Mixing Matters: Callaloo Nation Revisited

In "Todos Somos Primos" ("We Are All Cousins"), his moving introduction to Callaloo's 2004 special issue on Afromestizo peoples in Mexico, Charles Henry Rowell makes a call to expand the concept of African Diaspora as site; to interrogate identity politics, race, cultural politics, and forms of power; and to explore how these dimensions of diaspora "relate to uncharted regions of the African Diaspora" (xiii). The goal of this revisionist work would be to broaden the concept and discourse of African Diaspora from its connotation as a site to encompass its eclipsed historical, cultural, and regional dimensions (Rowell xiv). In drawing attention to the elision of peoples of African descent by scholars and others, and insisting on the recognition of the "absent-presence" of these communities (xiii), Rowell underscores the need for a deeper and more politically inflected understanding of race, culture, and memory in Afro-Latin American Diasporas. The recognition of "absent-presence," however, requires nuanced efforts because race is not simply a "regime of visual ascertainment" (Rowell xiii). That is, the visual does not necessarily reveal genealogical descent or its myriad symbolic significance; there are multiple and often subtle ways that the African Diaspora remains vital. Despite centuries of miscegenation and transformation into mestizos, many Mexicans, Rowell explains, identify themselves as Afromestizo; or they acknowledge some relationship with Africa; or they "carry Africa in their bodies" (xiii), establishing what Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran calls the "biological basis of Mexican nationality" (qtd. in Rowell xiii).

2007 brings Callaloo to another special issue, one commemorating its thirty year anniversary as a major literary voice of the African Diaspora. My invitation to contribute to this issue provides an opportunity to consider how key points in Rowell's 2004 call resonate with another major diaspora of the Americas, that of South Asians ("Indians," as they are locally called) in the Caribbean.

Ending slavery in its colonies by 1838, the British colonial government struggled to meet the needs of sugar plantation production, particularly with respect to a cheap and plentiful labor supply. In the early post-emancipation period, strategies were debated and experimented with: immigrant and indentured labor were brought from such far-flung places as China, Madeira (Portugal), West Africa, other Caribbean colonies, and, after 1812, the United States. The majority of laborers who were headed for sugar plantations, however, arrived as indentured immigrants from India, the colony commonly known at the time as Britain's "jewel in the crown." Beginning in 1838 and lasting until 1917, this indenture scheme contracted laborers from such places as Uttar Pradesh, Oudh, and Bihar, and shipped them out of ports in Calcutta and Madras. Over a period of seventy-nine years almost a half-million Indians went to the Caribbean. About fifty-five percent of them ended up in what was then British Guiana, the first group arriving in 1838; seven years later, in 1845, the first shipload of indentured laborers arrived in Trinidad. By the end of the indenture period the Trinidad-bound totaled 33.5% of Indians sent to the Caribbean. Yet by the beginning of the indenture period, Trinidadian society was already permeated by what Donald Wood, among others, has characterized as "the whole intricate experience of the Afro-European encounter since the Renaissance, [and] the stereotypes formed by slavery [ . . . ]" (248). This was the context within which the various sectors of the Trinidadian population interacted and into which Indian (and other) immigrant laborers entered.

Despite its greater recency than the African Diaspora in the Americas, as well as its involving, at least in legal precept, voluntary as opposed to coerced labor, the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora, like the African Diaspora in the Americas, has also suffered its own forms of ideological elision and also contains its own expressions of nuance. The critical meeting points between African and South Asian Diasporas that I will consider here, prompted by Rowell's provocative discussion, are addressed as a series of key questions. Seeking to expand the concept of diaspora as it applies among African descended peoples in the Americas raises the question of boundaries: where do the boundaries of the African Diaspora (as opposed to other...