Art, Archives, and Cultural Practices
From tracing the emergence of Indo-Caribbean feminist perspectives in scholarship, activism and personal life to transgressive storytelling in forms of creative writing, the collection then moves to explorations of art, archives, and cultural practices. Kavita Ashana Singh, in her chapter, revisits Carnival (a popular site for thinking about Caribbean women’s feminist or anti-feminist choices within expressions of national belonging) and puts forward a perspective on Indo-Caribbean feminisms that is not oppositional but is rather keenly attuned to feminist claims and practices that cross ethnic divides and collectively challenge continuing patriarchal nationalist narratives. Her chapter also importantly examines the role of the North American diaspora returning home for women’s performances of gendered identity. This chapter argues that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought must engage Afro-Caribbean feminist analyses of women’s Carnival performances through a comparative methodology of minimal incommensurability. Ethnographically examining Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women’s participation in Trinidad Carnival, Singh frames the specificities of Indian women’s feminism within the jahaji bhain concept, both locally and transnationally.
Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan focuses on bisexual identities, agency, and politics by discussing the stories of eight bisexual women, four of whom identify as Indo-Trinidadian and the other four as mixed. This chapter highlights the ways in which Indo-Trinidadian bisexual women actively negotiate the sociocultural minefield of femininity and respectability, engage in protests and sexual rights movements, and use their online presence and personal lives to forward their political activism. Ghisyawan argues that the positionality of bisexual women can be used to clarify processes of identity formation, sexual subjectivity, and political participation, as bisexuals are still a largely invisible portion of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and engage in a conscious negotiation of their insider-outsider positions.
Angelique V. Nixon brings together a focus on art with the fundamental contributions of Patricia Mohammed in the development of Caribbean feminism, to argue for the importance of the visual in theorizing Indo-Caribbean feminist thought. By offering a specific genealogy of Mohammed’s knowledge production that is Indo-Caribbean focused and expansive in its definition of Caribbeanness and pairing it with an examination of the artwork of the Indo-Trinidadian contemporary visual artist Shalini Seereeram, Nixon argues that Seereeram’s visual art embodies and visually offers what Mohammed calls for in her claiming of the Caribbean landscape beyond/outside notions of the “Caribbean picturesque” or “tropical paradise.” Nixon’s key approach in this chapter is to discuss visual art in terms of knowledge production by Indo-Caribbean women. With her focus on moments of intersectionality and formations of solidarity, Nixon sheds new light on the processes of building feminist knowledge in the region.
Finally, in “Art, Violence, and Non-Return,” Lisa Outar interviews Indo-Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary. Her work is inextricably intertwined with the autobiographical as she uses personal spaces such as her childhood bedroom and her own body in her exhibits. At the same time, Sinnapah Mary pushes back against readings of her work as defined by a particular ideology about women or feminism, highlighting the multiple and varied forms that Indo-Caribbean feminist knowledge production takes. While she does not claim this epistemological lineage in the interview, Sinnapah Mary’s overall engagement with global forms of gendered violence coupled with her emphasis on processes of reconstruction continually at work in Indian women’s lives in the diaspora suggest connections to the work of Indo-Caribbean feminists like Patricia Mohammed who explore the complex ways in which patriarchy gets reconfigured in the Caribbean by Indian women and men.
