Shalini Puri - Springer LINK

321© The Author(s) 2016G.J. Hosein, L. Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, New Caribbean Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1

I joined the conversation on Indo-Caribbean feminisms about twenty-fi ve years ago. A South Asian scholar trained in postcolonial studies in a North American academic institution, I was motivated among other things by the belief that comparative and south-south scholarship could be impor-tant forms of solidarity. I also wrote in resistance to the then-dominant episteme of cultural hybridity and the disproportionate emphasis on India in postcolonial studies, and from appreciation of the profoundly creative political and artistic energies of the contemporary Caribbean.

I fi rst presented my work to a Caribbean audience in 1995, at a largely celebratory fi ve-day Indian diaspora conference at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine; it was a conference that largely bypassed ques-tions of power and inequality within the Indo-Caribbean community. I spoke there on one of two panels that addressed domestic and sexual violence within the Indo-Caribbean community and on one of two panels that uttered the word “dougla.” Public responses to the panel, mostly from male gatekeep-ers of Indo-Caribbean patriarchy, were hostile. But away from their loud public denunciation, on the sidelines and outside the room, in small groups,

AFTERWORD

Shalini   Puri

Shalini Puri ( ) Department of English , University of Pittsburgh , Pittsburgh , PA , USA

322 AFTERWORD

among women, students, and many young people of Indo-Caribbean, Afro-Caribbean, and mixed heritage, the panels generated some excitement. This split reception framed my understanding of the situation and the form my intervention in Indo-Caribbean feminisms took. My comments in this after-word refl ect on the volume as a whole as well as revisit the dougla poetics that emerged from my early engagements with Indo-Caribbean feminism.

Rather than advancing a theory or model or concept, I understood myself to be listening to the ways that the word “dougla” was circulating both in conservative Indo-Caribbean discourse (Puri 2004 , 192–195) and in existing examples of progressive public discourse, music, poetics, and Indo-Caribbean feminisms. I sought to articulate the ways in which these examples struggled against a racial logic of divide and rule, and worked toward solidarities based on the overlapping histories of slavery and indentureship and toward contes-tatory claimings of Indo-Caribbeanness (Puri 2004 , 214, 216, 220, 221).

Though I am gratifi ed by the number of scholars who drew on my work, I had not intended (indeed, had cautioned against) constructions of douglaness that were idealizing, paradigmatic, or prescriptive, calling not only for an elaboration of dougla poetics but also for a careful delimiting of the political scope of such poetics within and across different conjunc-tures (Puri 2004 , 218, 220–222) and different artistic media (Puri 2004 , 219–220). After all, the work on dougla poetics was part of a book that centrally argued against fetishizing cultural hybridity.

Perhaps that work took on a life of its own because at the time there was still immense pressure against speaking publicly from a dougla position. 1 Examples that I took up—such as The Mighty Dougla’s calypso “Split Me In Two,” Brother Marvin’s “Jahaji Bhai,” and Bally’s chutney-soca “Dougla,” which were by or about embodied dougla subjects—were rela-tively rare. Moreover, though such music explicitly addressed dominant racial logics (and not in merely assimilationist ways), it was not specifi cally feminist. Feminist essays that spoke directly about dougla experience, like Kamala Kempadoo’s “Negotiating Cultures: A ‘Dogla’ Perspective” in Matikor , were as important as they were few. Thus, I would like to think that my arguments refl ected the absence of dougla subjects in public dis-course rather than contributed to their erasure. Indeed the very intensity of antagonism in the racialized public sphere often made it hard for dougla subjects to speak as douglas. I wrote against such punitive silencings and equally punitive namings of douglas. In other words, rather than “discur-sive colonization” of douglas or dougla identities (as Gabrielle Hosein puts it, 247), my work was intended as a space-clearing gesture for discus-sion of dougla experience. 2

AFTERWORD 323

Poetics is but one form of making; it cannot substitute for speech by marginalized subjects. Thus, for example, Sean Lokaisingh’s elaboration of the trope of jahaji bhai to imagine queer Indo-Caribbean male identi-ties; the use of Hindu iconography of Ardhanarishwara (taken up in inter-esting ways in the forum “Queerying Hinduism” that Krystal Ghisyawan alludes to in this volume) to contest reactionary versions of Hinduism; and the practices, images, and metaphors of Shakti, Bindi, Matikor, cut-lass, and Hosay have all developed symbolic resources for critique and inclusion. But they do not necessarily either enable or disable actual, his-torical gender-ambiguous or gender-shifting or mixed-race subjects—and this is not a shortcoming. It is only when such ideas, images, or examples are turned into singular paradigms that they acquire a normative, prescrip-tive, displacing, or appropriative force.

The many efforts this volume contains at naming and imagining are important, and related, but partial undertakings. In this volume, the contributions of Kavita Singh, Sue Ann Barratt, Stephanie Jackson, and Krystal Ghisyawan undertake similarly important ethnographic work about so-called “ordinary” Indo-Caribbean, dougla, and bisexual women. Such work serves a quite different documentary function from the—also valuable—gathering of biographies of “exceptional women.” Angelique Nixon’s conversations with visual artist Shalini Seereeram, Alison Klein’s interview with writer Peggy Mohan, and Lisa Outar’s interview with Indo-Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary perform crucial archival work that documents artistic projects, projects that often seek to render histori-cal experience imaginatively. Anita Baksh takes up not only the similarities but also the differences in the artistic and political interventions made by Guyanese writers Mahadai Das and Rajkumari Singh. And Tuli Chatterji’s essay on Shani Mootoo’s writing about transgender crossings and the desta-bilization of gender identities raises questions with which Indo-Caribbean feminisms, too, must contend. It is precisely this diversity and range of approaches by the different scholars gathered together here in the service of a shared project that is one of the most valuable aspects of this volume.

As a whole, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought enacts a welcome exten-sion, challenge, and redirection of earlier discussions of Indo-Caribbean feminisms. Whereas my earlier work focused on examples of the politics of gender and national belonging in Indo-Caribbean cultural practices such as Hosay and on articulations of dougla identities and poetics in relation to Indo-Caribbean feminisms (such as those of Ramabai Espinet and Drupatee Ramgoonai), several of the essays in this volume take up the question of specifi cally dougla feminisms. For Gabrielle Hosein and Sue Ann Barratt,

324 AFTERWORD

dougla feminism involves self-representation by douglas. Hosein rightly notes that Indo-Caribbean feminism should not stand in for dougla femi-nisms articulated by dougla subjects and that invocations of dougla politics and poetics should not concede the term “Indo-Caribbean” to conservative agendas. Sue Ann Barratt explores both the diffi culty and the need for a “pli-able dougla feminist epistemology” (273) that can think about “dougla” as referring to historical subjects who are not biracial but multiracial (275) and can encompass the wide range of ways in which dougla subjects relate to that designation. For Kaneesha Parsard, dougla feminism is less about who speaks and more about articulating the shared material histories of planta-tion labor by both Afro- and Indo-Caribbean and the sexual economies that plantation labor generated. Parsard’s feminist method is aimed not at recovering voice but at studying material objects and lost histories.

Such work builds on earlier work that explores the relationships among different strands of feminism. For example, Sheila Rampersad’s delicately nuanced claim about the relationship between dougla and other feminisms notes: “a dougla feminism must recognise that Indian women have been using, and can continue to use, African women’s resistance as a frame-work for their own liberation and in so doing can draw attention to the Afro-centricity of the regional women’s movement in a tone that also cel-ebrates the elements of trust and intimacy implicit in these relationships” (Rampersad 2000 , 164). In this volume, Kavita Singh, in her analysis of eth-nically specifi c experiences of women’s participation in carnival mas’, calls not only for feminisms attuned to intersectionality and hybridity but for a specifi cally comparative and “translative encounter” between “jamette” and “jahaji bahin” feminisms, and between Indo-Caribbean and doubly dia-sporic Indo-Caribbean feminisms. Lisa Outar’s discussion of Francophone Caribbean artists and writers counters generalizations based on Anglophone Indian diasporas; it considers French Caribbean sites with much smaller Indian populations than Trinidad and Guyana, inviting analysis of how the strategies and alliances of Indo-Caribbean feminisms there might differ from those in Trinidad and Guyana. Her work also opens out to expansive Indian Oceanic solidarities and sites of indentureship beyond the Caribbean. In keeping with this volume as a whole, India recedes as a site of origin or longing or legitimation; it is indentureship and its subsequent diasporas that ground the forms of feminism addressed in this volume.

The essays in many ways turn on the question of who speaks, on whose behalf, and in whose name. Yet the volume in my view also points to the need for a defi nitional openness in Indo-Caribbean feminisms, for facili-

AFTERWORD 325

tating and keeping in play multiple and simultaneous namings and femi-nisms—Indo-, Afro-, dougla, bhowjeee, kala pani, jahaji bahin, mixed, coolie, same-sex-loving Indian women, bisexual and trans, and more. The essays work, in other words, to dislodge the disciplining and constraining narratives of Indo-Caribbean or even feminist identities. Such proliferation is what I take to be Ghisyawan’s point when she says: “Instead of defi ning the group by ideals of what it should be, it can instead be defi ned by all the possibilities of what it could be” (201). For each of the aforementioned terms offers importantly different infl ections and even the same term is often deployed with different resonances. 3

Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought feels the pull of two approaches: the desire to name and publicly claim and the desire to resist naming because naming risks reifi cation. At the gathering that led up to this volume, Rawwida Baksh asked why there is still ambivalence about what Indo-Caribbean is. I wonder if it is because ambivalence offers a way of both claiming and critiquing; it is a way of keeping things unsettled; it is a form of radical openness, a kind of precision, a non-normative claiming. This ambivalence is part of a wider preoccupation with naming which threads through the entire volume, refl ecting its commitment to both specifi city and inclusive diversity.

The concern with naming also registers two different and neces-sary impulses: On the one hand is the need to recover and generate an archive through documentation of historical traces and imaginative tell-ings such as Espinet’s loving gathering of fragments of vernacular songs in The Swinging Bridge or Andil Gosine’s meditation on his mother’s photo album and the forms of freedom it imagined and enacted. On the other, as Kaneesha Parsard explores, is the need to register the gaps in archives, through material objects and traces that do not so much recover a lost history as point to its absence. Several essays in one way or another also remind us of the multiplicity of forms of feminist practice, that the “political” need not be public—and that there is a host of under-the-radar forms of activism practiced by women who, for fear of violence and stigma and job loss, cannot publicly take certain positions but nonetheless work toward more egalitarian gender and sexual arrangements.

Perhaps relatedly, however, the collection as a whole also betrays a cer-tain suspicion of, or at least relative absence of, collective stories, organized and mass politics, and attention to the ways in which gender identities and experiences interact with contemporary neoliberalism, unemploy-ment, migration, the militarization of the region, and so on. Yet surely

326 AFTERWORD

any identity category also involves collective stories, and surely it is not only collective narratives that leave things out; so do “individual” stories. Many of the essays treat the historical experience of indentureship and plantation labor in systemic terms, but fewer focus on the systemic eco-nomic underpinnings of the present. Michael Niblett’s essay productively addresses the impact of structural unemployment, waste, and deindustri-alization on Indo-Caribbean masculinities in the non-sovereign French Caribbean present. And Kavita Singh begins to address the uneasy articu-lations between the historical experience of indentureship, working-class jahaji bahin solidarities, the politics of respectability and transgression, and individual aspirations for upward mobility in contemporary neolib-eral Trinidad. But as a whole, one question this volume raises but does not pursue is the tension between collective advancement and individual advancement in capitalist modernity in the contemporary moment.

Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought is not the fi rst collection of essays on Indo-Caribbean feminism, but it is the fi rst to focus explicitly on Indo-Caribbean feminism as an intellectual tradition and object of scholarship. One of the many strengths of the volume is the way it historicizes the emergence and changing emphases and agendas of Indo-Caribbean femi-nisms. The contributors offer a careful stocktaking of their own varied routes to feminism, its reach, and its methods. It thus positions us to ask such questions as: What is the force fi eld of events in which this vol-ume becomes possible? What enabled the emergence of the burst of writ-ing by women in the late 1980s and early 1990s that took up issues of domestic violence, queer sexualities, and especially incest? (I am thinking not only of individual analysis of individual texts but also of an Indo-Caribbean feminist literary critical historiography.) What have been the gains and losses and constants for Indo-Caribbean women at various times and places; relatedly, how have Indo-Caribbean masculinities and patriar-chy changed, and how have the emphases of Indo-Caribbean feminisms changed accordingly? What have been the social movements and pop-ular forces with which Indo-Caribbean feminisms have made common cause and vice versa? What forms of commodifi cation of race and sexual-ity frame Nicki Minaj’s emergence as a global celebrity? What would an Indo-Caribbean feminist study of the UWI and the academic cultures of the UWI itself look like? How might the work undertaken in this volume require a rethinking of other strands of feminist thought; how might it shake up Caribbean Studies and Latin American Studies programs?

AFTERWORD 327

The volume is almost fi erce in its focus on education as revelatory and transformative of gender identities. Thus, for example, Patricia Mohammed’s account of Naparima Girls School takes up in a very specifi c way the impact and signifi cance for feminism of a particular school’s open-ing or starting a particular scholarship. Preeia Surajbali illuminates the cru-cial role played by her experiences of mentorship and particular courses in university in Canada. And the existence of this volume itself points to the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the UWI, St. Augustine, as a crucially supportive and generative institutional space that has been a key site not only of knowledge production but also of knowledge transla-tion between different spaces and demographics.

Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought productively brings together work from ethnography, literature and transgressive storytelling, music, visual arts, everyday practices, religious, and spiritual beliefs. It explores a wide spectrum of political, gender, and sexual orientations, and represents Indo-Caribbean and mixed-race women not only in struggle but also in pleasure and at peace. I believe that feminist analysis requires the cultiva-tion of such interdisciplinary curiosity. As I have written elsewhere, inter-disciplinarity is a way of learning to think and to listen in several different registers. As such, it is a form of political care (Puri 2016 ).

The reconceptualizations of Indo-Caribbean feminism in this volume invite reciprocal reconceptualizations of Afro-Caribbean, Caribbean, postco-lonial, diasporic, and transnational feminisms. They contribute signifi cantly to feminisms of color, shifting the discussion of race from a white/black or brown/black axis to lateral conversations among women of color. They establish both the common ground and the historical specifi city of Indo-Caribbean women’s experience.

In his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Derek Walcott noted with self-directed irony that though he had adapted the Greek epic The Odyssey for the stage, he knew little of the Ramleela , a central cultural text for Indo-Trinidadians, who are by no means a minority in Trinidad. “[N]obody in Trinidad knew any more than I did about Rama, Kali, Shiva, Vishnu, apart from the Indians, a phrase I use pervertedly because that is the kind of remark you can still hear in Trinidad: ‘apart from the Indians’” (Walcott 1998 , 66). Like Walcott, this volume critiques and remedies the kinds of unexamined privilege of the cultural dominant and the cultural marginalization of Indo-Caribbean people. It works toward a situation where a phrase like “apart from Indian women” would become obviously

328 AFTERWORD

nonsensical. Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought insists on the cultural and historical knowledge that is necessary for developing a feminist solidarity, understanding, and intimacy that goes beyond strategic coalition politics.

Cultural nationalists have a long history of delegitimizing feminisms of color on the grounds that they risk disunity within a community. Moreover, feminists within their community sometimes still fall into cultural nation-alism in relation to other communities. This fallback into cultural nation-alism is something that Afro-, Indo-, and all Caribbean feminisms would benefi t from resisting.

Many other things stand out about this volume: the intellectual gene-alogies it makes visible; the community of women and feminists it has forged and envisages; its exploration of the numerous ways that people come to their feminist realizations and revelations; its multigenerational conversation and generosity of vision.

It is a very different fi eld of conversation than it was twenty years ago when I fi rst presented a paper at the UWI. At the symposium held in November 2015 en route to this volume, Sheila Rampersad rightly made this point: “Do not take a gathering like this for granted.” For it is a gathering made possible by a dynamic group of scholars and activists, a community forged by women who together have transformed the discursive and political landscape. Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought is an impressive achievement both because of the scholarship it holds and because of the scholarship it makes possible.

NOTES 1. It is undoubtedly a substantially different conjuncture now, and references

to dougla identities are routine and often assimilationist. 2. Crucial early efforts in a similar project were Kempadoo’s essay, and the

ethnographies and oral histories that surfaced dougla self-understandings carried out 25 years ago by scholars like Rhoda Reddock, Aisha Khan, and Daniel Segal. What Hosein brings to the debate is both the question of dougla self-representation and the question of whether and when the sym-bolic exaltation of a disenfranchised group can actually contribute to its material marginalization. For another powerful treatment of this topic, see Stallybrass and White. For another critique of dougla poetics, see Jennifer Rahim 2010 . I remain appreciative of these and other essays that have debated, extended, modifi ed, or critiqued my thinking on dougla poetics.

3. See, for example, the different connotations of “cutlass” in the work of Parsard, Gosine, and Seereeram.

AFTERWORD 329

WORKS CITED Kempadoo, Kamala. 1999. Negotiating Cultures: A ‘Dogla’ Perspective. In

Matikor: The Politics of Identity for Indo-Caribbean Women , ed. Rosanne Kanhai, 103–113. Trinidad: UWI Extra Mural Studies Unit.

Khan, Aisha. 1993. What is ‘a Spanish’: Ambiguity and ‘Mixed’ Ethnicity in Trinidad. In Trinidad Ethnicity , ed. Kevin Yelvington, 180–207. London: Macmillan and University of Warwick.

Lokaisingh-Meighoo, Sean. 2000. Jahaji Bhai: Notes on the Masculine Subject and Homoerotic Subtext of Indo-Caribbean Identity. Small Axe 7: 77–92.

Puri, Shalini. 2004. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity . New York: Palgrave.

———. 2016. (Mine)fi elds of Memory: A Response to Don Robotham. Social and Economic Studies , 65 (1): 199–206.

Rahim, Jennifer. 2010. Dougla, Half-doogla, Travesao and the Limits of Hybridity. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 7(1): 1–14.

Rampersad, Sheila. 2000. Douglarisation and the Politics of Indian/African Relations in Trinidad Writing. Ph.D. Thesis, Nottingham Trent University.

Reddock, Rhoda. 1994. ‘Douglarisation’ and the Politics of Gender Relations in Contemporary Trinidad and Tobago: A Preliminary Exploration. Contemporary Issues in Social Sciences: A Caribbean Perspective 1: 98–124.

Segal, Daniel. 1993. ‘Race’ and ‘Colour’ in Pre-Independence Trinidad. In Trinidad Ethnicity , ed. Kevin Yelvington, 81–115. London: Macmillan and University of Warwick.

Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression . Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Walcott, Derek. 1998. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. In What the Twilight Says: Essays , ed. Derek Walcott, 65–84. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

331© The Author(s) 2016G.J. Hosein, L. Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, New Caribbean Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1

POSTSCRIPT

Shivanee N.   Ramlochan

Indianness is not the province of the light skinned, the Valsayn-dwelling, the satsang-throwing, just like Indian feminism isn’t the province of the sindoor-wearing, mehendi-clad, symposium-attending, bangle-clinking, constantly and righteously self-affi rming of us with Singhs, Mahabirs, Mohips, and Ramlochans behind their fi rst names.

For me, Indo-Caribbean feminism isn’t a plinth, it’s a bridge. It isn’t a Divali Nagar fete; it’s an open palm.

If your Indo-Caribbean feminism makes no room and holds no breath-ing space, no blossom of fi erce welcome for dougla identities, transwom-en’s identities, dark-skinned identities, femme women’s identities: if your Indo-Caribbean feminism isn’t intersectional, then it is suspect, and it breathes with all the wrong kinds of complacent insularity in Trinidad and Tobago in 2015.

333© The Author(s) 2016G.J. Hosein, L. Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, New Caribbean Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1

Anita Baksh is Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College at the City University of New York. Her teaching and publications focus on Caribbean literature, South Asian diasporic literatures, postco-lonial theory, feminist theory, and composition. Her essays on Indo-Caribbean women’s writing have been published in Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women (2011) and Defying the Global Language: Perspectives in Ethnic Studies (2013), and published online in sx salon: A Small Axe Literary Platform . Her current research examines how Indo-Caribbean writers utilize indentureship as a way to understand the history of colonial domination and to negotiate dominant models of postcolonial Caribbean citizenship.

Sue Ann Barratt is Assistant Lecturer in the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She has a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary gender studies from the Institute for Gender and Development Studies. Her thesis focused on the relevance of perceptions of gender identity to interpersonal communica-tion confl ict. Her previous undergraduate and post-graduate education was centered on communication studies and political science.

Tuli Chatterji is Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, New York. Her teaching and research interests include world Anglophone literature, Caribbean studies, and queer theory.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

334 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of the West Indies, Trinidad, and a Double Honors B.A. in Anthropology and South Asian Studies from York University, Toronto. Her research interests include female same-sex desire, gender and sexuality in Hinduism, “queer” politics, activism and identity forma-tion within the context of globalization and neo-liberalism.

Andil Gosine is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at York University.

Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is the Head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She is an associate editor of The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She works in the areas of politics and governance, and Caribbean feminism. Her column, Diary of a Mothering Worker , is published weekly in the Trinidad Guardian .

Stephanie Lou Jackson is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her disserta-tion examines the role of music and ecstatic religious practices in the pro-duction and mediation of Indo-Guyanese identity, analyzing Caribbean ontologies of sound and vibration in relation to race, gender, and dias-pora within contemporary contexts in Guyana, New York City, and virtual spaces. She has taught courses on popular music of the Caribbean and African-American music history.

Alison Klein is a full-time lecturer in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Her research interests include gender, diaspora, and labor, as well as literature of the British Empire. Her articles on indentured labor in the Caribbean have been published in Anthurium and South Asian Review .

Patricia Mohammed is  a scholar, writer, and fi lmmaker. She is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies in the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. She currently holds the position of campus coordinator at the School for Graduate Studies and Research.

Michael Niblett is Assistant Professor of Modern World Literature at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Caribbean Novel since 1945 (2012) and co-editor of Perspectives on the “Other America”: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture (2009).

Angelique V. Nixon is a writer, artist, teacher, scholar, activist, and poet. Her research, cultural criticism, and poetry have been published widely. She strives through her activism, writing, and art to disrupt

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 335

silences, challenge systems of oppression, and carve spaces for resistance and desire. Her book Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture examines the ways Caribbean cultural workers nego-tiate and resist the complexities of tourism (2015). Her current research areas include feminist praxis and discourse, Caribbean sexualities, sexual labor, and social justice movements. She is a Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago.

Lisa Outar is an independent scholar who researches Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. She has a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Chicago. Her work focuses on Indo-Caribbean literature, feminist writing, and the connections between the Caribbean and other sites of the indentureship diaspora. Her work has appeared in the journals Small Axe , South Asian Review ,  Caribbean Journal of Education ,  South Asian History and Culture ,  Caribbean Review of Gender Studies , and  South Asian Diaspora ; in Stabroek News ; and in the edited book collections  South Asian Transnationalisms (2012), and Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2015). With Gabrielle Hosein, she coedited a special issue of The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies that focused on Indo-Caribbean feminisms. She serves as an editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature and is working on a manuscript about Indo-Caribbean women’s public sphere engagements in the fi rst half of the twentieth-century.

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is a Ph.D. candidate in African American studies; American studies; and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Improper Dwelling: Space, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernity in the British West Indies, 1838–1962,” examines British West Indian literary and visual forms to illuminate three dwelling spaces—the landscape, barrack yard, and the house—in which African and Indian planta-tion laborers and their descendants challenged colonial attempts at social and spatial control between emancipation and the independence period.

Shalini Puri is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She works on postcolonial theory and cultural studies of the global south with an emphasis on the Caribbean. She is the author of the award-winning  The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (2004) and, more recently,  The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory , which studies the confl icting cultural memories of the Grenada Revolution as they surface in the arts, everyday life, landscape, and the diaspora. She has also edited several volumes: Marginal Migrations: The Circulation

336 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of Cultures in the Caribbean , The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics , Caribbean Military Encounters   (with Lara Putnam), and Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities (with Debra Castillo) . Her interdisciplinary humanities-based work seeks to expand the settings, resources, and audi-ences of humanities scholarship.

Rhoda Reddock is Professor of Gender, Social Change and Development, and Deputy Principal at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. Her research output has revolved around the themes of gender, ethnicity and nationalism, masculinities, sexualities, women and social movements, and environmental studies.

Kavita Ashana Singh is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston. She completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Cornell University, and a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the Francophone and the Anglophone Caribbean, and spans liter-ary analysis, cultural studies, translation theory, and performance. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled The Carnival Language: Exhibitive Multilingualism in the Postcolonial Caribbean , theorizes performance and multilingualism as modes best expressing postcolonial Caribbean forms of cultural and political autonomy. Her work has previously been published in the journals Transforming Anthropology and Small Axe .

Preeia D. Surajbali is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. The corpus of her inquiry and interest is vested in studying the gendered, generational, and racial implications of iden-tity formation among diasporic Caribbean and South Asian communities. Questioning notions of cultural “authenticity” is a central provocation for her research.

337© The Author(s) 2016G.J. Hosein, L. Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, New Caribbean Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1

INDEX 1

1 Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to notes.

A Abidh, Stella , 29, 97 activism , 1, 6, 8, 10–13, 16, 17, 33,

34, 59, 74, 88, 98, 128, 162, 164–6, 208, 219, 328

feminist activism , 11, 270 Africa , 57

Africanness , 227, 230, 233 Afro-Caribbean , 79, 133, 134

Afro-Caribbean feminism , 4 Afro-Caribbean masculinities , 266

Afro-Creole , 149 alcohol , 272, 273

alcoholism , 273, 274 Alexander, M. Jacqui , 58 alternative femininities , 318 Amerindian , 86 ancestral , 307, 314 androgynous , 116, 119, 121 Anglican , 28 anti-capitalist rebellion , 142 Antillanité , 292 anti-patriarchal projects , 98

anti-teleological , 55, 57, 58 apartheid , 96 Appanah, Nathacha , 11, 101, 102, 104 archipelagic , 11

archipelagic approach , 12, 103 archipelagic turn , 101

arrival , 16 art , 1, 12, 13, 16, 17, 49, 167, 252,

254, 259n10. See also feminist art autobiography , 9, 77

autobiographical , 13, 194, 200

B Bahadur, Gaiutra , 6, 7, 10, 14, 24, 51,

64, 245, 247, 271, 273 Baksh, Rawwida , 24, 33, 46n2, 66, 73

Baksh-Soodeen, Rawwida , 217, 328 Balak Saharta Mandalee , 77, 78 bell hooks , 25 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio , 101 BGDS. See British Guiana Dramatic

Society

338 INDEX

bhowjee , 57, 327 Bhowjee feminism , 209 bhowji feminism , 5

bindi , 325 biography , 1, 10

biographies , 77, 110 biphobia , 161 bisexuality , 159, 160

bisexual , 12, 155, 156 bisexual women , 326

black feminism , 135–7, 246 black feminist , 232, 243, 246,

247, 259n13 black feminist scholarship , 245 black feminist thought , 245,

256, 258 black masculinity , 249 . See also

Afro-Caribbean: Afro-Caribbean masculinities; Caribbean masculinity; masculinity

Boodoo-Fortuné, Danielle , 178 Bragard, Véronique , 50, 103 braiding , 201 Britain . See England British Guiana , 95, 251,

272, 273 British Guiana Dramatic Society

(BGDS) , 77, 78 Brooklyn , 307, 309 Burnham, Forbes , 74

C CAISO . See Coalition Advocating for

Inclusion of Sexual Orientation calypso , 150n6, 211, 274, 275 Canada , 47n5, 55, 56, 71, 95–8,

115, 126, 161, 252, 329 Canadian , 49, 53, 56, 57

cane , 86, 124, 189, 250, 252, 253, 292 . See also sugarcane

cane-cutter , 85, 250, 253, 259n12 cane fi elds , 81, 86, 106

capitalism , 80, 87 capitalist patriarchy , 294, 297–9

Caribbean aesthetics , 190 Caribbean Association for Feminist

Research and Action , 33 Caribbean diaspora , 26 Caribbean femininity , 188, 190 Caribbean feminism , 3, 4, 13, 23,

32–4, 73, 137, 171, 173–5, 198, 219, 228

Caribbean feminist praxis , 1, 173, 219

Caribbean feminist scholarship , 226 Caribbean feminist theorizing , 219 Caribbean feminist thought , 2, 4,

24, 176 Caribbean masculinity , 266, 268 .

See also masculinity Caribbeanness , 3, 13, 46n1, 147, 171,

174, 176, 179, 190, 207, 290 Caribbean picturesque , 13, 172,

178, 179 Caribbean public sphere , 95 Caribbean queer , 114 Caribbean womenloving women ,

180, 181 Carifesta , 75 carnival , 12, 133–50, 274, 326, 327

carnival feminism , 5, 134, 135, 140 Carter, Marina , 67 caste , 50, 51, 58, 59, 84 Catholicism , 196

Catholic , 157 Césaire, Aimé , 50, 194, 195, 201,

294, 295 Chaudhuri, Amala , 97, 100, 110 .

See also Ramcharan, Agnes; Ramcharan, Amala

Chevannes, Barry , 277, 288

INDEX 339

Christianity , 28, 30, 278, 290 Christian , 249 Christians , 28, 31, 32, 58, 77, 78,

156, 157 chutney , 58, 136, 274–6

chutney-soca , 134–6, 150n4, 150n6, 274, 275

class , 2, 74, 75, 80, 83, 84, 88, 99, 104, 107–9, 125, 128, 140, 141, 149, 154, 159, 164–6, 171, 181, 196, 206, 207, 279, 304

class consciousness , 27 class control , 142 cross-class solidarities , 102, 214

Cliff, Michelle , 115 Coalition Advocating for Inclusion of

Sexual Orientation (CAISO) , 115, 162, 164

comparative feminist theorizations , 3 comparative Caribbean feminisms ,

133–50 competing masculinities , 258, 271

See also masculinity competing patriarchies , 294 Concerned Women for Progress , 33 Confi ant, Raphaël , 285, 292, 294 coolitude , 5, 47n8, 102, 196, 202 cosmopolitan , 11, 98, 107

cosmopolitan feminism , 110 cosmopolitan feminist thinking , 98 cosmopolitanism , 101, 106, 110 cosmopolitan post-indentureship

feminism , 103 feminist cosmopolitanism , 93, 99

counterpublic sphere , 163 Crawford, Charmaine , 114 creole , 133, 271 cr é olité , 50, 102

créoliste , 294 creolization , 3, 32, 50, 136, 159, 207,

212, 220n4, 247, 267, 280n3, 292, 294

creole nationalism , 33, 34, 214 ‘creole’ patriarchy , 271

( see also patriarchy) creolization-nationalism , 52 creolized , 166

cross-dressing , 121 cross-ethnic , 107, 217

cross-ethnic feminist coalitions , 88 cross-ethnic solidarities , 9

cross-race , 206, 214, 215 cross-racial , 102, 246 cross-racial solidarities ,

194, 195, 206 cutlass , 14, 189, 190, 244–8, 250,

252–8, 325, 331n3 cyber-activism , 162–5

D Dabydeen, David , 104 Das, Mahadai , 11, 24, 64, 74, 75,

79, 82, 83, 326 Davis, Angela , 25 decolonization , 31, 82 deindustrialization , 288, 293, 299 Devi, Ananda , 11, 94, 101, 102, 104 diaspora , 12, 94, 101

Caribbean diaspora , 26 diasporic femininity , 15 indentureship diaspora , 101, 104,

106, 195, 197 Indian indentureship diaspora , 16

domestic violence , 88, 135, 273–6, 289, 329

domestic and sexual violence , 324 Donell, Alison , 95 dougla , 14, 107, 108, 134, 157, 208,

210, 212–17 dougla feminism , 14, 205, 207,

209, 219, 221n7, 225, 226, 228, 230–3, 235, 236, 246, 247, 257, 258, 259n13, 326

340 INDEX

dougla (cont.) dougla feminist , 212, 213, 226,

227, 233, 248 dougla feminist approach , 249 dougla feminist epistemology , 228,

326 dougla feminist theory of

representation , 14, 246, 256–8 dougla feminist thought , 225, 246,

257 Indian-Dougla relations , 218 douglaness , 205, 227, 228, 230, 233

dougla poetics , 5, 205, 208–10, 217, 218, 246, 324, 325

dougla poetics and feminism , 205–7, 214, 216

douglarization , 6, 180, 206–8, 220n3, 220n4

douglas , 14, 168n1, 205–7, 225, 226, 228–32, 235, 236, 236n1, 236n3, 246, 251, 257, 324, 325, 330n1

E ecstatic religious practices , 305, 306,

318 . See also Indo-Caribbean ecstatic religious practices

ecstatic religiosity , 304 Indo-Caribbean ecstatic religious

practices , 319 education , 5, 10, 25, 27, 29–33,

35n11, 46n4, 64, 78, 97, 98, 138, 149, 158, 168n2, 266

emancipation , 142, 246, 249, 258 embodiment , 4, 213, 214 England , 50, 74, 99, 124 environment , 82, 86 epistemology , 114, 118, 122, 137

epistemological , 137, 159, 206, 226 feminist epistemologies , 3, 129, 216

Espinet, Ramabai , 10, 24, 64, 89n1, 209, 211, 326

ethnic violence , 291 ethnocentrism , 50, 52, 57–9 extra-human nature , 287, 289, 293,

296–9

F Facebook , 16, 140, 143, 146, 149,

162–4, 312 failures of female solidarity , 107 female artists , 194 female same-sex desire , 154 femininity , 13, 15, 53, 57, 75, 106,

110, 114, 118, 119, 121, 124, 128, 157–9, 174, 176–9, 187, 188, 231, 275, 307, 314

Indian femininity , 97, 135 feminist , 179

feminist agency , 77 feminist consciousness , 4, 7, 8, 10,

16, 27, 30, 33, 74, 76, 77, 122, 172, 174, 190, 318

feminist navigations , 5, 6, 206, 226 feminist praxis , 2, 172, 206, 207,

215 feminist theorizing , 208 feminist thought , 171 feminist activism , 11, 270 feminist art , 194 feminist cosmopolitanism , 93, 99 feminist epistemologies , 3, 129, 216 feminist genealogies , 17, 139 feminist scholarship , 5, 8 feminist scholarship on men , 270

feminization of labor , 298, 299 feminization of poverty , 299 fi ctions of ethnic purity , 206 Fiji , 9, 94–6, 197, 272 folktales , 67, 70 France , 103, 197, 286 Franco, Pamela , 141 French Caribbean , 290

Francophone , 94, 327

INDEX 341

Francophone Caribbean , 197, 202 Francophone Indo-Caribbean , 290 French , 103, 104

G Pargass, Gaietry , 24 gender-based violence , 258, 276 gender conformity , 55 gender consciousness , 7, 8, 10,

121, 167, 174 gender crossing , 114, 115, 118, 128 gender differences under capitalism ,

287 gendered violence , 105

gender violence , 299 gender equity and equality , 8

gender inequality , 195 gender inequity , 33

gender ideology , 30 gender navigations , 17 gender negotiations , 5–7, 11, 31,

35n12, 46n4, 98, 172, 206, 207, 216, 217

gendered negotiations , 16 gender norms , 31 gender politics , 114, 126 gender scholarship , 57

genealogies , 5, 11, 88, 255, 258 feminist genealogies , 17, 139 genealogical , 6, 253 genealogy , 8, 13, 24, 171, 206,

219, 226 generation , 1, 5, 98, 110,

267, 308 generational , 212, 308 generational differences , 87 generational sacrifi ces , 140 generational shifts , 5, 159 multigenerational , 100

Ghosh, Amitav , 101 girlhood , 207 Glissant, Édouard , 50, 101, 286

goddess-centered worship , 303–5, 317 Hindu goddess-centered worship , 15

Gopeesingh, Brenda , 24 Gosine, Andil , 10, 14, 46n4, 109, 245 Guadeloupe , 16, 193, 196, 197, 290,

291, 300n4 Guyana , 16, 65, 74, 75, 78, 81, 94,

99, 101–3, 106, 110n1, 146, 207, 236n1, 247, 252, 256, 273, 277, 304–6, 308, 309, 311–13, 315–17

Guyanese National Service (GNS) , 74

H Haiti , 254 Haniff, Nesha , 24, 27, 66,

265, 274 Hartman, Saidiya , 243 Haynes, Tonya , 23 heteronormativity , 117, 127

heteronormative , 12, 17, 114, 127 heteronormative pressures , 158

heterosexism , 58 heterosexuality , 116, 118, 121

hegemonic heterosexuality , 55 heterosexual , 118–20, 127, 145

Hill Collins, Patricia , 25 “hill coolie” , 195, 200, 201 Hindu goddess-centered worship , 15 Hinduism , 25, 32, 156–8, 167, 196,

212, 278, 290, 306, 325 Hindu , 28, 31, 32, 52, 58, 65, 81,

106, 109, 110n1, 124, 143, 153, 156–9, 168, 179, 187, 193, 196, 249, 267, 277, 305, 306, 308, 311, 317

Hindu womanhood , 158 Hindu nationalisms , 158 historical violence , 243, 245 homophobia , 126, 158, 165

homophobic , 167 homosexuality , 186

342 INDEX

Hosein, Gabrielle Jamela , 6, 14, 24, 32, 46n5, 57, 108, 159, 178, 226, 256, 267, 278

Hosein, Shaheeda , 24, 65

I incommensurability , 137 indentureship , 3, 8–11, 14, 17, 49–59,

64, 67, 74, 79, 83–5, 87, 94, 96, 101–3, 109, 114, 115, 125, 154, 189, 195, 197, 202, 244–53, 255–9, 270–2, 276, 277, 324, 327, 328

indenture , 11, 30, 50, 63–5, 67, 68, 81, 99, 107, 138, 139, 158, 207, 244

indenture history , 80 indentureship history , 87

indentureship diaspora , 101, 104, 106, 195, 197

Indian indentureship diaspora , 16 independence , 50, 74, 79, 80, 93, 252 India , 8, 16, 26, 27, 31, 47n7, 50, 56,

57, 64, 65, 67–70, 77, 79, 93, 95–100, 103, 110, 121, 124, 138, 154, 156, 158, 167, 195, 199, 201, 207, 218, 221n8, 244, 257, 271, 272, 290, 291, 306, 308, 314, 323

Indian aesthetic , 176, 177 . See also Indo-Caribbean aesthetic

Indian-Dougla relations , 218 Indian femininity , 97, 135 Indian feminist negotiations , 215 Indianité , 196, 290–2 Indian masculinity , 98 Indianness , 3, 4, 9, 14, 17, 32, 46n1,

46n7, 93, 96, 156, 158, 159, 164, 165, 167, 174, 177, 179, 196, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212–15, 217, 219, 227, 228, 230, 325

Indian Ocean , 94, 102–4, 247, 249, 252, 256, 257

Indian patriarchy , 271 India’s anti-indentureship campaign ,

317 indigenous feminist theorizing , 176 Indo-Caribbean aesthetic , 180 Indo-Caribbean-American , 304,

314–16 Indo-Caribbean-American women ,

311 Indo-Caribbean art , 177 Indo-Caribbean ecstatic goddess-

centered worship , 311 Indo-Caribbean ecstatic religious

practices , 319 Indo-Caribbean feminism , 23–35

Indo-Caribbean feminist consciousness , 10, 77

Indo-Caribbean feminist thought , 1–3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11–13, 15–17, 74, 76, 82, 110, 137, 205, 206, 216, 218, 219, 226, 228, 245–7, 258

Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology , 2, 10, 23, 46n1, 216–17

Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemological tradition , 2

Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemologies , 93, 173

Indo-Caribbean feminist knowledge production , 194

Indo-Caribbean sexual epistemology , 118

Indo-Caribbean feminist genealogy , 77, 218 . See also genealogies

Indo-Caribbean feminist intellectual tradition , 1

Indo-Caribbean feminist poetics , 209, 218

Indo-Caribbean feminist praxis , 1 Indo-Caribbean feminist “wrecking

work” , 10

INDEX 343

Indo-Caribbean masculinity , 5, 15, 266, 267, 269, 273, 278, 279, 286, 289, 328, 329

Indo-Caribbean patriarchy , 324 Indo-Guadeloupean , 194–6, 202 Indo-Guyanese , 74–6

Indo-Guyanese diasporic subjectivities , 304

Indo-Guyanese ecstatic goddess worship , 317

Indo-Guyanese ecstatic religious movement , 304

Indo-Guyanese masculinity , 307 Indo-Guyanese-American , 15,

303–10, 317, 319, 319n2 Indo-Martinicans , 286, 294 Indo-Trinidadian-American , 314 Indo-Trinidadian bisexual politics ,

165–8 intergenerational differences , 166

intergenerational gendered solidarity , 138

interracial , 118, 124, 126 interracial space , 209

interreligious , 124 intimate partner violence , 252 Islam , 25, 28, 32, 156, 278

J Jackson, Shona , 89n7 Jagan, Cheddi , 74 Jahajee Sisters , 24, 88, 89n8 jahaji bhai , 10, 12, 103, 111n4,

133–50, 154, 255, 276, 277, 325, 327

jahaji , 71 jahaji -hood , 66

jahaji-bhain feminism , 145 jahaji bhain principle , 5 jahaji-bhain feminist solidarity ,

140, 145 jahaji sisterhood , 148

Jamaica , 16, 272, 277 James, C.L.R. , 101 Jehovah’s Witnesses , 196 Jones, Claudia , 26 Josephs, Kelly , 105

K kala pani , 81, 158, 247, 327

kala pani poetics , 5 Kali , 305, 307, 309, 310, 312, 319n1

Kali Mai , 303 Kanhai, Rosanne , 5, 6, 16, 24, 27,

57, 81, 205, 209, 211, 212, 217, 220n2, 274

Kassim, Halima , 6, 7, 24, 279 Kempadoo, Kamala , 205, 207, 215,

325 Kempadoo, Peter , 78 Khan, Aisha , 6, 24, 318, 325 King, Rosamond S. , 114, 116, 154,

161 knowledge translation , 329 Kreol , 103

L Lamming, George , 95, 101 landscape , 87, 295, 298 Lewis, Linden , 289 LGBT , 13, 164, 165, 186

LGBT rights , 55 Lokaisingh-Meighoo, Sean . See

Lokaisingh, Sean Lokaisingh, Sean , 154, 325 London , 97, 98 Lorde, Audrey , 25 Lovelace, Earl , 268, 269

M madness , 94, 100, 101, 104, 105, 108 Madrasis , 306–8, 312–15, 317

344 INDEX

Mahabir, Dennis , 93, 96, 98 Mahabir, Joy , 5, 6, 16, 24, 29, 30, 82,

138 manhood , 114, 269, 274, 279 . See also

masculinity Mariamman , 303, 305, 307, 312, 313,

315, 318, 319, 319n2 marriage , 111n2, 268, 272, 275, 291 Martinique , 15, 16, 193, 285, 286,

288, 290, 291, 294, 295, 299 masculinity , 7, 10, 15, 17, 31, 53, 54,

76, 114, 115, 118–21, 124, 128, 166, 188, 249, 266–71, 273–5, 278, 279, 280n7, 288, 289, 295, 298 . See also Afro-Caribbean: Afro-Caribbean masculinities; Indian masculinity; Indo-Caribbean masculinity

masculinity studies , 270 masquerade , 134, 136, 137, 139–42,

149, 150n1 Matadeen, Laura , 29 Matikor , 5, 65, 136, 154, 205, 325 Mauritius , 9, 16, 50, 67, 94, 96,

101–4, 106, 110, 197, 272, 273 Mehta, Brinda , 6, 10, 46n2, 47n6, 81,

102, 108, 154, 207, 246 Meighoo, Beulah , 29 Melas, Natalie , 135 mentorship , 76, 329 Messenger Group , 74, 76, 79 middle class , 69, 75, 77–9, 84, 95,

141, 142, 144, 148, 155, 160, 164, 168, 308 . See also class

middle-class respectability , 95 migration , 31, 64, 328 Minaj, Nicki , 14, 225, 226, 228–31,

233–6, 329, 330n1 minimal incommensurability , 12, 135,

137, 138, 145 minority feminist politics , 24 Mittelholzer, Edgar , 95

mixedness , 164, 216, 219, 227, 229, 235

mixed , 5, 12, 14, 155, 157, 158, 181, 226, 227, 229–31, 246

mixed-race , 167, 173, 190, 206, 330

mixing , 108, 180, 219 multiracial , 114, 326 racial mixing , 207

modernity , 57, 141, 159, 243, 252, 299n1

Mohammed, Patricia , 6, 9, 13, 35n7, 52, 65, 66, 77, 98, 114, 137, 166, 171, 172, 190, 195, 271

Mohammed, Feroza “Rose” , 24, 279 Mohan, Peggy , 10, 11, 63, 64, 326 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade , 94 Monar, Rooplall , 79 Mootoo, Shani , 12, 24, 113–28, 161,

326 Morrison, Toni , 25, 27 Moutoussamy, Ernest , 290–2 Moutoussamy, Laure , 108 multiethnic identities , 88 . See also

mixedness multiethnic , 100, 114, 178

murder/suicides , 273 Muslim , 6, 16, 28, 30–2, 58, 110n1,

124, 156, 279 . See also Islam Mutu, Wangechi , 194, 197 myths of racial purity , 214

N Naidu, Janet , 79 Naimool, Mary , 29 Naipaul, Seepersad , 268, 269 Naipaul, V.S. , 27, 97 Nair, Supriya M. , 66 naming , 52 Naparima Girls High School ,

29, 30

INDEX 345

Naparima Girls , 329 national identity , 80 nationalism , 75, 76, 79, 83, 85, 95,

205, 209, 214 Hindu nationalisms , 158 nationalist discourses , 88 nationalist narratives , 12

nationalist creolization , 58 national politics , 75 national service , 75 nation-as-family , 291 négritude , 50, 294, 295 New York City (NYC) , 15, 139,

144–8, 193, 303–6, 308–10, 313, 315–17

Niranjana, Tejaswini , 47n7 Nobbee, Grace , 97 nonheteronormative sexualities , 88

See also heteronormativity non-normative Indian femininity , 314 non-normative sexualities , 158 non-return , 193–202 Nurse, Keith , 289 NYC . See New York City

O the Observer , 96 online communities , 162

online community building , 17 oral narratives , 11, 64, 80 orhni , 211 Outar, Lisa , 6, 7, 11, 13, 24,

89n8, 178

P Pandey, Jyoti Singh , 195, 199, 200 Parsard, Kaneesha , 208, 214, 216 patriarchy , 7, 10, 31, 50, 57–9, 211,

231, 277, 288, 291, 329 capitalist patriarchy , 294, 297–9

competing patriarchies , 294 Indian patriarchy , 271 Indo-Caribbean patriarchy , 324 patriarchal , 7, 10, 12, 30, 31, 65,

85, 98, 99, 104, 105, 108, 114, 117–19, 124, 126, 127, 134, 136, 140, 148, 154, 155, 158, 159, 213, 217, 266–8, 270–2, 279, 291, 293, 294, 298, 310, 317–19

patriarchal black masculinity , 249 patriarchal gender ideologies , 6 patriarchal norms , 100, 274 patriarchal violence , 190 white patriarchy , 271

People’s National Congress (PNC) , 74

People’s Progressive Party (PPP) , 74

performative androgyny , 119, 124 Persad-Bissessar, Kamla , 35n12, 143,

186 Persaud, Lakshmi , 27, 66,

211 photography , 200, 201 Pirbhai, Mariam , 5, 6, 16, 64, 103,

111n4, 138 plantation , 6, 15, 50, 63, 65, 80, 82,

87, 94, 102, 189, 201, 246–51, 254, 256, 257, 271–3, 286, 290–4, 298

plantation labor , 326, 328 plantation violence , 271

PNC . See People’s National Congress politics of relationality , 10 politics of solidarity , 206 Ponnamah, Michel , 15, 286 post-emancipation period , 244–6,

248–51, 253, 258 post-indentureship , 3, 8–11, 94, 101,

109, 110, 126, 174, 178, 179, 211, 317, 319

346 INDEX

post-indenture , 9, 159 post-indentureship diaspora , 110

post-indentureship feminisms , 6, 8, 9 post-indentureship cosmopolitan

feminism , 11, 104 post-indentureship feminist , 110 post-indentureship feminist

thinking , 101 post-independence , 33 post-slavery , 9, 126, 249 Powell, Patricia , 115, 121 PPP . See People’s Progressive Party Pragg, Lauren , 154 Presbyterianism , 35n9

Presbyterian , 25, 28, 29, 32, 155, 313

proletariat , 80 . See also class protofeminist activity , 141 Puar, Jasbir , 94, 110, 277 public sphere , 11, 85, 94, 95, 97–9,

105, 163, 164, 325 counterpublic sphere , 163 public arena , 276 public life , 75, 88, 289 public spaces , 180, 181, 185 public sphere practices , 1

Puri, Shalini , 10, 16, 116, 205, 209, 246

Q Queens , 144, 305, 307, 312, 313,

315, 319n2 queerness , 56, 231

queer , 120, 121, 125 queer discursive space , 116 queer feminist , 232 queer Indo-Caribbean , 325 queer masculinities , 276 queer sexualities , 329

Queerying Hinduism , 167

R racelessness , 230, 235 racial integration , 75 racialization , 57 racial solidarity , 319 Raghunandan, Kavyta , 154, 274 Rahim, Jennifer , 207, 226 Rajkumari Cultural Center , 88 Rambachan, Niala , 211 Ramcharan, Agnes , 100, 110 Ramcharan, Amala , 96 Ramgoonai, Drupatee , 135, 209,

212, 221n5 Ramkissoon-Chen, Rajandaye , 211 Ramlochan, Shivanee , 16 Rampersad, Indira , 24, 35n12 Rampersad, Indrani , 24 Rampersad, Sheila , 6, 24, 206, 209,

210, 217, 330 rape , 104, 105, 199, 200, 205 Reddock, Rhoda , 7, 15, 27, 67,

207, 220n3, 288, 325 regional women’s movement , 221 religion , 165, 171, 177, 196, 197,

214, 267, 272, 318 reputation , 159 respectability , 2, 13, 109, 120,

155, 156, 158, 159, 171, 174, 185, 188, 190, 206, 317, 328

Réunion , 273 Robinson, Colin , 115 rum , 252, 273, 274, 288 rural , 74, 278

S same-sex desire , 172, 190

same-sex female desire , 185–6 same-sex loving , 155, 157, 159,

161, 164, 165, 167

INDEX 347

same-sex loving women , 165, 167, 173

Sampath, Neils , 266, 289 Selvon , Sam , 268 scholarship , 1–5, 8, 10–12, 15–17,

33, 34n1, 64, 65, 74, 97, 165, 178, 206, 219, 226, 247, 269, 270, 274, 276, 279, 304

feminist scholarship , 5, 8 feminist scholarship on men , 270 gender scholarship , 57

Scrimgeour, Margaret , 29 second-wave feminism , 7, 175, 270

second-wave feminist , 33, 166 Seereeram, Shalini , 13, 167, 172, 177,

179, 190, 326 Segal, Daniel , 325–6 self-care , 165, 190 sexual assault , 66 sexual equality , 171 sexuality , 2, 4, 7, 14, 17, 55, 104,

114, 118, 120, 122, 126, 127, 135, 136, 153–68, 171, 174, 176, 186, 188, 206, 209, 219, 244, 246–8, 250–2, 257, 268, 275, 276

sexual minorities , 165 sexual rights advocacy , 162, 164 sexual violence , 121 Shah, Ryhaan , 11, 27, 64, 88,

98, 102 shakti , 304, 311, 314, 316, 325 Shepherd, Verene , 65 Shewcharan, Narmala , 88 Shinebourne, Janice , 88 Shiw Parsad, Basmat , 273 Silver Lining Foundation (SLF) ,

162, 164 sindoor , 109 Singh, Alice , 77, 78, 83, 89n2 Singh, Gora , 79

Singh, Karna , 89n3 Singh, Rajkumari , 11, 74, 75, 77,

78, 83, 326 Sinnapah Mary, Kelly , 13, 111n3, 178,

193, 326 slavery , 74, 84, 94, 102, 115, 126,

189, 196, 198, 244, 246, 252, 253, 255–9, 324

Smith, Faith , 116 soca , 146, 150n4, 150n6,

274, 275 socialist , 74, 79, 83, 88

socialist activism , 83 socialist revolution , 75

solidarity , 2, 3, 9, 13, 16, 17, 96, 99, 102, 109, 110, 145, 148, 211, 215, 219, 274, 314, 323, 324, 327

solidarities , 9, 109, 110, 215, 219, 314, 327

South Africa , 9, 94–6, 197 south-south scholarship , 323 spectacular violence , 247 the Spectator , 11, 93–7, 110 Spivak, Gayatri , 26, 94, 101, 110 Sri Lanka , 9, 96 Stephens, Michelle , 96, 101 storytelling , 67 Subran, Portia , 178 sugarcane , 244, 250, 252, 253,

273, 285, 293 sugar , 290 sugar estates , 247, 248, 250,

253, 293, 298 suicide , 105, 272 Suriname , 16, 236n1, 251

T Tagore, Rabindranath , 78 Tamil , 195, 197

348 INDEX

Teekah, Olivia , 77, 89n3 teleological narrative , 7, 10, 11

teleological , 99 teleological progression , 5

third-wave feminism , 7 third wave feminist , 232

Tinsley, Natasha , 114 Torabully, Khal , 10, 47n8, 50, 94,

102, 195, 196, 202 trance , 15, 306–9, 311–19, 319n2 transgender , 115, 116, 326 translation , 104, 137 translative approach , 135

translative perspective , 137 transnational ecstatic religious

movement , 15, 304, 317 transnational feminism , 327 transnationalism , 106, 257, 259n10 transoceanic , 3, 17, 93, 102, 104 trauma , 87 Trinidad , 6, 11, 16, 27, 29, 30, 32,

33, 49–51, 53, 54, 56, 64, 65, 67, 70, 93–6, 98, 101, 103, 106, 114, 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 127, 128, 134, 138, 144–5, 154, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 173, 180, 185, 186, 207, 209, 220n3, 225, 235, 236n1, 249, 255, 269, 271–4, 277, 279, 304, 309, 317

Trinidad Carnival , 12, 133, 134, 143, 146

U unemployment , 15, 288, 289 University of the West Indies , 32, 64

UWI urban proletariat , 74 . See also class USA , 74, 95, 96

V violence , 11, 13–15, 17, 66, 118, 119,

124, 127, 134, 138, 159, 163, 193–202, 211, 243–9, 252, 255–8, 266, 268, 271–4, 276, 328

gender-based violence , 258, 276 gendered violence , 105 gender violence , 299 historical violence , 243, 245 intimate partner violence , 252 sexual violence , 121 spectacular violence , 247

Virassamy, Maurice , 290 visibility , 97, 140, 141, 143, 144, 165,

217, 266, 289 visual art , 13, 198, 245, 330 . See also

art visual culture , 171, 177

visual feminist praxis , 177, 179, 185, 186, 188, 190

W wage inequality , 258 Walker, Alice , 25 waste , 293–8 Wekker, Gloria , 117, 122, 166 West Indian federation , 93, 96 white patriarchy , 271 wife murders , 245–8, 250, 256 Windrush Era , 95 Wollstonecraft, Mary , 24, 33 woman loving women , 173, 190 Womantra , 164 Women’s Progressive Organization

(WPO) , 79 Women’s Revolutionary Socialist

Movement , 79 women’s trance , 304, 305, 307, 308,

311, 317, 318. See also trance

INDEX 349

working-class , 5, 26, 76, 77, 79, 83–5, 104, 140, 142, 166, 269, 275, 278, 306. See also class

working-class consciousness , 74, 80, 85

working-class jahaji bahin solidarities , 328

working-class nationalism , 87 Working People’s Alliance (WPA) , 83

Working Women , 33 WPA. See Working People’s

Alliance WPO. See Women’s Progressive

Organization wrecking work , 10, 50, 58. See also

Indo-Caribbean feminist “wrecking work”

wrecking , 53, 56–8, 109