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

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’.