Indo-Caribbean Culture

This dossier seeks to make the Indian Caribbean more visible and more pertinent to critical debates within Caribbean discourses. Few studies have undertaken serious analyses of Indian Caribbean creative expression, and most ignore the newness and complex fusions that characterize music, dance, and visual cultures in the postindenture diaspora. We endeavor to nuance conversations around marginalized Caribbean cultural production and multilocal identity, understanding the arts as useful historical archives. An overview of Indian indentureship precedes the presentation of the articles, which provide deep analyses that critically address these issues: how Indian identity is expressed and debated in performative and artistic practices, including LGBTQ challenges to categories of race and gender; what comparative analyses reveal about continuity, change, and exchange across the Indian Caribbean diaspora; how racial and cultural alterities are resolved within an African "creole" and/or multicultural framework; and how orientations to India, citizenship, and transnational belonging are expressed and processed.

In this piece, we collectively continue, and greatly expand on, emerging discussions surrounding diasporic tensions between South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities in Toronto, cultural appropriation, and the consumption of Caribbeanness, specifically in the work of Lilly Singh (also known as "Superwoman").

Indo-Caribbean literature has been gaining momentum over the past thirty years, creating a body of literature that most often bypasses the traditional vertical and national power relations between the former colonizing centre and the former colonized periphery. One can think of such writers as Cyril and David Dabydeen, Mahadai Das, Ramabai Espinet, Peter Kempadoo, Arnold Itwaru, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Shani Mootoo, VS Naipaul, Raj Kumari Singh, Ryhaan Shah, Jan Shinebourne, among others, and more recently Gaiutra Bahadur. These writers have written a variety of fiction and non-fiction narratives (poems, novels, short stories, essays) that foreground the odysseys, tribulations and ordeals of the people who crossed the kala pani (black waters) in the 19th century. In this chapter I would like to focus on two narratives written by descendants of these indentured labourers: Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge (2003) brings out the life of her great-grandmother Gainder who voyaged from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1879, and Gaiutra Bahadur’s essay Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013) researches Sujaria’s journey from Calcutta to British Guiana in 1903.
Taking a transnational and ‘transcolonial’ perspective is the only possible approach when dealing with Caribbean intersections in the Americas and beyond, in the transatlantic and indoceanic worlds. I will use what Shih and Lionnet in Minor Transnationalism (2005) call "transcolonial" relations, which denote "the shared, though differentiated experience of colonialism and neocolonialism (by the same colonizer or by different colonizers), a site of trauma, constituting the shadowy side of the transnational" (11).
Bringing together The Swinging Bridge and Coolie Woman will enable a better understanding of the complex network of geographical and historical intersections, as well as generational and generic crossings. These narratives of two women writers who retrace the steps of their ancestors intersect in many subtle and varied ways. Not least because, in Cyril Dabydeen’s words in a review about Coolie Woman, they both endeavour to "foster awareness" of their history. The translations Gainder and Sujaria performed from their native India to their adopted Trinidad and British Guiana find unsettling and complex echoes in the translations that are reconstructed and reimagined by Ramabai and Gaiutra from Canada and the USA. Listening to such echoes is indispensable in the present world.