This course is for those shaped by diaspora – not as a static category but as a lived dissonance. It’s for people who have been asked to perform belonging in cultures that have erased them, and for those who have inherited too many origin stories without a clear place to land. Whether you were born into the in-between or cast into it by war, adoption, mission, or migration.
We begin by unravelling what it means to be “from” somewhere you don’t quite belong to. Drawing from Hall, Gilroy, and our own framing of “postcolonial orphanhood,” we name the longing, code-switching, and dislocation that haunts diasporic identity.
This session traces how race is read, misread, and internalised – especially in missionary or mixed-ethnic contexts. You bring in your concept of the “epistemic violence of belonging,” and we explore how whiteness, brownness, and blackness are not only social categories but embodied scripts.
We turn to the role of religion in shaping diasporic subjectivity. Using your critique of missionary erasure and inherited theological dissonance, we ask: what happens when faith becomes both anchor and weapon? What do we reclaim, discard, or reimagine?
Finally, we map the ethics of naming our own location, not as fixed identity but as fragile claim. Drawing on your work on narrative as epistemic justice, we practise the art of speaking across contradiction, without resolving it.
Diaspora is not a backdrop – it is the psychic infrastructure of millions. Yet dominant models of identity still hinge on fixed roots, flags, and neat labels. For racialised and displaced subjects, these frameworks fall apart. Drawing from your own critique of “inherited displacement” and the violence of tidy narratives, this course creates space for polyphonic truths, unresolved contradictions, and the echo of migration’s afterlife.
This 4-week Action Learning Set runs as a live, online cohort. Weekly 90-minute sessions blend critical discussion, reflective writing, and embodied noticing. The space is lightly held, trauma-aware, and rooted in dialogue, not diagnosis. Participants also receive access to a private digital space for gentle exchange and curated readings.
Tone: philosophically rigorous, emotionally spacious, politically grounded.
diaspora postcolonial belonging religious rupture hybridity narrative identity racialised subjectivity migration & meaning
