Dougla Feminisms

In the penultimate section of the collection, three chapters consider the question of dougla feminisms. As Mohammed did for her earlier writings, Gabrielle Jamela Hosein reflects on her own work where she embraced dougla feminism as a way to name transgressive Indo-Caribbean women’s practices. Here she explores what such an appropriation of the concept of dougla, by herself and by other feminist scholars, may have meant for both Indian and dougla gendered identities and politics and what it may mean now in a changed/changing atmosphere for claiming Indianness in the Caribbean. Hosein’s theorization of her daughter’s experiences as a dougla, both present and future, looks forward to a new generation of Caribbean feminists. Taking an approach that is personal, epistemological, and political, she shows the importance of examining openings as well potential displacements in Indo-Caribbean feminist intellectual trajectories.

Also in this section, Sue Ann Barratt leads us boldly into the raucous world of Nicki Minaj to try to assess Minaj’s inhabiting of the category of the dougla and the ways in which she plays with notions of sexuality, female power, and success in a hyper-gendered arena of rap music. Barratt’s analysis offers interpretations of new unexpected transnational and transgressive feminist practices. She particularly argues that dougla feminism could find itself in a paradox because of multiple and varied ethnic identifications made by douglas or by others perceiving this mixed group.

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard’s contribution puts forth a dougla feminist theory of representation via the object of cutlass as it is taken up in both Andil Gosine’s multimedia artwork and Gaiutra Bahadur’s nonfiction narrative of Indian women’s experiences of indentureship. In looking at these contemporary Indo-Caribbean feminist works, Parsard constructs a dialogue between the cutlass as artistic form and as potential suturer and the associations of the cutlass in the colonial archive with spectacular violence, especially addressing how physical objects at the center of colonial histories draw together violence, racialized histories, gender, and sexuality. Parsard argues that the cutlass is ambiguous and mobile, uneasily traveling through historical circuits of exchange, spaces such as the estate and the house, and contemporary print and performance. In examining the cutlass, this chapter highlights the politics of narration and the intimacy “at work in the history and present that Africans and Indians share.”