Tarika Sankar

This project adapts Aisha Khan’s concept of “diasporic consciousness” to rethink race and culture-based models of identity, arguing that Indo-Caribbeans in North America formulate identity as a political awareness of colonial labor exploitation and multiple migrations rather than “Indian” cultural practices or ethnic origins. Obscured by Caribbean Afro-centrism and marginalized within the South Asian diaspora by the traumatic history of indentured labor, Indo-Caribbean writers, activists and artists negotiate competing discourses of multiculturalism, anti-Blackness, and normative South Asianness without reproducing racial essentialism and ethnic separatism. Reading across literary texts, visual and documentary art, and grassroots activism from Indo-Caribbeans in the US and Canada, the project unsettles “culture” as the basis of diaspora to understand how marginalized diasporas navigate identity and build solidarities.

This project adapts Aisha Khan’s concept of “diasporic consciousness” to rethink race and culture-based models of identity, arguing that Indo-Caribbeans in North America formulate identity as a political awareness of colonial labor exploitation and multiple migrations rather than “Indian” cultural practices or ethnic origins. Obscured by Caribbean Afro-centrism and marginalized within the South Asian diaspora by the traumatic history of indentured labor, Indo-Caribbean writers, activists and artists negotiate competing discourses of multiculturalism, anti-Blackness, and normative South Asianness without reproducing racial essentialism and ethnic separatism. Reading across literary texts, visual and documentary art, and grassroots activism from Indo-Caribbeans in the US and Canada, the project unsettles “culture” as the basis of diaspora to understand how marginalized diasporas navigate identity and build solidarities.