Indo-Caribbean Feminisms: Charting Crossings in Geography, Discourse, and Politics

Abstract

An examination of Indo-Caribbean feminisms is a fraught endeavor, burdened as the figure of the Indo-Caribbean woman is with the weight of historical stereotypes and with competing contemporary expectations of the role she must play in community identity and in protection of what is seen as the boundaries of Indianness in the Caribbean. While contemporary Indo-Caribbean literature and scholarship have done much to push against these flattened versions of what Caribbean Indian femininity is or should be, the dominant notions of the Indo-Caribbean woman as Hindu, as passive, as heterosexual, as conservative, as submissive, as guardian of Indian culture via her body and her morality continue to haunt us. This special issue of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies pulls together a wide cross-section of voices—scholarly, artistic, and activist—to try to highlight the often-unaddressed diversity of this community and to offer some sense of the critical and revolutionary interventions that Indo-Caribbean women are making in conversations about Caribbean femininity, politics, agency, and the nature of “authenticity” in diasporic contexts.

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