Seeing and being the visualised 'Other': humanitarian representations and hybridity in African diaspora identities

ABSTRACT

This article examines how humanitarianism representations affect British Nigerian identities. It problematises the tendency within development literature to uncritically generalise British audiences of NGO representations as seemingly white. Studies further assume audiences interpret and are impacted by representations in largely undifferentiated ways. This assumption discounts the complexities and particularities of and within audiences and overlooks how humanitarian representations inform how (and why) audiences negotiate their racialised subjectivities. Applying Bhabha’s hybridity theory, this article reveals how Nigerian diaspora negotiate racialised identities vis-à-vis humanitarian representations in distinct and revelatory ways, including along the lines of social class. These Nigerian subject-makings are contingencies against problematic portrayals of Black African poverty and perceived racism mediated by whiteness. While focused on Nigerians, this work has implications for the racialised realities of UK-based Black Africans.

KEYWORDS:

• Representations
• humanitarianism
• African diaspora
• Nigerian identities
• hybridity
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

I will like to extend my gratitude to my Ph.D. supervisors Uma Kothari and Dan Brockington who supported this research from which this paper is taken. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful and informative comments helped shape this paper and further develop my thinking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here, ‘whiteness’ is the omnipresent, invisible and unmarked standard with which non-white ‘others’ are judged and declared to deviate. It is a relational category that is parasitic on ‘Blackness’ (Willoughby-Herard 2015).

2. Here the term ‘ethnoracial’ is not just a portmanteau of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ but also refers to how Nigerians ethnic and racial identification are mutually-inclusive.

3. A Nigerian ethnolinguistic community.

4. Here, ‘race’ is a socially-constructed descriptor of skin colour.

5. The terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ are used to refer to common identity-based cultural considerations of people in (and part of) a given geographic region, including ancestry, heritage, language, and regional customs.

Additional information

Funding

The material is based upon PhD research supported by the Global Development Institute (GDI) - University of Manchester.