Bringing together three generations of scholars, thinkers and activists, this book is the first to trace a genealogy of the specific contributions Indo-Caribbean women have made to Caribbean feminist epistemology and knowledge production. Challenging the centrality of India in considerations of the forms that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought and praxis have taken, the authors turn instead to the terrain of gender negotiations among Caribbean men and women within and across racial, class, religious, and political affiliations. Addressing the specific conditions which emerged within the region and highlighting the cross-racial solidarities and the challenges to narratives of purity that have been constitutive of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought, this collection connects to the broader indentureship diaspora and what can be considered post-indentureship feminist thought. Through examinations of literature, activism, art, biography, scholarship and public sphere practices, the collection highlights the complexity and richness of Indo-Caribbean engagements with feminism and social justice.

The dawn of the twenty-first century is an opportune time for the people of the Caribbean to take stock of the entire experience of the past forty years since the ending of direct colonialism. The authors believe it is now time to chart our future by carefully learning the lessons of the recent past. This interdisciplinary collection is the first to cross traditionally restrictive disciplinary barriers to address the tough questions that face the Caribbean today. What went wrong with the nationalist project? What, if any, are the realistic options for a more prosperous Caribbean? What are to be the roles of race, gender and class in a more global, less national world? Meeks and Lindahl include thought-provoking articles from twenty-one respected thinkers in diverse fields of study. The groundbreaking articles include critiques of existing bodies of thought, reformulations of general theoretical approaches, policy-oriented alternatives for future development, and more. This book is a must for statesmen, academics and students of political theory, social theory, Caribbean studies, comparative gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism and Caribbean history and anyone interested

As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.

In contemporary times, the bindi (red dot between the eyebrows) is decorative is well as religious, and is worn by women of any marital status, Hindu or non-Hindu, in India, its diaspora and globally. Rosanne Kanhai uses the bindi to characterize how Indo-Caribbean women come into their own in multiple ways. The book is a sequel to Matikor: The Politics of Identity for Indo-Caribbean Women and showcases recent works that reflect a variety of disciplines, styles and topics that include considering Indo-Caribbean women in creative, artistic and performance text, historical and anthropological analyses, intersection with their "others" in the Caribbean and its diaspora, narratives of self, healing and spiritual growth, and roles in religion and cultural activities. Bindi "makes a significant contribution to the field. It has moved forward the debates started by the first generation scholarship on Indo-Caribbean women and gender. ... The essays offer a more dynamic set of debates that allow tradition to dialogue with contemporary in one breath, as real life docs." --- Patricia Mohammed, Professor, Gender and Cultural Studies, and Campus Coordinator, School for Graduate Studies and Research, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago

An articulation of any kind of global understanding of belonging, or ways of cosmopolitan life, requires a constant engagement with vulnerability, especially in a world that is so deeply wounded by subjugation, colonialisms and genocides. And yet discussion of the body, affect and corporeal politics from the margins are noticeably absent from contemporary liberal and Kantian models of cosmopolitan thought. This book explores the ways in which existing narratives of cosmopolitanism are often organised around European and American discourses of human rights and universalism, which allow little room for the articulation of an affective, embodied and subaltern politics. It brings contemporary understandings of cosmopolitan solidarities into dialogue with the body, affect and the persistent spectre of colonial difference. Race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender are all extremely important to these articulations of cosmopolitan belongings, and we cannot really speak of communities without speaking of embodiment and emotion. This text envisions new ways of articulating and conceptualising ‘corporeal cosmopolitanism’ which are neither restricted to a purely postcolonial paradigm, nor subjugated by European colonialism and modernity. It challenges the understanding of liberal cosmopolitan solidarities using decolonial, and feminist performances of solidarity as radical compassion, resistance, and love.

What does a feminist urban theory look like for the twenty first century? This book puts knowledges of feminist urban scholars, feminist scholars of social reproduction, and other urban theorists into conversation to propose an approach to the urban that recognises social reproduction both as foundational to urban transformations and as a methodological entry-point for urban studies. Offers an approach feminist urban theory that remains intentionally cautious of universal uses of social reproduction theory, instead focusing analytical attention on historical contingency and social difference Eleven chapters that collectively address distinct elements of the contemporary crisis in social reproduction and the urban through the lenses of infrastructure and subjectivity formation as well as through feminist efforts to decolonize urban knowledge production Deepens understandings of how people shape and reshape the spatial forms of their everyday lives, furthering understandings of the 'infinite variety' of the urban Essential reading for academics, researchers and scholars within urban studies, human geography, gender and sexuality studies, and sociology

Homelandings is a critical exploration of the ways that postcolonial diasporas challenge exclusive formulations of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ based on racist and heteronormative assumptions. It critically engages with Foucault’s notions of “biopolitics" and "governmentality" as a conjoined technology of governance in the era of neoliberal capitalism ushered into the global economy from the late 1970s. Drawing on texts produced by diasporic people in the UK and USA whose work resists and re-appropriates exclusive home sites produced by trends of Anglo-American neoliberalism, it exposes entrenched discourses of exclusion rooted in race, class, and sexuality. In doing so, it offers an urgent intervention for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, Anglophone literature, comparative literature, Race and Ethnicity studies, and Queer studies.