The Western Indian Ocean African Diaspora and #BlackLivesMatter: Situating Siddi, Sheedi, and Ceylon African Struggles and Politics

This article is based on a content analysis of eight digital news reports published between June 2020 and March 2021 that link anti-Blackness in South Asia to the concerns of #BlackLivesMatter following George Floyd’s murder and the heightened global attention to issues of anti-Black racism against African Americans. In this study, I ask the following questions regarding these news reports: (1) How do these accounts present Afrodiasporic communities in South Asia relative to the concerns of #BlackLivesMatter? (2) What kind of impact does the use of #BlackLivesMatter to bring attention to South Asia’s racism have on Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon African communities? This paper contributes additional interpretive and analytical material to scholarship on racialization in South Asian societies, political intimacies between Afrodiasporic communities in geographically disparate parts of the world, and the need for cultural validity in journalistic accounts engendering #BlackLivesMatter to legitimate the connective tissue of this global Black political movement.