Paper short abstract:

This paper connects research work with Oromo diaspora communities in Europe to an ongoing study of African im/migrant organizations in Germany in order to better understand the relationships between indigeneity, Blackness, and diaspora.

Paper long abstract:

This paper connects research work with Oromo diaspora communities in Europe to an ongoing study of African im/migrant organizations in Germany in order to better understand the relationships between indigeneity, Blackness, and diaspora. The argument builds from a discussion of the concept of black, or guraacha, in the Oromo indigenous epistemology. Beyond a literal translation of the color or a specific racial category, guraacha is tightly linked Oromo concepts of self and other, and relationships with the world around. Throughout the move from Ethiopia to Europe, however, the meanings of guraacha and blackness are complicated by processes of racialization and ongoing anti-colonial struggles. Building from this conceptual frame, I make a broader case for a view of racialization that incorporates the specificities of Blackness and African Indigeneity. By viewing African diasporic lifeways as influenced by both Indigenous knowledges like guraacha and diasporic experiences of Blackness, the role of race can be more clearly explicated. Such an inquiry also clarifies how African indigeneity is (re)experienced and described in the European diaspora alongside and against experiences of Blackness. This approach to African Studies and African diaspora studies makes conceptual and theoretical space for meanings of race and racialization that are better in tune with the ways Blackness is lived and articulated across geographies.