Harry Kiiru

Harry Kiiru is a PhD candidate in the Department of African Cultural Studies with a minor in African American Studies. His dissertation titled The Culturally and Racially Body in Motion: How Sub-Saharan African Immigrants Become Black in the United States, is a study of the new African diaspora’s racialization processes of incorporation into the ethno-racial hierarchal order within the United States and how they negotiate this identity. The study begins with the 1959-63 East African Students’ Airlift which saw almost eight hundred students attend schools in the U.S. and Canada. The Airlift as a concrete historical moment allows me to construct a periodization that runs from the 1950s to the present. Methodologically, he employs a mixed-method approach, incorporating archival research, African migrant literature and filmic analysis, and self-ethnography.