In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Asian American Studies 4.1 (2001) 1-34



[Access article in PDF]

Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle for Inclusion in Trinidad 1

Viranjini Munasinghe


Introduction

There is, . . . an attitude gaining increasing acceptance in our society, that those of African descent are somehow more Trinidadian than everyone else. As foolish as this is, it is being accepted hook, line and sinker by many. There are those also, who argue . . . that other groups must "prove" their Trinidadianness by giving up their heritage, spending all their time listening to calypsos and "carnivalising" everything they do, even religiously significant events, and even to go to the extent of wholesale intermarriage, as though this were some cure. 2

In articulating the predicament faced by Trinidadians 3 of non-African descent in the Caribbean nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago, 4 this anonymous writer unwittingly addresses a fundamental concern of our times--namely, the contestation over the power to define the cultural coordinates of the symbolic space of the nation. In the age of the hyphenated "nation-state," this tenuous if mythical congruence between nation and state is reproduced through hegemonic processes whereby a privileged race and class seek to establish a metonymic relation to the nation. 5 Such a relation provides the ideological cornerstone for ruling groups to claim to represent the nation ("the self" in the doctrine of self-determination) thereby legitimizing their control over the state. In this way the right to make claims on the state is one reserved for "marked" ethnic groups and minorities who are symbolically positioned outside [End Page 1] the "national self" even as they are included within the political state as citizens--a predicament facing those of "Asian" origin in the new world, including the U.S. While in the U.S. groups representing diverse "Asian" ancestries attempt to insert "their" community into the projected multiculturalism of the U.S. nation through the symbolism of a singular marked identity--"Asian American"--the Indo-Trinidadians have pursued a somewhat different strategy. Here we find a marked group that seeks national inclusion by changing the symbolics of the nation itself and not "their" particular identity. Such a strategy is possible because historical memory in this case points to a single origin for this "Asian" diaspora--India; in contrast, Asian Americans in the U.S. have no option but to redefine "their" identity into a singular identity precisely because historical memory dictates against a singular origin--they have to domesticate their diversity to fit into the "given" multicultural categories of the polity if they are to be included, however marginally, as legitimate nationals. Thus, while "Asian" groups in the Americas may share certain similarities with respect to their marked/outsider status, the particular strategies by which various groups struggle to become legitimate nationals of their respective nation-states are never uniform, informed as they are by historical particulars. As such, I use a specific discursive moment that occurred in 1989 in Trinidad to illustrate and analyze the politics of cultural struggle waged by certain segments of the Indo-Trinidadian population to transform the symbolics of the nation in order to insert "their community" into the definition of the "national self."

The question of national identity became paramount in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Trinidad, and the most vociferous participants in this debate were segments of the East Indian population. The principal allegation directed at the predominantly Afro-Trinidadian dominated government, the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR), 6 was the cultural and political marginalization of Indo-Trinidadians. This is not to say that material interests did not figure prominently in the crisis; nonetheless, Indo-Trinidadian contestation of what they perceived to be Afro-Trinidadian cultural and political hegemony heralded a significant change in tone from earlier forms of East Indian protest in that they were challenging domains previously considered incontestable, namely, the privilege [End Page 2] of "nativeness" accorded to Afro-Trinidadians as natural right. This privilege had historically legitimized Afro-Trinidadian claims on the state prior to and since independence in 1962. East Indian...

pdf

Share