Author: Lomarsh Roopnarine Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 149681441X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 171
Book Description
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: Rattan Lal Hangloo Publisher: Primus Books ISBN: 9380607385 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
This volume seeks to explore some aspects of the history of Indian emigration to the Caribbean, which is one of the most significant events in the history of Indian indentured migration that took place to different parts of the world during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Indians faced many hardships in the Caribbean during the initial stage of their migration. However, over the years, they have become one of the most successful immigrant ethnic groups in the Caribbean. This book studies key facets of this retention of the Indian ethos. While doing so, it also analyses notions of religiocultural transformation, identity reconstruction, political participation and transformations, as well as resistance to enslavement and other oppressions. The contributors to this volume, who are recognized scholars and academics in the field of Caribbean studies, also have the advantage of first-hand knowledge and the experience of being a part of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean.
Author: Dave Ramsaran Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1496818059 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 148
Book Description
Winner of the 2019 Gordon K. & Sybil Lewis Book Award In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean under extreme oppression. Dave Ramsaran and Linden F. Lewis concentrate on the Indian descendants' processes of mixing, assimilating, and adapting while trying desperately to hold on to that which marks a group of people as distinct. In some ways, the lived experience of the Indian community in Guyana and Trinidad represents a cultural contradiction of belonging and non-belonging. In other parts of the Caribbean, people of Indian descent seem so absorbed by the more dominant African culture and through intermarriage that Indo-Caribbean heritage seems less central. In this collaboration based on focus groups, in-depth interviews, and observation, sociologists Ramsaran and Lewis lay out a context within which to develop a broader view of Indians in Guyana and Trinidad, a numerical majority in both countries. They address issues of race and ethnicity but move beyond these familiar aspects to track such factors as ritual, gender, family, and daily life. Ramsaran and Lewis gauge not only an unrelenting process of assimilative creolization on these descendants of India, but also the resilience of this culture in the face of modernization and globalization.
Author: Peter Lamarche Manuel Publisher: Temple University Press ISBN: 9781439905708 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tãn-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tãn-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture. Author note: Peter Manuel, an authority on the music of both North India and the Caribbean, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College. He is the author of several books, including Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford University Press), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, and Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Temple University Press).
Author: Philip Kasinitz Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801499517 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that underlie some of the city's explosive racial confrontations. Philip Kasinitz examines how two forces--racial solidarity and ethnic distinctiveness--have helped to shape the identity of New York's West Indian community. He compares "new" (post-1965) immigrants with West Indians who arrived earlier in the century, and looks in detail at the economic, political, and cultural rules that Afro-Caribbean immigrants have played in the city during each period.
Author: Paul M. Pressly Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820335673 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
DIVHow did colonial Georgia, an economic backwater in its early days, make its way into the burgeoning Caribbean and Atlantic economies where trade spilled over national boundaries, merchants operated in multiple markets, and the transport of enslaved Africans bound together four continents? In On the Rim of the Caribbean, Paul M. Pressly interprets Georgia's place in the Atlantic world in light of recent work in transnational and economic history. He considers how a tiny elite of newly arrived merchants, adapting to local culture but loyal to a larger vision of the British empire, led the colony into overseas trade. From this perspective, Pressly examines the ways in which Georgia came to share many of the characteristics of the sugar islands, how Savannah developed as a "Caribbean" town, the dynamics of an emerging slave market, and the role of merchant-planters as leaders in forging a highly adaptive economic culture open to innovation. The colony's rapid growth holds a larger story: how a frontier where Carolinians played so large a role earned its own distinctive character. Georgia's slowness in responding to the revolutionary movement, Pressly maintains, had a larger context. During the colonial era, the lowcountry remained oriented to the West Indies and Atlantic and failed to develop close ties to the North American mainland as had South Carolina. He suggests that the American Revolution initiated the process of bringing the lowcountry into the orbit of the mainland, a process that would extend well beyond the Revolution./div
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004288066 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 375
Book Description
The chapters presented in this volume represent a wide variety of Indian diasporic experiences. From indenture labour to the present day immigrations, Indian diasporic narrative is one that offers opportunities to evaluate afresh notions of ethnicity, race, caste, gender and religious diversity. From victim discourse to narratives of optimism and complexities of identity issues, the Indian diaspora has exhibited characteristics that enable us as scholars to construct theoretical views on the diaspora and migration. The cases included in this volume will illumine such theoretical ideas. The readers will certainly be able to appreciate the diversity and the depth of these narratives and gain insight into the social and cultural and religious world of the diaspora. Contributors are: Archana Kumar, Ram Narayan Tiwari, Ashutosh Kumar, Brij Vilash Lal, Inês Lourenço, Prea Persaud, Nalini Moodley, Carolyn V. Prorok, Thembisa Waetjen, Kalpana Hiralal, Sultan Khan, Shanta B Singh, Abdalla Khair Gabralla, Abul Fadl Mohsin Ebrahim, Sharmina Mawani, Anjoom Mukadam, Goolam Vahed, and P. Pratap Kumar.
Author: Krystal A. Sital Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393609278 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
An eloquent new Caribbean literary voice reveals the hidden trauma and fierce resilience of one Trinidadian family. There, in a lush landscape of fire-petaled immortelle trees and vast plantations of coffee and cocoa, where the three hills along the southern coast act as guardians against hurricanes, Krystal A. Sital grew up idolizing her grandfather, a wealthy Hindu landowner. Years later, to escape crime and economic stagnation on the island, the family resettled in New Jersey, where Krystal’s mother works as a nanny, and the warmth of Trinidad seems a pretty yet distant memory. But when her grandfather lapses into a coma after a fall at home, the women he has terrorized for decades begin to speak, and a brutal past comes to light. In the lyrical patois of her mother and grandmother, Krystal learns the long-held secrets of their family’s past, and what it took for her foremothers to survive and find strength in themselves. The relief of sharing their stories draws the three women closer, the music of their voices and care for one another easing the pain of memory. Violence, a rigid ethnic and racial caste system, and a tolerance of domestic abuse—the harsh legacies of plantation slavery—permeate the history of Trinidad. On the island’s plantations, in its growing cities, and in the family’s new home in America, Secrets We Kept tells a story of ambition and cruelty, endurance and love, and most of all, the bonds among women and between generations that help them find peace with the past.
Author: Walton Look Lai Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 9780801877469 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar Walton Look Lai offers the first comprehensive study of Asian immigration and the indenture system in the entire British West Indies—with particular emphasis on the experiences of indentured laborers in the major receiving colonies of British Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Exploring living and working conditions as well as the makeup of immigrant communities and their cultures, Look Lai offers a "dialectical pluralist" model of Caribbean acculturation that contrasts with the more familiar "melting pot" or "pure pluralist" model.
Author: Lomarsh Roopnarine
Author: Rattan Lal Hangloo
Author: David Dabydeen
Author: Dave Ramsaran
Author: Peter Lamarche Manuel
Author: Philip Kasinitz
Author: Paul M. Pressly
Author: 
Author: Krystal A. Sital
Author: Walton Look Lai