Read more
As Contradictory Indianness endeavors to show, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. This book’s unique contribution lies in an explicit privileging of Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean.
List of contents
Introduction: Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary
1. Passage and Poetics in Totaram Sanadhya and LalBihari Sharma
2. Repatriation and the "Indian Problem" in Ismith Khan's The Jumbie Bird (1960)
3. The Trope of the Ricefield in Harold Sonny Ladoo's No pain like this body (1972)
4. (En)Gendering Indenture in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1992)
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the author
ATREYEE PHUKAN is an associate professor of English at the University of San Diego in California. She is the co-editor of South Asia and Its Others: Reading the Exotic, and co-editor of Home and the World: South Asia in Transition.
Summary
Maintains that the writers’ engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart - the Africanized and Indianized - and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same - indenture and South Asian Indianness.
