Diasporic Landscape: Theoretical Reflections on African Migrants' Everyday Practices of ‘Home’ and ‘Belonging’

Abstract

This paper utilises an inter-disciplinary approach that integrates transnationalism, diaspora and cultural geographical perspectives on landscape to propose diasporic landscape as a theoretical and analytical concept. It argues that research on African migration still suffers from the limitations imposed by theories that focus on linear processes and bounded conceptual frameworks. This paper draws on research with Ugandan migrants and their descendants in Britain, a diverse community encompassing a variety of migration trajectories. It traces the evolution of the concept of diasporic landscape to ground symbolic and material transnational enactments across space, place and time. Diasporic landscape as a concept reveals migrants' textual practices through a discursive terrain that highlights complex migration and integration dynamics through migrants' everyday practices of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’.

Keywords:

• Diasporic Landscape
• Ugandan Migrants
• Transnationalism
• Diaspora
• African Migration
• Belonging

Notes

[1] Meanwhile, Mercer (2002) favours a conceptualisation that begins with a view of landscapes as ‘contested networks of material-semiotic relationships, […] (both the work of hands and minds) […] provisional alliances between people and things, and contested representations viewed from a necessarily situated perspective’ (2002: 42). He suggests a strengthening of this dialectic tension by incorporating ‘the agency of the landscape itself, animated by the ongoing struggles over both a landscape's material-semiotic territory and semiotic-material meaning’ (2002: 42).

[2] The Baganda are the ethnic group that dominates the central region of Uganda that also hosts the capital Kampala. Their Kingdom is called Buganda, the King is called the Kabaka and the term Muganda refers to an indigene of Buganda.