I can see that you’re not one of us. Where are you really from, because you don’t seem to fit in here. Where are you really from, because how long you’ve been here will tell me something about your place in this country. […] Where are you really from because you can’t possibly be from here” (2022: 20). The where-are-you-from question is pernicious in its pathologizing of racial differences and reification of antiblackness. It seeks to always remind the Black body of its assumed origin elsewhere and maintains Black presence in Canada as awkward and discomfiting (Wright, 2022; Maiangwa, 2023). The participants in this conversation are unmistakable in their articulations of the fact that (their) Black experiences and those of others within Canada and elsewhere are not the same as those of non-Black peoples. In their wrestling with the notion of blackness, Black experiences, and Black Belonging, their Canadian experiences as Black humans provide a platform on which they theorize and reflect on the fate and state of blackness in other places. Their conversation on those outlined subjects does not take place in a vacuum; it exists within the discursive spaces that different generations of Black thinkers and writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Chinua Achebe, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Dereck Walcott, Rinaldo Walcott, Afua Cooper, Cornel West, Dionne Brand, among other countless notable Black studies scholars and critics, command fascinatingly critical and ideational presences in. While this conversation participates in the exercise of thinking about the same subjects as these Black writers and thinkers, it does not go deeper in certain respects. Surely, it has its gaps and, in that sense, invites critiques. >>> That is where the group of four left the conversation. For many reasons having to do with individual commitments and the demands of

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back-to-back deadlines, no other meeting for the continuation of this conversation on blackness and belonging or other components of it have taken place before this publication. Could it also be that we took time off because of the heaviness of our subject? Without any doubt, any conversation about alienation, violence, and dehumanization is never a pleasant engagement. But difficult and traumatizing as these subjects may be, they require constant attention. Why? The thinking that produced slavery, colonialism, racism and, to sum it up, the unfounded fear of the Other, especially the Black Other, remains venerated. It is still alive even though it has assumed a different shade. In other words, anti-blackness and its violent “civilizing mission” is still active. As this conversation shows, Black children are not only witnesses to the existence of this anti-Black attitudes, but they are also being impacted by it. Being born in Canada (think also of any other non-Black spaces) or the length of years they have spent within it does not shield them from worrying about the vexatious problem of belonging. They have the myth that is multiculturalism in Canada to contend with, for the implementation of that policy conceals as much as it dissimulates. It ignores the colonial violence, race, and racial ladders that enabled the creation of the country and its policies. The cultural medley of this country, as it is those of other Western nations, is far from being vertical. It remains rigidly horizontal and hierarchical, but “the real inequality of power [and unacceptance of the Other is] hidden by the multicultural cloak” (Kogila Moodley, 1983: 325). Were there a subsequent conversation, it would have included other topics damasked by the multicultural cloak. Anti-Black policing would have been one of them. And given that all discussants are eggheads, their experiences as graduate students and professors in Canadian academy, “where blackness creates discomfort,” would have been another focus (Ibrahim et al., 2022: 7). These are topical issues. Among numerous others, Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives (2017) and the collected essays, Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy: Teaching, Learning, and Researching While Black (2022), edited by Awad Ibrahim, et al., underline the relevance and topicality of those issues. Additionally, the quartet would possibly have given thought to anti-Black immigration policy, incarceration of Black bodies (broadly conceived), and experiences of Black people in other work areas. All are areas where many Black scholars, activists, and critics are laboring assiduously. It is fitting to close by noting that this conversation on blackness and belonging hints at the resilience of Black peoples in the face of an

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unrelenting force of dehumanization. The negative understanding of blackness, its suppression, and baseless terrorizing notwithstanding, Black peoples continue to assert and affirm their humanity. The poem below by one of the foursomes in this conversation (Ademola Adesola) speaks to the belief and the clarion call of Black peoples in nations like Canada; it provides a vision of what a genuine multicultural space looks like: I Too Deserve to Breathe Breathing isn’t a chocolate car fit for the smooth road of your tongue alone; You can’t breathe freely if I can’t breathe. For the wellness of our beings, I too deserve to breathe. I too deserve to breathe. When I ask you to give up your old way of privileging your own body, I express my inalienable right to breathe. I too deserve to breathe. When I say your policies are choking me, I affirm my power to breathe. I too deserve to breathe. When I demand you take down walls of division, I proclaim the freedom of everyone to breathe unconstrainedly. I too deserve to breathe. When I say all peoples deserve to breathe, I speak of breathing as a human necessity and not a privilege to be allowed some against others. Who deserves to breathe? You, I, he she, they, it, and we. Homosexuals, heterosexuals, the religious, the atheists, the political, the apolitical, the affluent, the impoverished  – think any human; include any non-human being. When I breathe, you breathe. When she breathes, he breathes. When we breathe, you breathe.

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When they breathe, we breathe. When it breathes, we all breathe. Let’s breathe individually; let’s breathe collectively. In our rainbow breathings are assured our continuous beings.

References Chariandy, D. (2007). “The fiction of belonging”: On second-generation black writing in Canada. Callaloo, 30(3), 816–829. Ibrahim, A., Kitossa, T., Smith, M.  S., & Wright, H.  K. (2022). Introduction. Nuances of blackness in the Canadian academy: Teaching, learning, and researching while black (pp. 3–14). U of T Press. Maiangwa, B. (2023). Where are you really from? Review of African political economy (ROAPE) blog, March 9th, 2023. Where are you really from? – ROAPE. Mbembe, A. 2017. Critique of black reason. DUP Moodley, K. (1983). Canadian multiculturalism as ideology. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 6(3), 320–331. Mudimbe, V.-Y. (1988). The invention of Africa. IUP. Spivak, G. (1993). Outside the teaching machine. Routledge. Thompson, D. (2022). The long road home: On blackness and belonging. Simon & Schuster. Wright, H. K. (2022). The awkward presence of blackness in the Canadian academy. In A. Ibrahim, T. Kitossa, M. S. Smith, & H. K. Wright (Eds.), Nuances of blackness in the Canadian academy: Teaching, learning, and researching while black (pp. 23–44). U of T Press.



Spider Web and Dew Drops Laure Paquette

Life sometimes provides where the academy does not. When I was already in phased retirement, I met a brilliant new hire in my former department. I invited Benjamin (whom I will later refer to as Ben) to dinner sight unseen, because I knew what it was like to move for the umpteenth time. This led to many wonderful conversations on issues I had never thought about and quite a bout of reading on my part. Peace and conflict studies—Ben’s field of study—were fairly well represented in the collective libraries of Ontario universities. Studies in African humanities were not: seven books total! But Ben would make casual references to the elasticity of African philosophy which hinted at vast differences with the bifurcated either-or western philosophy. So, I embarked on a course of reading, much of it pell-mell and in no particular order, on the shores of Lake Superior during the summer of 2022: William Abraham’s Mind of Africa, Irele’s Companion to African Philosophy from 2006, Floistad’s African Philosophy from 1987, Mungwini’s African Philosophy, Amo’s books, Kwasi Wiredu’s work, and that of Leopold Senghor as well, to me, a accomplished poet than a polemicist. I was gob smacked. First, I was shocked at the assumptions by earlier western philosophers, who seemed surprised to find there were Africans who could think. Bernal’s Black Athena to the rescue. Second, I winced at the very thought

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Maiangwa (ed.), The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race, and Belonging, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5

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of the formidable methodological problems posed when trying to understand African philosophy using western philosophical methods. There was no way the wealth and the complexity of the African paradigm could be captured by a foreign tool. Third, I wanted to see if there was a relationship or at least a point of meeting between the two? Could they understand each other? Personally, I was stuck at the realization that the content of African philosophy could not accurately be represented by delineated units. And how could I relate one to the other? I could barely picture in my mind what the content was. This is what I spent the most time thinking about. Epistemology has interested me since my undergraduate days, but I had to be honest. I couldn’t understand easily half the material presented by the African philosophers since the twentieth century; I who had plowed through so much of Ancient and European philosophy for the sake of professional development. I had trouble putting African philosophy into the existing structure of my own western circumscribed mind—it was so dramatically different from what I already knew. In a sense, I was suffisante. I thought I had done very well as an intellectual. With that mindset, I was forcing African philosophy to fit into my structure of thinking, not the other way around. I tried to avoid this problem but failed. I initially put away my books, but my friendship with Ben, and an upcoming kaffeeklatsch with him, put these questions back on focus for me. I had to come off my perch of ‘pure reason’, which I was trained to value as superior by the colonialist education that I, a self-identified Métis, had received. Although I identify as Métis, my family has always denied its Aboriginal heritage, and I came to discover my identity through my spirituality. Groomed for the identity of French Canadian, or a pure laine in the local expression, I nonetheless slowly discovered I had spiritual experiences in common with First Nations people. Through visions, I eventually found the clan to which I belong, the deer; the Algonquin warriors of my clan; my spirit name, Eau claire; and my Aboriginal ancestors. This always occurred through my many times alone in the untouched Canadian wilderness, fortunately so close at hand where I live. Shaken in what I had always thought of as my core identity, I came to value greatly this aspect of myself, for are any of us ever any one thing? And I find this now to be a source of strength and joy. In my society, I soon learned, about half of the self-identified Métis have discovered their roots for the first time in the last seven years! What price colonialism?

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What price indeed. I realized how much pain the denial of who I was had caused me and others and what colonialism did to me, having lived with an unnamed part of myself and unknowingly passing for white, like at least three generations of my family before me, and like my relatives still living today. But I now look at all this pain and appreciate the possibilities of the seeds that can grow from it. Among so many others, I found myself wondering how one current of philosophy could relate to the other, what the relationship could be between the two, and where to slot in among the other knowledge I had acquired. I partook in these mental gymnastics without quite realizing it. Over the course of a few weeks, however, I did come to realize it. At first, I thought again of my reading of Heidegger’s complete works in three languages. I was reading him because my mentor had asked me to see if he had indeed provided support for National Socialism. He had. It was the hardest puzzle I had ever tried to figure out. Heidegger himself claimed to have begun a new kind of philosophy, but I found this not to be true. What he had done was change the point of view between the philosopher and the object of the philosopher’s inquiry. Before Heidegger, the philosopher was looking at the object from the outside, at some perceptible distance. With Heidegger, however, the philosopher could situate themselves where the object was and look out into the rest of the universe. But it was still fundamentally operating with limited concepts, ideas, objects, and boundaries. What I found liberating with African philosophy and worldview is that its essence is richer and more complex, because it did not have boundaries around its content. It had a continuum in multiple dimensions. My mind boggled, but that thought led me to think of Einstein’s relativity. Yes, that famous metaphor of a rubber sheet with balls of steel whose weight deformed it. Back in my undergraduate days, I had realized that it was not just physics but epistemology that could work that way. But if the African philosophical content I just mentioned could not be encapsulated or thought of as circumscribed units, Einstein’s rubber sheet would not work either. And yet, the philosophy originating in Europe did work with circumscribed units. Then an image came to me: a beautiful spider web covered in dewdrops. To me, at least, African philosophy would be like that: a spider web, beautiful, supple, but not in two dimensions or three, as we see in nature. It would have to be in as many dimensions as could be imagined, each dimension representing a continuum of content that evolve in time and

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place. I could at that point only think of one, the one built along the dynamics between the community and the individual. This image also captured the fact that one continuum would be in relation to all the others. This was so much more than Einstein’s metaphor. In my bid to draw the connection between my western standpoint and emerging education in African philosophy, I thought that the ideas of western philosophy were like dew drops sparkling all over the web: different sizes, different weights and therefore impacts on continua, different locations, contributing to the beauty of the web, but also its destruction. Together, they are a thing of delicacy, dignity, and great beauty. This spider web could support the dewdrops up to a point, but of course it had been damaged and sometimes destroyed by a water cannon. European philosophy would have become no stronger than a mist if it was to respect the spider web. And, of course, the spider web could understand the dew drops, but it was much harder for the dew drops to understand the web on which they rested. Dewdrops could otherwise land gently in the web, and the web could be rebuilt. I thought of the richness of the contribution the web could make to the world in which the dewdrops lived. I also thought the web would find it easier to understand the dewdrops than the other way around. And I thought the dewdrops would need to be a lot more open to the beauty of this intricate, pluri-dimensional spider web than it has been with the water cannons of the past. I write this after swearing off my academic career with my last book, published a few months ago. I have been winding down that career for a number of years and devoting my time to the arts and to literature. I was in the middle of developing a major art installation with my paintings and compositions; I was getting ready to perform Chopin at my professor’s studio recital. But I was drawn to this piece after series of conversations with Ben, igniting an interest and introspection on our mutual humanity and what we can each learn from the other given our murky history. I read the controversial UNESCO History of Africa in eight volumes and in particular the chapter on the demographic impact of the slave trade. I also knew but never gave the impacts of this history much mind. But now I must confront it and all its corollary violence and damages to Africa. Yes, my Caucasian forbears have much to account for at the bar of history. More than that, they and their heirs have much to learn from the richness and beauty of the web that will not disintegrate because of its deep spirituality that offers a space of dwelling for all.

Index1

A Advocacy, 215, 240 Africa, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75–77, 79, 80 African continent, 64, 67, 97 African descent, 46, 75, 113 African literatures, 66, 67, 250 Africanness, 77, 115, 117, 119, 123, 253 African personhood, 101 Afro-Caribbean, 253 Afrocentric, 98 Afrophobia, 100, 111n1 Akan, 84 Animalized, 46 Animals, 46 Anti-blackness, 113n3, 124, 246 Anti-Black policing, 262 Aotearoa, 178 Ashanti, 84 Atlantic slave trade, 91

B Bahá’í, 154 Being and becoming, 100 Belonging, 63–77, 82, 111–113, 118, 122–124, 126, 200, 201, 203, 206, 217, 228, 232 Bernstein, M., 33 Bilge, S., 31, 34 BIPOC, 158 Black, 2, 77, 81, 111–126, 229 body, 250 experience, 246 identity, 250 Black-Americans, 2 Black Lives Matter Movement, 252 Blackness, 96, 112, 114, 115, 117, 121, 123, 124, 246

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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Black scholars, 123, 262 Border, 5, 65, 113, 121, 228 Border walls, 7 Brexit, 5 British-Canadian, 47 Brunila, K., 34 Byrne, S., 39, 239 C Cameroon, 50 Canada, 67, 73, 75, 76, 111–126, 199, 201–205, 213, 223–226, 228–232, 234, 236, 237, 240 Canadian academy, 262 Canadians, 46, 75, 112, 123–125, 223–240 Capitalism, 4, 73 Capitalist, 49 Capitalist materialism, 261 Careers, 199, 207, 230–233 Cavanaugh, K. A., 25, 26, 238 Chandler, D., 25, 224 Chopra, D., 39 Cis-gender, 158n13 Citizenship, 112, 125, 179 Clash of civilizations, 6 Colonialism, 66, 68, 77, 80, 83, 129, 130, 134, 138, 141, 147, 225 Colonization, 111n1, 119 Colonizing, 165 Color-blindness, 47 Color-silence, 47 Congenital deformity, 167 Congo, 100 COVID-19 pandemic, 67, 177 Creator, 155, 162 Credentials, 205 Culture, 64, 65, 72, 182

D Dark continent, 80 Decolonization, 13 Decolonize, 58 Definition and the five stages of perception, 36 Dege, M., 33 Deglobalizing, 7 Democracy, 65, 94 Diasporas/migration, 74, 75, 82, 130, 132–134, 136, 138, 146, 225 Diasporic belonging, 7 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 83 Divide and rule, 81 Dominator culture, 165 Double consciousness, 68, 162 E Economic integration, 200, 223, 225, 231, 239 Employment, 200, 203–205, 208, 212, 214, 216, 224–226, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238 Enslavers, 2 Epistemological ethnocentrism, 252 Ethnicity, 2, 225, 234, 238 Ethnocentrism, 4 Euro-Canadian, 47 European ancestry, 46, 50 European colonialism, 92, 95 European colonization, 82 Excluded, 216 Exclusion, 68, 112, 120, 122n12, 124, 200, 231, 232 F Feminist, 181, 227 French, 53, 70, 79

 INDEX 

G Gender, 83 Gendered, 70, 153, 236 Geographical, 185, 228 Globalizing, 7 Global political community, 13 Global South, 130, 142 Golden Stool, 84 Good Life, 4 H Hanh, T. N., 38, 39 Heart of Darkness, 80 Hernandez, L., 39 Heteronormative, 46 Heteronormativity, 260 Hill Collins, P., 31, 34 His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 39 Home, 2, 64, 67–71, 73, 75, 77, 82, 111, 111n1, 112, 122n11, 125, 126, 225, 229, 235, 237 Homesickness, 179 Homogenous associations, 207 Homophobia, 158 Homophobic, 259 Humanity, 74, 112, 121, 154 I Ideology, 76, 155, 232, 240 Illegal migrants, 6 Immigrants, 71, 73, 81, 111–126, 199, 204, 205, 212, 223–240 Immigration, 5, 7, 72, 112, 113, 202, 231, 234, 236, 237, 240 Immigration policy, 231, 234, 236, 237, 262 Inclusion, 125, 214, 217, 225 Independence, 69, 76, 93 Indian Ocean, 57 Inequality, 120, 122, 125, 209

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Injustice, 119, 212 Inner diaspora, 162 Integration, 205, 213, 217, 225, 226, 228–232, 234, 235, 237, 240 Intersectional belonging, 184 Islam, 96 J Jeong, H. W., 25 K Kenya, 254 Kovach, M., 33 L Lee, B. A., 34 LGBTQIA+, 257 M Male, 73, 85 Male supremacy, 157 Male, W., 238 Māori, 190 Matriarchy, 83 Matrilineal system, 84 Mau Mau, 97 Migrant, 5, 64, 68, 71–74, 228, 231, 232, 234–240 Migrant communities, 7, 234 Migrant women’s, 178 Migrations/diaspora, 64–69, 71, 72, 74–76, 129–132, 134–147, 223–225, 227–240 Misogyny, 154 Mobile people, 180 Moderator, 249 Modern Era, 92 Modernity, 82

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INDEX

Modern/new world, 69, 76, 81, 236 Moffitt, P., 36 Multicultural, 112, 120, 125, 234, 236, 239, 247 Multiculturalism, 65, 112, 116n4, 247 Multiple belonging, 185 Muslim, 96 Muslim woman, 254 N National identity, 64, 178 Nationalists, 4, 69 Nation-state, 70, 81, 234 Negro, 55, 117 Negrophobic, 100 Neo-racism, 7 Nervous conditions, 74, 80, 111–126 Newcomers, 200, 201, 204–206, 209, 212, 223, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 237, 240 New World, 91 Nigeria, 1, 72–75, 84, 100, 114–116, 121 Non-beings, 6, 119 Non-Black spaces, 262 Non-European, 92 O Oppression, 163, 164 Oppressor, 162 Optimism, 206 P Patriarchal, 45, 83 Patriarchy, 83, 154 Paul, K., 31, 34 Peacebuilding, 8, 233, 235–236, 239 Permanent minorities, 81

Phenotypical citizenship, 94 Physical borders, 100 Pigmentocracy, 94 Political communities, 7 Politics of belonging, 76, 181 Polkinghorn, B. D., 26, 27 Populist, 5 Positionality, 13, 225–227, 230, 231 Postcoloniality, 13 Postcolony, 3, 80 Prejudice, 155n4, 232 R Race, 2, 69, 114, 130–134, 137, 140, 143, 145–147, 232 Racialized, 77, 200, 203, 205, 223–240 Racism, 71, 75, 77, 102, 113, 117n5, 119, 120, 122–125, 122n10, 122n11, 155n4, 225, 232 Refugee, 6, 113, 234 Religion, 2 Rossi, L.-M., 34 Ruiz, M., 39, 232 S Sarma, 31 Savior-complex, 52 Schizophrenic personality, 167 Second sight, 162 Security dilemma, 6, 7 Senehi, J., 39, 234 Settled communities, 13 Settlers, 14, 81, 111 Settler states, 3 Sexist, 49, 157 Skin color, 96 Slavery, 66, 68, 69, 81

 INDEX 

Social enterprises, 200, 208, 210 Socio-economic, 199, 203, 204, 206, 212 South Africa, 100 Sovereignty, 100 Spaces, 70, 112, 113, 117, 120, 121, 124, 130–137, 139, 143–147, 178, 228, 229, 236 Stereotype, 48, 49 Structured ignorance, 165 Subaltern, 5 Superiority, 50 Supremacist, 45 Supremacist, capitalist, 55 Supremacist world, 51 T Taxation, 95 Third World, 80 Toxic masculinities, 158 Tragic duality, 167 Transatlantic slave trade, 82 Transnational identity, 179 Transphobic, 259 Trauma, 75, 163 Tribalism, 87 Tribe, 80 2SLGBTQA+, 158

273

U Unbelonging, 114, 246 Unequal, 211, 236 United Kingdom, 91 W Western civilization, 80 Western nations, 262 White, 2, 70, 73, 115–119, 121, 122, 122n10, 125 White-bodied, 156 Whited, 153, 155 Whited man, 154 Whiteness, 53, 54, 117, 118, 121–124, 154 White normativity, 46 White people, 51, 116, 119, 121, 122n10 White person, 51 White-presenting, 249 White supremacist, 45, 81 White supremacy, 122, 154 Wolff, S., 25, 30, 37 Women, 74, 84, 118n7, 224, 225 X Xenophobia, 101, 191 Xenophobic, 100