A creative process: Indo-caribbean american identity as diasporic consciousness

Abstract

This article examines contemporary cultural production by New York-based, self-identified Indo-Caribbean artists in order to understand how Indo-Caribbean identity is formulated in the double diaspora, removed from the contexts of both India and the Caribbean. Specifically, I analyze Miranda Deebrahs oral performance piece Sounds from Home and Lissa Deonarains short documentary film Double Diaspora: A. Portrait of Indo-Caribbeans in New York using Aisha Khans framework of diasporic consciousness. I argue that in these pieces, Indo-Caribbean identity is constructed not around ethnicity, culture, or Indian traditions, but as a process that recognizes the interlinking of multiple traumatic displacements and migrations in the history of descendants of South Asian indentured laborers. Deebrah and Deonarain narrate journeys toward understanding and embracing identity that follow a trajectory from alienation and psychic disavowal caused by the dislocation of migration to the United States, where Indo-Caribbeanness is largely invisible in racial discourses, to self-imposed exile and distancing from the community. This prompts a return to histories of indentured migration and ultimately a reconfiguration of Indo-Caribbean identity around notions of intergenerational trauma and multiple displacements. I argue that this conceptualization of Indo-Caribbean identity as a diasporic consciousness allows a generation of Indo-Caribbean artists and activists to flexibly navigate racial discourses in the US, because it refuses to reproduce reified categories of race and ethnicity often demanded by a nationalist politics of recognition.