Diasporic (Dis)locations, Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani

ISBN: 978-976-640-157-3

Price: US$32 (s)

Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani, though published several years ago, remains an invaluable contribution to an emerging body of scholarship that focuses on the under-represented community of Indo-Caribbean women. Brinda Mehta writes that there exists, “a serious pedagogical and scholarly flaw” in Caribbean studies, in the form of “a wide theoretical and literary gap in the analysis of Indian constructions of female identity in Guyana and Trinidad and its determining impact on issues of race, class, gender and nationhood” (3). In Diasporic (Dis)locations Mehta posits kala pani discourse as an alternative analytic framework, or a way of thinking about Indo-Caribbean women writers and their work in order to reposition this marginalized community and its body of concerns as central to questions of national development.

Mehta asks questions about the ways in which “cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora,” in an effort to explore, “whether the idea of cultural continuity is, in fact, a postcolonial reality or a myth” (4). Mehta interrogates the extent to which women of the Indian diaspora as well as their diasporic counterparts share the mythologies and histories of women’s migration. A major interest lies in questioning the extent to which migration led to successful renegotiation of patriarchal and imperial conceptions of power. Mehta performs this analysis through a detailed exploration of the ways that Indian women have articulated the necessary process of (re)adjustment within the community and home following their primary displacements from ancestral lands.

Mehta begins Diasporic (Dis)Locations with a meticulous survey of the situation of Indo-Caribbean women in terms of their discursive representation and participation, as well as an intellectual cartography of previous scholarship in this area. She argues that earlier representations of Indo-Caribbean women in literature offer views of Indo-Caribbean women through masculinist and Afro-centered prisms that effect “a double literary displacement,” labeling Indo-Caribbean women as inferior and other as a result of both their gender and ethnicity. This mantle has been challenged by scholars such as Bridget Brereton, Ramabai Espinet, Patricia Mohammed, Rhoda Reddock, and Verene Shepherd, whose scholarship and literary contributions constitute a major intervention in social and cultural studies. While resulting theoretical frames, such as dougla poetics and creolization, have created an interstitial space that contests the dominant Afrocentric frame, they have perpetuated a concept of race-based Caribbean identity. Thus, by incorporating postcolonial and transnational feminist thought to dislodge previous models of identity based on race, kala pani discourse offers a feminist frame for forming alliances that are transnational and political in nature instead of biological and ethnic. This critical framework is therefore suitable to the experience of members of other minority populations in the Caribbean such as the Chinese and Lebanese.

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