Future-oriented leisure as informal infrastructure in the Zimbabwean diaspora in Britain

This article analyses leisure among Zimbabweans in Britain as a field of practice through which racialised governance, belonging and transnational obligation are negotiated. It adopts a decolonial approach that treats leisure as an analytic for African diasporic life rather than a Western category separate from culture, survival or religion. Drawing on multi-moment ethnography in pubs, churches, domestic gatherings, gochi-gochi (barbecues) spaces and the Zimbabwe Vigil, it shows that sites often treated as ‘social’ are arenas where recognition, risk and claims-making are organised and where visibility is managed under uneven scrutiny. The article introduces the concept of future-oriented leisure to theorise how legal precarity reorganises leisure through deferral, rehearsals of anticipated status change and moral evaluation tied to work and remitting. It shows how these dynamics structure participation and shape performances of dignity, masculinity and respectability, reframing diasporic leisure as identity work and informal infrastructure central to migrant life rather than secondary to work, settlement or formal politics.