The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora

Join us as we celebrate the publication of Aleah N. Ranjitsingh’s edited volume The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora: Essays on Migration, Identity, and Literary and Cultural Representations. The volume expands notions of the Caribbean diaspora to account for the Asian as part of the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora. Its interdisciplinary chapters center Caribbean people of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Javanese descent in and outside of the Caribbean, reveal migration narratives, encounters on Caribbean plantations and in diasporic urban centers, notions of homeland and experiences of return, family histories, identity formation and subjectivity, the ways in which Caribbean people create and convey meaning about these histories, experiences and self, and the contributions of Caribbean people of Asian descent to the framing of the Caribbean and Asian diasporas.

Ranjitsingh is an assistant professor in the Africana Studies Department and Caribbean Studies Program. Her research focuses on the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora, and her areas of interest include identity and identity formation, gender and ethnic identities, race, Blackness and mixedness, and the processes of racialization at “home” in the Caribbean and in the diaspora. She has published in the Journal for Intercultural Studies, the Caribbean Journal of International Relations and Diplomacy, and the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She is the co-author of Dougla in the 21st Century: Adding to the Mix and the edited collection The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora. Essays on Migration, Identity, and Literary and Cultural Representations.

Ranjitsingh will be joined in conversation by volume contributors:

• Jillian Ollivierre, a Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology at York University in Toronto. Her dissertation, provisionally entitled “Jahajin Bundles: Fashioning ‘Global’ Indianness in the Wake of Trinidadian Indenture,” examines the interwoven material, affective, and geopolitical textures of nationalist and diasporic processes in Trinidad, focusing on the historically gendered commerce and consumption of the imported Indian fashions known locally as “Indian wear.”
• Nikoli Attai, who received his Ph.D. in women and gender studies from the University of Toronto. His most recent book, Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean, was published in 2023. Attai’s broader research focuses on queer experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean beyond notions of disease and violence, and the need to flee the region.
• Sue Ann Barratt, a lecturer and head at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She is a scholar of human communication and gendered expression and interaction. Barratt interrogates gender-based violence, especially as it manifests through social discourse.
• Tarika Sankar, digital humanities librarian at Brown University and a critical scholar of Indo-Caribbean diaspora, race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, and digital humanities. She earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of Miami. Her dissertation project, “Beyond the Culture Concept: Indo-Caribbean Identity as Diasporic Consciousness,” received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
• Cristine Sabrina Khan, a PRODIG Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Stony Brook University. Khan is currently working on her book manuscript tentatively titled, “Racialized Legacies in Localized Identity Politics: Constructing Second-Generation Indo-Caribbean Identity in New York City and Toronto.”