“Migrants With Attitude”: Shailja Patel and the Phenomenology of South Asian African Diasporas

Abstract

In her performance piece and book Migritude, Shailja Patel traces South-Asian diasporas in East Africa and her own migrations from Africa to England and the United States. This tracing stages the fraught and historical intimacies of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. East African Asian writers like M.G. Vassanji, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and others are similarly global and diasporic in scope. Yet, Patel's project Migritude refashions Négritude-era identity politics and engages the material histories of migration and Empire to challenge systemic violence against immigrants under neoliberal globalization. In this essay I analyze Shailja Patel's relationship to Négritude, migration in Patel's work, and conclude with remarks on the critique of gendering in migration and the promise of Patel's “migrant attitude.”