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14 The Diasporic Mo(ve)ment Indentureship and Indo-Caribbean Identity SEAN LOKAISINGH-MEIGHOO The argument of this chapter will unfold in four scenes. Each scene will lead into the next, and new concepts will be encountered within each scene. I think it necessary to follow my argument in this way if the many layers of the story I want to tell are to be appreciated. Of course, there are themes that will recur throughout, and some sort of narrative that will hold it all together. My argument is organized around the concept of what I will call the diasporic mo(ve)ment— that historical point of rupture between diaspora and home, which pins but does not fix diasporic identity in both time and space. So although this paper is about the significance of Indian indentureship in the Caribbean, there are many interrelated problems, both specific and general, ethno-historical and theoretical, that must be met along the way—the constitution of Indo-Caribbean identity, the meaning of diaspora, and even the very workings of identity. The first act, as such, will deal with the concept of diaspora in two scenes. In starting with a discussion of diaspora as a style rather than an identity itself, I want to suggest right away that diaspora is neither an intra- nor an extra-cultural concept. That is, the concept of diaspora cannot be theorized without reference to specific cultural identities, and yet, diaspora always escapes any such reference . The meaning of diaspora does not lie either fully inside or fully outside specific cultural identities, but may only be approached through the ongoing articulation of these identities. This, then, explains the first of my chapter’s excesses : in discussing Indo-Caribbean identity, we must always consider its relationship with Afro-Caribbean and other diasporic identities. And let me also spell out a corollary here, that my discussion of indentureship in this chapter offers important insights not only into Indo-Caribbean identity but into the intercultural politics of diaspora. The second act will move on to address indentureship in particular, again in two scenes. Revisiting some of the key characters introduced in the first act, I want to further suggest that not only must any discussion of cultural identity grapple with the challenge of cultural difference, but that moreover, this challenge of cultural difference must itself grapple with its own limits. The theoretical discourse of difference has certainly proven invaluable in dislodging nationalist and fundamentalist claims based on notions of absolute identity. However, this discourse itself runs the risk of falling into an equally absolute notion of difference, an unrelenting relativism that prohibits any critical discussion of the relationships that bring together different nations, religions, and cultures. The 172 Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo final part of the chapter, on the comparison between indentureship and slavery within Indo-Caribbean studies, then, will attempt to confront this renewed problem of cultural identity and difference. Yet I still have not explained the second of the excesses: my brief discussion of Indo-Caribbean religion is buried within a largely theoretical treatment of diasporic identity. But this is only apparently the case. Let us not forget, after all, that the concept of diaspora, the organizing theme of this chapter, is itself a religious one, appropriated from the Jewish tradition of textual exegesis and oral transmission. However, anyone at all acquainted with current cultural politics knows that diaspora is not “just” a religious concept anymore. But what a more critical consideration of the diaspora concept would question is that it ever was “just” a religious one, and that the religious ever has been so distinct from the secular. Rather, diaspora indicates that the religious and the secular are always already mutually implied and that the notion of religion as a discrete social practice is itself an invention of modern secularism. The implication of religion with other social practices is perhaps especially evident in the Caribbean, where issues of identity and difference along with themes of captivity and redemption seem to inform all areas of life. But let me suggest here that this relation between the religious and the secular is not at all unique to the Caribbean. What the study of Caribbean religion and culture suggests, as such, is that the object of religious studies in general must not be limited to “just” the religious, at least not in its conventional sense. And likewise, what the concept of diaspora in particular gestures toward is the importance of...

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