New Masculinities and Femininities

The final section on new masculinities and femininities offers fresh insights on the forms that Indo-Caribbean masculinities and diasporic femininity take on when refracted through the lens of this feminist intellectual tradition. Noting the absence of an accompanying body of literature on Indo- Caribbean men, Rhoda Reddock attempts to locate masculinity discourses in the larger body of Indo-Caribbean and Caribbean feminist writing and thinks through the implications of those discourses, past and present, for an epistemology of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought.

Michael Niblett explores the pressures exerted on traditional conceptions of masculinity as a result of increasing unemployment in male- oriented jobs following the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy. Given the lack of scholarship focused specifically on the transformation of Indo-Caribbean masculinities in this period, the article takes up Rhoda Reddock’s injunction that we look to Caribbean literature and popular culture as a vital repository of information on such changes. Through an analysis of Michel Ponnamah’s novel Derive de Josaphat (1991), Niblett considers the relationship between the decline of plantation agriculture in Martinique, the dislocation of masculinist identities, and the reworking of the masculinist narrative trope. He foregrounds the processes of violence and exploitation through which Indo-Caribbean masculinities are engendered and provides a utopian glimpse of how humanness and masculinity might be otherwise imagined.

Finally, Stephanie Jackson’s chapter on diasporic Indo-Caribbean Hindu goddess-centered worship highlights how women’s trance has become a major point of contention among temple communities in recent years. Emanating predominantly from within Indo-Guyanese-American ecstatic religious groups in New York City, such ambivalence and anxiety rest upon a paradoxical predicament: women routinely undergo trance despite a dominant discourse that women should not. Jackson suggests that gendered anti-trance narratives operate not merely as proscriptions but they undergird multiple multivalent messages constitutive of emergent Indo-Guyanese diasporic subjectivities within the broader context of a transnational ecstatic religious movement. As with Kavita Singh’s chapter, Jackson’s work here allows us to see the transnational circuits that ideas about Indo-Caribbean femininity travel and the potentially subversive versions of knowledge and praxis that can emerge in those contexts.