The Construction of an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora PDF Download

Author: Brinsley Samaroo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : East Indians
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Author: Frank Birbalsingh
Publisher: Tsar Publications
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book presents a comprehensive look at the history and culture of the Indo-Caribbean people in the West Indies, where they have lived for more than a century and a half, and in Canada, Britain and the United States to which larger numbers of them have emigrated. Encompassing detailed considerations of literary works and extensive interviews with people of different backgrounds - writers, politicians, a sportsman, educators and communtiy workers - and from several generations, it produces a composite multifaceted picture of the ongoing search by a people for definition and voice, for recognition and ultimately a home.

Author: Kamille Gentles-Peart
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443834947
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Cultural traditions transmitted within the primary and secondary migratory communities of the Caribbean are continually subject to loss, gain and reinterpretation. Communication practices play a role in these processes as they help to sustain and challenge the diasporic subjectivities of the Caribbean. Re-Constructing Place and Space: Media, Culture, Discourse and the Constitution of Caribbean Diasporas seeks to explore the influence of embodied, discursive and mediated communicative forms on the construction and maintenance of Caribbean diasporic communities. The volume emerged from the 2009 New Media and the Global Diaspora Symposium: Exploring Media in Caribbean Diasporas held at Roger Williams University in the United States. The event sought to encourage interdisciplinary academic discourse on Caribbean migratory populations, foregrounding the role of communicative practices in sustaining their traditions. In keeping with the spirit of the symposium, this volume applies a transdisciplinary lens to understanding the diversity and complexity of Caribbean peoples’ production of and engagement with communication practices. The objectives for the book are two-fold. The general objective is to contribute to discourse on diasporic identity and performativity. The more specific aim of the book is to present a more complex picture of peoples from the Caribbean region and their diasporic communities. —From the Introduction

Author: Asmin
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN: 9353228476
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Over 33 million strong Indian diasporas spread all over the world has been an exceptionally successful story. Given their skills and other social qualities, they are also among the most sought after lots in most countries. Indian diaspora has performed well on all important parameters Ñ political, economical, technological and cultural. PIOs are amongst the top skilled, employable and prosperous non-native people in most countries. They are heading some of the top multinational companies and hold high positions in many international organisations, in a way making an important contribution to the evolving global agenda. Today, Indian diaspora is investing in creating jobs and cutting edge technologies world over. India has also done very well in reaching out to its diaspora through various channels, including the youth. At over USD 75 billion annually, India is the top recipient of remittances. Diaspora could also be an important source of technology and know-how. Given their goodwill on both sides, they are a great source of confidence-building between India and countries of their adoption and have demonstrated their clout on many occasions. Over the last many centuries, Indians have travelled to many near and far off destinations in the world for trade, business, education and jobs. One major wave of such movement was carried out by the colonial administration under the so called indentured system for meeting labour shortages in their overseas plantations. This inhuman system of exploitation of workers finally ended and the centenary of its abolition was commemorated in many parts of the world including India during 2017-18. Antar Rashtrya Sahyog Parishad (ARSP) had organised year long activities to mark this important land mark in the life of Indian diaspora, culminating with an international conference on the topic, ÔContribution of Diaspora in Nation BuildingÕ in Mauritius in July 2018. Several leaders and scholars addressed this gathering and this publication captures the essence of its outcomes. This publication could be a good reference for students and scholars working on diaspora.

Author: Lomarsh Roopnarine
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 149681441X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Winner of the 2018 Gordon K. and Sybil Farrell Lewis Award for the best book in Caribbean studies from the Caribbean Studies Association This book tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean--one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. Through oral history and ethnography, Lomarsh Roopnarine explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories, including the French Caribbean and other islands with smaller South Asian populations. He pursues a comparative approach with inclusive themes that cut across the Caribbean. In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean. Today India bears little relevance to most of these Caribbean Indians. Yet, Caribbean Indians have developed an in-between status, shaped by South Asian customs such as religion, music, folklore, migration, new identities, and Bollywood films. They do not seem akin to Indians in India, nor are they like Caribbean Creoles, or mixed-race Caribbeans. Instead, they have merged India and the Caribbean to produce a distinct, dynamic local entity. The book does not neglect the arrival of nonindentured Indians in the Caribbean since the early 1900s. These people came to the Caribbean without an indentured contract or after indentured emancipation but have formed significant communities in Barbados, the US Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. Drawing upon over twenty-five years of research in the Caribbean and North America, Roopnarine contributes a thorough analysis of the Indo-Caribbean, among the first to look at the entire Indian diaspora across the Caribbean.

Author: Brinda J. Mehta
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789766401573
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. This book fills an important gap in an important but underestimated emergent field. The book explores how cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora to determine whether the idea of cultural continuity is, in fact, a postcolonial reality or a fictionalized myth. kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters who in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity with equating writing as a pubic declaration of one's identity and right to claim creative agency. The book is of critical interest to those interested in twentieth-century literary studies, Caribbean studies, gender studies, ethnic studies and cultural studies.

Author: Ron Ramdin
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814775486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Arising from Bondage is an epic story of the struggle of the Indo-Caribbean people. From the 1830's through World War I hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers were shipped from India to the Caribbean and settled in the former British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies. Like their predecessors, the African slaves, they labored on the sugar estates. Unlike the Africans their status was ambiguous--not actually enslaved yet not entirely free--they fought mightily to achieve power in their new home. Today in the English-speaking Caribbean alone there are one million people of Indian descent and they form the majority in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. This study, based on official documents and archives, as well as previously unpublished material from British, Indian and Caribbean sources, fills a major gap in the history of the Caribbean, India, Britain and European colonialism. It also contributes powerfully to the history of diaspora and migration.

Author: Frank J. Korom
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220252X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The multivocalic rite known as Hosay in the Caribbean developed out of earlier practices originating in Iraq and Iran which diffused to Trinidad by way of South Asian indentured laborers brought to the Caribbean by the British from the mid-1800s to the early decades of the twentieth century. The rituals are important as a Shi'i religious observance, but they also are emblems of ethnic and national identity for Indo-Trinidadians. Frank Korom investigates the essential role of Hosay in the performance of multiple identities by historically and ethnographically situating the event in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Caribbean contexts. Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora is the first detailed historical and ethnographic study of Islamic muharram rituals performed on the island of Trinidad. Korom's central argument is that the annual rite is a polyphonic discourse that is best understood by employing multiple levels of interpretation. On the symbolic level the observance provides esoteric meaning to a small community of Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. On another level, it is perceived to be representative of "transplanted" Indian culture as a whole. Finally, the rituals are becoming emblematic of Trinidad's polyethnic population. Addressing strategies used to resist integration and assimilation, Hosay Trinidad is engaged with theories concerning the notion of cultural creolization in the Caribbean as well as in the general study of global diasporas.

Author: Aisha Khan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386097
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Mixing—whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism—is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies. Historically entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan shows in this ethnography, they reveal the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, Khan examines this paradox as it is expressed in key dimensions of Hindu and Muslim cultural history and social relationships in southern Trinidad. In vivid detail, she describes how disempowered communities create livable conditions for themselves while participating in a broader culture that both celebrates and denies difference. Khan combines ethnographic research she conducted in Trinidad over the course of a decade with extensive archival research to explore how Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians interpret authority, generational tensions, and the transformations of Indian culture in the Caribbean through metaphors of mixing. She demonstrates how ambivalence about the desirability of a callaloo nation—a multicultural society—is manifest around practices and issues, including rituals, labor, intermarriage, and class mobility. Khan maintains that metaphors of mixing are pervasive and worth paying attention to: the assumptions and concerns they communicate are key to unraveling who Indo-Trinidadians imagine themselves to be and how identities such as race and religion shape and are shaped by the politics of multiculturalism.

Author: Jasbir Jain
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities: Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora is a multifaceted collection of essays that unfolds the charge of the Caribbean writer to represent a region with a complicated history and an even more complex future. It encompasses the work of Caribbean writers living and writing abroad, rather than at home and thus, evaluates, critiques and reflects on Caribbean identity and reality from the perspectives of exiled authors. Questions of race, nation-building and postcolonial separation/connection, the Caribbean landscape, and navigating the minefield of culture are thoroughly examined. The essays have been chosen by editors Jasbir Jain and Supriya Agarwal from presentations at a seminar on Indo-Caribbean writing held in Jaipur, India. The selections are as rich and varied as the Caribbean itself, presenting and examining the work of authors such as Jean Rhys, the three NAipauls - Shiva, V.S. and Seepersad - Austin Clarke, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, George Lamming, and Arnold Itwaru among others. An excellent read for anyone interested in Caribbean Literature and the study of Caribbean Writers, Shifting Homelands, travelling Identities: Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora is also a tribute to the Caribbean itself.