African Identities

Performing diasporic belonging: The experiences of African migrants in Europe

Belonging in migratory contexts is neither static nor singular. It is shaped by histories of colonial entanglements, racialisation, migration governance and transnational connections (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). African migrants in Europe enact, perform and contest their belonging through linguistic practices (Blommaert, 2010), sport, music, literature, heritage practices, visual culture and other forms in their everyday social life. It is performed in aesthetic expression, negotiated in institutional settings and experienced through processes of both inclusion and exclusion (Brah, 1996; Hall, 1990; Zeleza, 2005).

Africans constitute a significant and growing presence across Europe. The current realities in Europe (e.g., the intensification of far-right politics across the continent, increasingly restrictive migration governance regimes, and renewed public debate about race, citizenship and national identity) make critical scholarly engagement with African diasporic experiences in Europe both timely and urgent (Lentin, 2020; De Genova, 2017). This context provides fertile ground for comparative and interdisciplinary reflection on how diasporic belonging is constructed, experienced and contested by African migrants within different sociocultural and political landscapes across Europe.

Bringing together researchers from across different disciplines, this special issue will explore how African diasporic subjectivities in Europe represent themselves and are represented across expressive domains. By foregrounding ‘performance’ as both metaphor and analytical lens, this special issue aims to examine the many manifestations and representations of belonging in the lived realities of Africans in Europe. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars, Performing Diasporic Belonging seeks to deepen critical understanding of how African migrants in Europe enact, contest and reimagine belonging in contemporary Europe.

We particularly encourage submissions from early career researchers whose work engages empirical research and/or theoretical approaches to African diasporic belonging in Europe.

This special issue is planned to emerge from a dedicated interdisciplinary symposium. Rather than soliciting papers independently, we have designed a structured process in which the symposium functions as a collaborative workshop: accepted contributors will circulate full draft papers in advance, engage in substantive peer dialogue at the event, and then revise for journal submission. This integrated approach, where the symposium and the special issue are conceived as a single scholarly endeavour rather than separate activities, is intended to produce more rigorously developed, dialogically informed work than conventional special issue processes allow. This model reflects our conviction that the ‘best’ scholarship emerges from interdisciplinary conversations of this nature.

We invite submissions for an interdisciplinary symposium exploring how African migrants in Europe represent, perform and negotiate belonging across diverse social, cultural, political, educational, institutional, etc contexts. The symposium will take place at SOAS University of London on 3rd September 2026.