Art, Archives, and Cultural Practices
Comparative Caribbean Feminisms: Jahaji-bhain in Carnival
Kavita Ashana Singh
In Trinidad, Carnival has traditionally been seen as “a Creole thing,” code for “not Indian.” This “Creole” festival is closely identified with the nation in political and cultural discourse, so it is emblematic of how traditionally Afro-Caribbean practices became representative of national identity, to the exclusion of practices more associated with Indian culture. Yet Rita,1 an Afro-Trinidadian woman with a Carnival guesthouse, wryly told me during Carnival 2015 that “it have more Indian women out there than anyone else, now.” Of course, Indian participation in Carnival is not new, but Indian visibility in the centralized Port of Spain festival has certainly increased.
Carnival has become, in the last two to three decades, dominated by female participation. My first time at Carnival in 2011, a new Afro- Trinidadian acquaintance, Sharon, announced, “Carnival is woman!” Yes, approximately 80% of Carnival masqueraders are women (Scher and Green 2007, 6), but “Carnival is woman” goes further, suggesting that Carnival defines women, or vice versa. In this moment of spontaneous enunciation, an Afro-Creole woman speaking to a diasporic and transnational Indo- Caribbean woman named our shared subjectivity—“woman”—through
K.A. Singh (H)
English Department, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2016
G.J. Hosein, L. Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, New Caribbean Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1_9
Carnival; the festival suddenly became the promising ground for thinking “woman” in Trinidad before or aside from ethnicity or race. Sharon’s assertion compelled me to ask: how do women desire, create, and take pleasure in this space that is identified, in turns, with their womanhood, with the entire nation, and with the neoliberal state? How does this festival hold together both Indo- and Afro-Caribbean women’s masquerade— both groups of women defining and designing performances of them- selves—as well as their subjectivities within shared desires, needs, and also inequalities?
Feminist scholars have meticulously located the agency, empowerment, and pleasure to which women lay claim in their Carnival performances, but often in ethno-racial isolation. We think about black women in bikini mas’2 asserting agency and reproducing jamette contestation against colonial control3 (Bettelheim 1998; Franco 2000), and we discuss Indian women’s rebellion against Indo-Caribbean patriarchy through chutney- soca performances4 (Puri 2004; Niranjana 2006). These are the contours of Carnival feminism as it stands: specifically Afro- and Indo-forms, with mas’ in particular only theorized as it relates to black women. But what about all the Indians that Rita now sees playing mas’? Indo-Caribbean feminists have worked hard to correct the mainstream erasure of Indian women’s experiences and voices and to address the specific material and psychological violences visited upon them (Baksh-Soodeen 1998; Mahabir and Pirbhai 2012). Now, however, an exploration of kindred feminist logics across race in women’s Carnival performances is needed, especially as Caribbean women largely participate today according to similar late capitalist logics that rely greatly on individualism.
In this volume, in which Indo-Caribbean feminist thinkers historicize and theorize the field’s emphases, goals, and possibilities, I posit that, in addition to intersectional, hybrid, or dougla theories of gender, feminism, and race, a theory of comparison is also necessary. Comparison establishes both a shared ground of similarity for analysis (feminism in the Caribbean) while recognizing the irreducibility of ethno-racial discontinuities. I propose here such a comparative analysis by bringing existing black feminist theorizations of mas’ practices to bear on what I call the jahaji-bhain specificity of Indo-Caribbean women’s mas’. By focusing on the fraught, ideologically marked, but symbolically important Trinidad Carnival—because of its perception as a primarily Afro-Caribbean space—I intend to engage some of the intersections of Caribbean women’s expression, allowing for a translative encounter between feminist ideas that have been articulated differently and that emerged in historically specific ways. In order to address the particular complexity of comparison in this context, I will draw on Natalie Melas’ framework of “minimal incommensurability” in order to propose a translative approach to comparison in Carnival feminisms.
