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2009, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
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West Indian identity was created in the context of Diasporic migration and the West Indian front room as the `special' room designated in the domestic interiors of migrants was reserved for guests with restricted access to children. In response to the trauma of displacement, these migrants brought with them a sense of dignity, `good grooming', aspiration and desires for social respectability as remnants of a `colonial time' as suggested by Richard Wilk. The front rooms they created when they eventually acquired homes was based on the Victorian parlour of the Caribbean colonial elite in terms of social function and prescribed behaviour. The West Indian Front Room exhibition curated by Michael McMillan (Geffrye Museum 2005-06) attempts to critique the heritage orientated representation of West Indian migration, which to use Krista A Thompson's and Leon Wright's perspective is a `framed ideal' of the `tropical picturesque'.
The abolition of slavery in the early 1830s in the British, French and Dutch colonies of the West Indies/Caribbean led to a severe shortage of labour in the sugarcane plantations. Soon, British-controlled India became a source of abundant cheap labour under a semi-slave contract system known as Indentureship. In 1838, Britain introduced the first Indian labourers to the Caribbean in British Guiana (now Guyana). The system later extended to Trinidad and Jamaica [1845] and then to other Caribbean islands like St. Lucia [1856], St. Vincent [1856], Grenada [1857] and St. Kitts [1861]. The system was also adopted by the French and Dutch who took Indians to Martinique [1853], Guadeloupe [1854], French Guyana [1855], St. Croix [1862] and Suriname [1873].
International Review of Social History, 1996
The American Historical Review, 2012
Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2018
In this paper, I wish to explore the life in the mid- 19th century to 20th century in the Durban based Indian Casbah and its enduring legacy. In exploring the Casbah life in Durban, I wish to pay special attention to the narratives of the people who either were associated with it and had living memories of it, or remember the many stories passed on to them by their families . The central question that I explore in analyzing these narratives is—does Casbah in the diaspora enable the diasporic community to reconnect with their Indian origins or does it orient them away from the romantic attachment to the places of their origin in India? In other words, is Casbah a symbol of a new settlement in which the diasporic community finds lasting meaning and legacy or does it evoke memories and myths about their origins in India?
Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2019
In this paper, I wish to explore the life in the mid-19th to 20th century in the Durban-based Indian Casbah and its enduring legacy. In exploring the Casbah life in Durban, I wish to pay special attention to the narratives of the people who either were associated with it and had living memories of it, or remember the many stories passed on to them by their families. 1 The central question that I explore in analysing these narratives is: does Casbah in the diaspora enable the diasporic community to reconnect with their Indian origins or does it orient them away from the romantic attachment to the places of their origin in India? In other words, is Casbah a symbol of a new settlement in which the diasporic community finds lasting meaning and legacy, or does it evoke memories and myths about their origins in India?
How do we continue to construct the Caribbean in the global world? Is the Caribbean an Afro-European Black Atlantic space which allows no evolutions of ideas, philosophies of difference, religious plurality, imaginative ethnic and racial hybridities or changing ethnic regimes of power? This paper examines the different aesthetic produced by religion, ritual and lifeways of an East Indian population in the western dominated region of the Caribbean. It argues that the position of the Indo-Caribbean is still that of the other in the region despite a history of over a century and one half of migration and settlement. Indo-Caribbeans have argued that their contribution to the region as a new entrepreneuring and diversifying agent has not been fully recognised and that the position of outsiderness is a convenient political one to ensure that they are kept as a marginal population. The paper proposes no facile solution but asks how might different ethnic or racialized groups might imaginatively enter each other’s predicament of identity and belonging and collectively rebuild the desecration of a shared colonial past
Indialogs: Spanish Journal of India Studies, 2022
This article argues that the novel A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), by Nobel-prize winner V.S. Naipaul reflects, through the metaphor of the house, characteristically Caribbean concerns regarding the meanings of home. Therefore, it is argued that the Indo-Caribbean community should be accounted for in theories of creolisation which, until recently, have ignored this community in favour of a unified Afro-creole identity that was to support the struggle for independence and other rights. The aim of this article is to understand creolisation by taking into account the interactions between the diverse diasporas that have created the contemporary Caribbean. As such, the novel unveils the conflicts that arise when there is a neglect of such negotiation. With its ending, even if not openly, A House for Mr. Biswas emphasises the immanence of lived experience in the perception of identity. The home in the novel eventually transitions into Avtar Brah's homing desire, a concept that challenges essentialism in the apprehension of diasporic identities. Reading the novel through this lens reconsiders the meanings of home in the context of the Caribbean in general and the Indo-Caribbean community in particular.
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NEW LITERARIA- An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
Following the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, the mass labour emigration between 1837 and 1917 became a potent mechanism in the formation of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. Over time, this "new system of slavery" emanated a new canon of studies related to migration and (re)settlement, the formation of new identities, experiences, and affiliation through assemblages of material. My study will analyse a selected texts from the Indo-Caribbean oeuvre. In the exploration of the intersectionality between migration and materiality, I will posit the significance of human identity and the process of commodification stimulated under the draconian indenture trade. My paper will engage in the binary prejudice and consequent, the commodification of the Indian coolies during and after the indenture system.
Conference Proceedings: Gender and Migration, 2014
A detailed study of the US-Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid’s work will be carried out in order to develop a reflection about the West Indian migratory process from a gender perspective. Kincaid’s writings contain plenty of elements that let us understand the complexity of West Indian diasporic identity, marked by a forced migratory in their origins, and then by another migration, which is apparently free, from the former Caribbean colonies to the old European mother countries and the new empires. Her main characters, who are always women (in interaction with another women), spread out that diasporic identity in a non-conformist way, from the dark preserved feminine side, challenging a world where colonialism and patriarchy are inseparable from each other.
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Rizka Ertama, 2019
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