African Asylum Claiming in the Age of Trump

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Department of African American and African Studies
Special Afternoon Colloquium
Thursday April 25th 3:10-4:30
Hart Hall 3114
African Asylum
Claiming
in the Age of Trump
Benjamin Lawrance (University of Arizona)
Recent developments in asylum and refugee mobilities in the US and elsewhere provide
a framework for understanding Trump era immigration enforcement priorities. Drawing
on real case histories of Africans seeking protection, this talk examines asylum
applications as historical legal transcripts of torture, persecution, and gender-based
violence. Legal transcripts have served as part of the bedrock of African social,
economic, and legal history for decades, transforming scholarly understanding of many
dimensions of the colonial African experience, such as gender relations, marriage and
divorce, and labor coercion (Burrill 2007, 2016; Lydon 2005, 2007; Roberts 2005; Rodet
2012; Thornberry 2018), and contributing to the theorization of colonial state power
(Chanock 1982, 1985) and its contestation (Saho 2018). This talk uses legal transcripts
as a source of evidence and as a theorization of agency, voice, and subjectivity for
contemporary African asylum claiming, in the context of increasing digital dispersal of
court records under Presidents Obama and Trump.
Benjamin N. Lawrance is Professor of African History at
the University of Arizona and the Editor-in-Chief of
the African Studies Review, the flagship journal of the
African Studies Association (USA). He is the author and
editor of eleven books, among them Amistad’s
Orphans (Yale 2014) and most recently Africans in Exile,
with Nathan Carpenter (Ohio 2018). A recipient of
research support from the NEH, the ACLS, and the UC
President’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, he has
served as an expert in more than 450 immigration cases
in the US and elsewhere.