Beyond National Bounds, the Indo-Caribbean

• In Event: Coloniality, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Caribbean: Contributions, Productive Intersections and Challenges

Abstract

The construction of the Indo-Caribbean presents an interesting coincidence of routes of coloniality studies and that of postcolonial theory. As an example I will take the location of the Indo-Caribbean in in the work of three writers: Sam Selvon (in An Island is a World, 1955), Harold Sonny Ladoo (in No Pain Like This Body, 1972) and David Dabydeen (in Slave Song, 1984). The Indo-Caribbean rests at the node of several networks, geographical, ethnic, linguistic, national and archipelagic. The Indo-Caribbean subject—not diasporic, as in from the Indian homeland, and not merely hemispheric since Indo-Caribbean subjects like David Dabydeen, Sam Selvon and Harold Sonny Ladoo occupy Old World European spaces like England—represents a category or authorial position that takes the Caribbean/the island/the archipelagic frame of the region as a starting point even as it engages with a previous notion of diaspora. The idea of “coloniality” allows us to discuss the continued oppressions along the global migratory routes of the Indo-Caribbean while the postcolonial studies, in targeting the British empire and colonial representational project, allows us to study the linguistic and literary specifics of these texts.

Author

• Anjali Nerlekar, RutgersUNiversity