Caribbean Masala: Indian Identity in Guyana and Trinidad (Caribbean Studies Series) - Hardcover

Dave Ramsaran (author) & Linden F. Lewis (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1496818040 ISBN 13: 9781496818041

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2018

Synopsis

In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean under extreme oppression. Dave Ramsaran and Linden F. Lewis concentrate on the Indian descendants' processes of mixing, assimilating, and adapting while trying desperately to hold on to that which marks a group of people as distinct.

In some ways, the lived experience of the Indian community in Guyana and Trinidad represents a cultural contradiction of belonging and non-belonging. In other parts of the Caribbean, people of Indian descent seem so absorbed by the more dominant African culture and through intermarriage that Indo-Caribbean heritage seems less central.

In this collaboration based on focus groups, in-depth interviews, and observation, sociologists Ramsaran and Lewis lay out a context within which to develop a broader view of Indians in Guyana and Trinidad, a numerical majority in both countries. They address issues of race and ethnicity but move beyond these familiar aspects to track such factors as ritual, gender, family, and daily life. Ramsaran and Lewis gauge not only an unrelenting process of assimilative creolization on these descendants of India, but also the resilience of this culture in the face of modernization and globalization.

About this title

Review:

"Ramsaran and Lewis have the courage to confront difficult political truths and dispel convenient mythologies that for too long sustained a one-dimensional view of Indian populations in Trinidad and Guyana. In Caribbean Masala, they unsettle dominant notions of what constitutes ethnic or racial boundaries, producing a new blend of identity that might be constituted as Asian Caribbeanness."

--Patricia Mohammed, professor of gender and cultural studies at University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, and author of Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad 1917-1947

About the Author:

Dave Ramsaran, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, professor of sociology at Susquehanna University, is author of Breaking the Bonds of Indentureship: Indo-Trinidadians in Business and coauthor of Hip Hop and Inequality: Searching for the Real Slim Shady. He recently edited Contradictory Existence: Neoliberalism and Democracy in the Caribbean. Linden F. Lewis, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, is associate dean of social sciences and professor of sociology at Bucknell University. He is editor of The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean and Caribbean Sovereignty, Development and Democracy in an Age of Globalization as well as the coeditor of Color, Hair, and Bone: Race in the Twenty-first Century.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1496818040
• ISBN 13: 9781496818041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144