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In this essay I write about an artist, a hiphop dancer and choreographer, Shailesh Bahoran, who is Dutch of Hindustani-Surinamese heritage. I use Bahoran’s work in several ways: to interrogate the relationship between “archive” and “repertoire;” to ask what it means to know through remembering, and to remember through dancing; and to explore what is it that we might want to “know” about migration. But I also use its multivalent appeal to the researcher in me to lever into the space of research, often buried aspects of subjectivity and positionality. I write about Bahoran not just to ask objective questions about epistemology, migration and movement, but to place on the table what it means for someone like me to write about someone like him. By “like me,” I indicate a position of relative privilege earned through my education in elite institutions of the world ring-fenced by certain conditions that have shadowed those privileges: racialisation in Europe (the space of my work); minoritisation through religious affilation in India (the nation of my birth and citizenship); restrictions on mobility thanks to decisions to retain that citizenship; gender. By “like him,” I indicate a male-identifying person racialised in the Europe that he is a citizen of; a person shaped by multiple generations of un/free migration across empires, oceans, continents and nations; born in a highly ethnically diverse country whose DNA is nevertheless “100% South Asian,”[1] and who expresses himself through a dance style forged from African American struggles for dignity, pride and self-expression.
Between that “me” and this “him,” there is a vast gulf that opened out when his ancestors left British India from the city I was born in. Yet despite that gulf, our life paths intersected at a common point of interest – African-heritage dance repertoires. This essay calibrates that gulf but also indicates the ways in which it can generate awareness of what Lisa Lowe has called “the intimacies of four continents.”[2] In spite of all that which separates, the contingent emerges through its Latin etymology of “touching with.” How do we detect those intimacies that exist beneath the radar of plotted narratives and charted routes? Lowe wants to “make legible the forcible encounters, removals, and entanglements omitted in liberal accounts of abolition, emancipation and independence” by “devis[ing] other ways of reading so that we might understand the processes through which the forgetting of violent encounter is naturalized, both by the archive, and in the subsequent narrative histories.”[3] My contribution to this approach is to seek intimacies of articulation – where “to articulate” is taken back to the movement of our joints. In the dance some other embodied histories are activated. My essay works through the articulations and contingencies that suture histories of migration to histories of staying put, and that come full circle when generations later those who inherit those histories come into contact in a continent other than those of our births, through the kinetic vocabularies of those who migrated out from yet another continent through the connected oceans.
I once found myself in Paramaribo, Suriname. What took me there was a conference on the legacies of Indian indentured labour worldwide.[4] But even more of a learning experience was simply being in a space that, prior to that moment, I had barely registered as a geographical and cultural entity: the Dutch Caribbean.[5] Moreover, I was in a part thereof that was not an island in the Caribbean Sea, but a sliver of land poised on the northern edge of South America, yoked to and different from French Guyane and English-speaking Guyana. Suriname looks out across the ocean towards Africa and Asia; northwards to the sugar plantation islands of the Caribbean, and backwards to the vastness of Amazonia; it is populated by a complex mix of ethnicities speaking a multitude of languages. In this space haunted by overlapping imperial histories, I heard echoes of words, accents and intonations that informed my own multilingual postcolonial world. My tongue encountered food that triggered my memory more acutely than sounds ever could. I was introduced to people whose faces and names reminded me sharply of my personal history in the port city of Calcutta, the culture of my family overlapping with that of the Biharis who had once set sail for Suriname via that city’s docks. Together with Surinamese people of African ancestry, I danced to a live performance of a much-beloved song for the Sufi saint of travellers, Jhulelal, whose shrine is now in Sindh, Pakistan.[6]
Before visiting Suriname, I had already experienced similar cultural phenomena in Trinidad, at another conference on Indian indentured labour.[7] There, somehow, the connecting tissue of a shared past – that of the British Empire – had made the matter less strange than the encounter with this remnant of another empire. Out here in Paramaribo, embedded in a matrix of spelling, language, aesthetics and architecture specific to the Netherlands and its colonies,[8] and, therefore, unfamiliar to me, were fragments of my own history, like the tips of vast icebergs in an unknown sea. These fragments linked up even more unexpectedly with the research interest that had propelled me to Suriname – the popular music and dance forms of the Caribbean which formed the basis of an interdisciplinary project on the possibilities of transnational solidarities forged through kinesis and rhythm.[9] In Paramaribo, dancing to zouk music in a room that was advertised as a salsa club, with Indian-looking young adults moving enthusiastically to r-n-b and hiphop in an adjoining room, I felt ever more displaced and ever more connected. My body felt porous to different waves of history. Where were the textbooks, the novels, even the atlases, that would help me analyse these assemblages created from migrations, displacements and deracinations?
Pagal Samandar/ Mad Sea
Sunny afternoon outside, darkness inside. Out of the dark emerge footsteps and the faint outline of bodies. Slowly, six sitting bodies are revealed. An Indian soundscape – tablas, Sanskrit chants – makes itself audible. A South Asian sacred ambience is unfolded through hand gestures. We are in a meditative memorial space. The bodies rise, writhing around a central, box-like frame. They wear short kurtas and dhotis of white homespun cotton – the signature garb of South Asian migrant labour down the ages. Beneath, they wear black stretch tops and leggings – the uniform of contemporary dancers. We are in a world as layered as their clothing. Here, bodies, space, sound and movement bear witness to migration and mixing, to the subaltern’s labour that laid the bricks of modernity. This is the history commemorated in the magnificent dance piece, Lalla Rookh. I was watching it at the Korzo Theatre, The Hague, where it had premiered in February 2014 as part of the Dutch Kadans Festival. It was also the first time I met the director of Lalla Rookh, the Dutch hiphop dancer and choreographer Shailesh Bahoran, who was born in Suriname, is of Indian heritage, and has lived in the Netherlands since his childhood.[10]
“Lalla Rookh” was the ship that transported the first Hindustani migrants from colonial India to Suriname – three hundred and ninety-nine of them who alighted at Fort Nieuw Amsterdam on 5 June 1873. They came to fill the labour gap left after the abolition of slavery in 1863; c. 30,000 more would follow.[11] Bahoran and three of Lalla Rookh’s cast of six claim this history as that of their ancestors, but this history is equally owned by the other three dancers who are of Moroccan and Indonesian heritage.[12] And indeed, Lalla Rookh leaves its audience with the realisation that all of us, subjects of capitalist modernity, are also part of that history. This inclusiveness is enabled by hiphop.[13] Afro-diasporic dance heritage tells the story of the pagal samundar: Hindustani for the “mad sea” that the ships encountered as they turned the Cape of Good Hope. The ship tossed on high waves, the dislocation of a body and mind in extreme agony, incapacitation, dementia: we saw it all on stage. The battle steps of capoeira, forged through resistance on the plantation, now enacted the emergence of the bond of jahaji-bhai.[14] Urban dance evoked the complete transformation of the new arrival to girmitiya: the subject of empire whose body is worth the labour it delivers, measurable in years, months, days and hours.[15] These are the robots of the Plantation and the Factory, the zombies of the Caribbean, the cogs in Capitalism’s monstrous wheels.[16]
Periodically, melodies and chanting voices revive a sense of the sacred. An existential problem emerges: How do we heal through these fragments? Can the trauma of Lalla Rookh and kala pani – the dark passage that robbed one of identity and moorings – ever recede?[17] Though identities are lost, the dance somehow suggests that newness is born – without amnesia. This is why a New World dance vocabulary, forged through the embodied memory of those who had been displaced earlier by enslavement, makes poetic sense here. Lalla Rookh’s dancers move from the particular to the universal through a versatile set of urban or street styles that are integral elements within African American social dance as a resistance to the Plantation’s necropolitics: hiphop, b-boying, breakdancing, funk, popping, locking.[18] Yet an Indian-ness is also invoked, especially through the little traditions that Lalla Rookh lovingly memorialises, in ritual gestures of meditation, consecration and prayer that start and end the piece. A new creolised body, with Indian hand mudras and b-boying lower bodies, is brought into being through dance. It moves in counterpoint to the relentless metronome of Capitalist time; it responds to the notes of the wooden flute that reminds us of the god Krishna, whose attribute the flute is, carrying the essence of Indic sweetness across the mad seas.[19]
Dance: To Remember, to Forget, to know
I have used my experience of viewing, analysing and learning from Lalla Rookh as an entry point to my essay. We are in a postcolonial moment replete with unpredictable trajectories of movement and affiliation. Transnationalism and cyber-connectivity bring us face to face with realities and histories entangled with ours in ways not always graspable in earlier phases of modernity. Gaps in our intellection open up which our established heuristic tools cannot immediately close. Lalla Rookh exemplifies for me how multi-sensory, embodied and performative resources can work in these contexts. The interlocking phenomenologies of dance, theatre and sound convey what Michael Rothberg has called our “implication” in each other’s traumas, far more efficaciously than any written document can.[20] Memories of journeys, both unspoken and impossible to articulate, become expressible through another kind of articulation – the movement of the joints of the body.[21] Working with dance implies shifting one’s critical practice from the realm of the graphic to the kinetic, from the textual and the recorded, to the embodied and ephemeral. Dance throws at me, a literary critic by training, the challenge of moving between textual and non-textual forms of creative expression. Before coming to dance, I had already enlarged my repertoire of primary materials from the written text to cinema, the visual and plastic arts and music. But working with dance allowed me to embrace fully the epistemological invitation of the protean, moving body. The body that traces history and inscribes its being in air and space returns us with new urgency to the question of theorising postcolonial memorialising and forgetting.
This body as repository of memory cannot be explicated solely through theory founded on forms of narrative expression and textual inscription, but neither can those theories be bracketed off from the body. Rather, the archive as repository of records, and the body’s creative expressivity demand analysis as dialogic epistemologies, sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic. From Diana Taylor’s distinction between “archive” and “repertoire” I thus extract a composite concept, “archive-repertoire,” as signalled in the title of my essay.[22] Furthermore, “repertoire” for me is also “sensorium.” The olfactory, the palpable, the kinetic: these are the ineffable, impermanent dimensions of memorialising that the sensorium gathers together as we work through historical trauma to claim our places within the narrative of modernity. The dancing body as episteme, the sensorium as knowledge-transmitter and the archive-repertoire as expressive code: all shed new light on the persistent question of how societies, and individuals within societies, remember, forget and forge solidarities in the wake of large-scale traumatic events. Thus, Shailesh Bahoran’s embodied articulation of Atlantic and Indian Ocean histories pushed my own research questions around memory studies beyond their territorialised preoccupations with the traumas of and around the Partition of India and the remainder of Kashmir towards a new, transoceanic remit for South Asia.[23] The journey of his ancestors outwards from Calcutta, on a ship like the Lalla Rookh, urged me to rethink my obsession with “cracks on the ground,” with “cracking India.”[24] As I become increasingly aware of my relationship to the ocean, via the Bay of Bengal and the port of Calcutta, I have started asking: how do memories of those who stay intersect with memories of those who had to leave?
The shift of focus provided another important corrective. For a long time, as a scholar, and like a great many people I know, I was largely interested in memory as it related to the study of unhappy affects. Mourning, melancholia and trauma were my buzzwords, and I was committed to working out ways to understand our postcolonial existence through them. This was a respectable exercise. The postcolonial world was a mess. 9/11 had happened, Islamophobia and radical Islam were both on the rise, while in India the Hindu Right had started its journey towards total supremacy. Ethnic conflicts were getting a new lease of life by being calqued on to one or the other of available religious revivalisms. On the ecological front, the 2000s brought various natural disasters – earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and the ever-present issue of global warming that, even when ostensibly unprovoked by human intervention, always confirmed the weakness of public infrastructure and the strength of corruption, especially in the developing world. There seemed little to be happy about, and devoting oneself to finding and developing analytical models for the trauma of postcolonial subjects seemed the most responsible task at hand. There were several scholarly role models to emulate, especially in the field of Holocaust Studies, and I set myself to developing paradigms for South Asian postcolonial memory politics through absorbing and dialoguing with those paradigms. Two decades-worth of research and writing on South Asia’s traumas and conflicts, including conflicts between public and variously private cultures of memorialisation, was the result.[25]
I had become a scholar of South Asian memory-making who emphasised trauma’s ubiquity as a postcolonial condition, and who took her cue from predominantly negative affects in both creative and intellectual domains. Supreme amongst these was Freudian melancholia and its post-Freudian elaborations.[26] Increasingly wanting to mould these resources and approaches to specific cultural contexts, I worked with South Asian affect clusters around language and image-worlds constellated around competing print cultures inherited from the late colonial period, and the splintered yet reticulated vernacular and Anglophone moderrnities that resulted. Affects of longing caused by separation, distilled in words such as the Sanskrit-derived “viraha” or Siraiki “moonjh” became useful lens to apply alongside the Eurocentric paradigms diffused throughout the postcolonial world.[27] But, fairly traumatised myself by repeated research visits to a live conflict zone (Indian Kashmir) and by analytical returns to the history of my own family divided by Partition, I was driven to look to a very different field of enquiry – Latin America. Spurred on by vague ideas of comparatively studying global postcolonialisms in a South-South model, I started to learn Spanish. This move led me to the world of Latin dance; the genealogies of those dance forms, in turn, led me to the African heritage of embodied and performance culture in and from the Americas.[28] The Afromodern dance floor and the dancing body that was at home in that space began opening new pathways for my quest to know, feel and articulate our modern condition: the traumas and the healing processes, alike, which make “implicated subjects” of us all.[29]
Alegria: A Radical Route to Knowing Migration
Diaspora is frequently experienced, remembered and analysed in terms of trauma, and, on the face of it, there is every reason to do so. The causes of diasporic migrations range from economic deprivation to political upheaveal, and from deceitful enticements – as in the case of indentured labour diasporas – to coercion, violence and the theft of populations to convert them into commodities – as in the case of enslavement. Even if a diasporic migration had been voluntary, there is always a formative input of homesickness or nostalgia. This close and foundational connection to traumatic events opens the migrant condition to reflections on the divergence between official histories and private traumas, the movement of the latter into “cultural trauma” and “collective trauma,” and the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memory as “postmemory” or “post-amnesia.” Textual explorations of diasporic subjectivity, such as the poem and the novel, fit well with modern literary preoccupations with alienation, unhomeliness, fragmentation of subjectivity, melancholia, which dovetail with the theoretical preoccupations with negative affects that I have noted above. The diasporic migrant writer, conscious of the slippage between origin, belonging and location, is well placed to answer the questions that have vivified modern literature: who am I, and where have I come from? But there is another side to culture produced through displacement: the transformation of those traumatic experiences into modes of resilience, survival and even joy. Where are the paradigms through which we can showcase and explicate this transformation? It is in music and dance forged through the experience and memory of the Plantation that I found answers.
I identify a positive affect generated by such music and dance working in conjunction with each other, that I call alegria, a pan-Iberian world for happiness or joy, connotative of a physicality that sometimes evades its English equivalents. Alegria is felt in the body. Its transformative force is most apparent in sonic and kinetic responses to the relationship between labour and diaspora, founded on the institution of slavery and perpetuated by the precariousness of post-Abolition life and labour migrations. Song lyrics alert us often to this paradox by explicitly juxtaposing traumatic memories of the Plantation with assertions of the joy generated by dancing to those songs. Thus, salsa songs on cane-cutting in Cuba, such as "Tumba la caña," funaná songs on working the volcanic Capeverdean soil, such as "Djonsinho Cabral," sega songs from Mauritius that evolved from the feminine labour of cooking, such as "Mol mole": these are just some examples of how music created out of migration and diaspora can transform the soundtrack of everyday life into the celebration of labour as a burden and self-making practice. The transformation of labour into alegria is further facilitated through dance. Rhythm and melody, call and response, and other structuring features that once ensured coordinated movement on the plantation, the field and the assembly line, now do so on the dance floor. Dance provides an embodied counterpoint to the memories of labour articulated in lyrics, converting potentially negative affect generated by those memories into an exhilaration that connects mind and body, individual and crowd.
A performance such as Lalla Rookh takes to the stage the dance and music of the street, to shine a spotlight on that exhilaration and make us, in the audience, sit up and feel it in our bodies. Lalla Rookh doesn’t just call on us to feel sorrow, remorse and anger for the brutalities of forced or coerced migration across the mad seas to serve the cause of extractive capitalism. The kinetic virtuosity of the dancing bodies on stage, their ability to interpret the music and rhythm, demand equally from us an appreciation of human agility to not merely survive, but survive with agility, grace and creativity. In watching, we vicariously feel their movements in our own bodies; through “kinaesthetic empathy,”[30] we understand that trauma was not always followed by melancholia. Rather, there are multifarious ways of re-making the self and the collective after trauma that involve repetition, physicality and the body. What I am calling an alegropolitics of dance thus demands theory’s return to a physical dimension of happiness that exceeds, indeed, bypasses the sexual in favour of the communal. Casting aside the age-old scholarly suspicion of happiness as a mere promise that was yet another kind of opium of the deluded masses, and of optimism as cruel in its delusions, I propose instead that we take alegria seriously.[31] How does the call to remember or forget sit alongside the imperative to be happy? How is happiness related to pleasure? Can we brush aside positive affects in our studies of memory? Alegropolitics, coined in dialogic response to Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics,”[32] is a heuristic toolkit with which to approach such questions.
The postcolonial condition has been over-intellectualised, as Elizabeth Freeman observes, through the intelligentsia’s propensity to turn away from a “seemingly obsolete politics of pleasure” and “[acquiesce] [. . .] to a Protestant ethic in which pleasure cannot be the grounds of anything productive at all.”[33] Freeman critiques Queer Studies’ valorisation of melancholia, and its suspicion of happiness as unhelpful in explicating what she identifies as inappropriate eruptions of “eros in the face of sorrow as traces of past pleasures located in specific historical moments.”[34] Dance that emerges through and in displacement but nevertheless draws attention to the beauty and virtuosity of the body and to the community created through collective joy, is one example of this eruption of eros in the face of sorrow. Its ability to short-circuit how we narrate those histories is akin to the interruptive force identified by María Rosa Menocal in lyric poems from early modern Iberia, that grieved privately the departure of Sephardic Jews into exile even while heroic narratives celebrated publicly the simultaneous departure of Columbus for the New World. Encrusted with traces from pasts and futures, such “shards of love,” as Menocal terms these lyrics, are memory-triggers for layered temporalities that refuse to remember the “whole story” by indulging us with narrative context.[35] Like the lyric-shard, dance too is counter-narrative, interruptive and iterative. Performing the relationship between dreaming and recalling, it evades narrative’s inevitable collusion of words, textuality and the power of telos. Through alegria of the body, dance derails linear time and tugs us into another time-space of knowing.
Multidirectionality: Grappling with Each Other
In a darkened church in The Hague, an audience hears a voice singing Indian classical music. As the light increases, two Black men, dressed in neutral tones of grey and beige, rush across the space. Stopping, starting, moving again, they seek the source of the sound. It is a South Asian man dressed in similar colours, a shawl thrown around his shoulders. He walks towards and past them, singing. A tanpura (a South Asian stringed instrument) occupies the nave’s far end, providing a focal point for the performers. The two dancers begin adapting their dance to his song through hiphop, other urban dance styles, and capoeira. Movements and voice mesh in a “trialogue.” The singer begins to play on a pair of tablas. The dancers contort their bodies around him. He lies down on the floor with the tanpura, cradling it lovingly, while continuing to sing; they also move down low, grappling with each other with capoeira-like movements. Their heaving chests and breathing adds another percussive layer as do the South Asian anklets placed over their trainers. The singer strikes the tanpura with a stick as if it were a cello. He sings in a melody and style recognizable to South Asian ears, but the words are Portuguese: brinca na areia (“play on the sand”). As his voice soars, the dancers reach a crescendo of exertion, supporting yet challenging each other. Beads of sweat catch the light before sudden darkness announces the end. Stray bells from their anklets scatter across the floor like jasmine blossoms.
Blood: Fellowship of the Dance is a performance conceptualised and directed by Bahoran.[36] The performers are, like him, Dutch: the singer Raj Mohan is of Indo-Surinamese heritage and the dancers, Eddy Vidal and Ramos Sama, are of Angolan heritage. Together, they have created a dance and music piece that draws from the Surinamese preservation of Indian classical music, and urban street dance styles that, while global in their appeal, have an unambiguous Afro-diasporic heritage. The commonalities between different migrant histories emerge, as well as the difficulties we face in speaking to each other about those shared experiences. Once again, Bahoran creates a profoundly moving piece that, through dance and music, transmits an understanding of intra-diasporic relationships very different than what the text or even word can permit. Freed from the pressures to demonstrate any kind of authenticity, creolised dance and musical forms, the flotsam and jetsam of modernity, re-assemble through an audacity born under duress and a historical need to improvise. The phenomenological amenability of music and dance to technologies and forms of splicing, mixing, layering and sampling come together with the characteristics of African-heritage music and dance forms, particularly polyrhythm, syncopation and improvisation. These formal propensities enable a range of music and dance from migrant cultures to embrace and juxtapose the inheritances of diverse cultures, including forms developed by subjects of other migration histories. The epistemic work of Blood begins to approach what Freeman calls an erotohistoriography, that “against pain and loss [. . .] posits the value of surprise, of pleasurable interruptions and momentary fulfillments from elsewhere, other times.”[37]
Freeman’s concept usefully supplements the study of narrative forms that are privileged within examinations of memory work. Our analytical reliance on, indeed preference for, narrative is closely linked with the privileging of testimony that arose through Freudian methods of psychoanalysis in which closure and a healthy working through are understood as beneficial for the traumatised psyche. Closure in these models is associated with storytelling that moves towards a denouement or conclusion; testimony is the act of telling one’s story to an audience. Our inheritance of these juridical-psychoanalytical models is part and parcel of the modern condition and we cannot do away with them altogether in the study of memory. However, since memory is in reality messy, embodied, non-linear, contradictory and sedimented, we need approaches that recognise and work with these dimensions – an erotohistoriographic approach, if you will. For a critical methodology, such approaches imply the consideration of embodied and improvisatory practices alongside the work of the text – a dialogue between graphic and kinetic realms that unfolds performative, temporal and affective complexity in the act of memorialisation. Dance as a mimesis of performance, as well as a host of embodied practices – including festive processions and carnival parades – involves the strategic retrieval of joyous memories felt in the body collective. These fragments from the past splinter the present to offer opportunities for its reassemblage. The dancing body as archive-repertoire can scramble linear time and make the past literally inhabit the present in a process that undoes haunting; it is instead a coming-alive, the negation of zombification.
Sudesh Mishra has called this coming-alive “the radical potential” of Plantation rituals:[38] freed from history, at any moment, any body can aspire to feel the same way by literally going through their motions. The singing voice and/or percussive and musical instruments can assist in an exegetical or dialectical fashion, adding to the semiosis of polyrhythm. The repetition of ritual, anchored both in the repetitiveness of the lyrics and the repetition of dance movements, urges us to rethink the connection between repetition and melancholia that many of us have been trained to assume. Instead, mimesis becomes an epistemic mode: mimicking each other, repeatedly, we can sense through each other’s bodies the histories of migration, displacement and trauma that would otherwise remain unknowable and siloed out of reach. This dancing body has the resources to be simultaneously reminiscent of Asia, Africa and Europe, of many transoceanic journeys of ancestors, and of victims and perpetrators alike. It is an enactment of Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multi-directional memory,” which calls for the recognition of co-existing, overlapping but non-competitive modes of memorializing events that were experienced as traumatic for different identity-groups. On the stage, as on the dance floor, all competition converges in a shared desire to shine through and despite pain. The common quest is to create beauty through kinetic virtuosity and lever up through movement, the transgenerational sediments of modernity that weigh down the subject as inheritor of these histories and memories.
Newness: (Un)Making Migration Through Dance
“Grandparents.” “Suriname.” “Malaya.” “Rubber Plantations.” “Migrated.” “India.” “Australia.” “Utrecht.” These were the words that announced the presence on stage of two young men half hidden in the shadows – words that were fragments of two fragmented histories now sedimented in their bodies – their dancing bodies. Wrapped in an orange-gold silk sari that was at once placenta, straitjacket, security blanket and creative inspiration, these Siamese twins conjoined by history now leapt, struggled and contorted their bodies in a confrontation with themselves, their ancestors, their pasts, presents and futures – indeed time itself. When they broke free of this material, it was to initiate a movement-dialogue using their respective dance styles – bharatanatyam for Sooraj Subramaniam, and hip-hop for Shailesh Bahoran. This was Material Men, their inspired collaboration for the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, unfolding before my stunned eyes at the Queen Elizabeth Hall of London’s Southbank Centre.[39] Bahoran’s Lalla Rookh had already convinced me that through dance there is indeed a way to link the African diaspora and Indian labour migrations that empire and capitalism triggered in waves. By combining the universal address of the language of hiphop with Indic rituals and gestures, and a soundtrack that brought the percussive rhythms of Urban dance with Indic melodies, Bahoran had created new solidarities between diasporic cultures which, even though embedded in the same national and transnational spaces, don’t often collaborate or dialogue – except through dance. Material Men went a step further in this use of dance to effect a meeting of histories, diasporas and the oceans.
While Bahoran’s ancestors had migrated to Suriname from eastern India to work on the sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery, Subramaniam’s grandparents had been part of the Tamil diaspora that answered Malaya’s need for labour on the British Empire’s rubber plantations. They are the inheritors, therefore, of migrations across the Western and Eastern paths of the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The migrants were non-elite people, who had no idea where Suriname or Malaya was, how long the journey would be, that they would have to be on a ship for months. They were people attached to the land they tilled and in which their dead were buried; to the rivers they worshipped and washed clothes in. But they were also very poor, desperate to make a living, exploited by landlords and by empire. What did they have to lose? Some of them were widows with no social mobility and others were young men with a sense of adventure. All were told rather tall tales of prosperity and plenty by unscrupulous recruiters who were empire’s middlemen. These recruiters organised their journeys from the hinterlands of Bihar or the Deccan to the busy imperial ports of Calcutta and Madras. There, after being contracted to work for a set period of years, they were bundled into ships and sent off to lands both far and relatively near – to Fiji in the Pacific, to Mauritius and Malaya in the Indian Ocean, to various Caribbean destinations, to Suriname on the edge of Amazonia.
Material Men’s use of Subramaniam’s dance repertoire alongside Bahoran’s highlights two possible embodied responses to dance as liberation from this history. One chose to train in a dance style considered classical within South Asia, another took to an African-diasporic style. In Material Men, their dance styles bend, flex and gesticulate like their bodies to respond to each other’s life path in dance. The sari that opens the show is their shared ‘material’ of histories of the heart – of difficult loves and private domains that lurk beneath official narratives and their deafening silences. It is the mother – “Mother India” – with its heavy demand of fidelity to an idea of home left far behind. Where and how does the diasporic subject find a toehold in that material/maternal vastness, always just out of reach? How does one acknowledge the caste-based oppression, collusions between colonisers and elites, and poverty that one’s ancestors would have fled, and the adventure of new lives across the oceans? Is turning to “classical Indian dance” the answer, or adopting the styles forged by another diaspora? Dance allows all answers to be right answers. It allows a non-narrative freeing of histories that imprison. In the process, Material Men universalises particular and individual histories. The intimate chamber music composed by Elena Kats-Chernin that forms its score enabled this universalising process, especially when, at a climactic moment, it is punctuated by the vocables of Indic dance. Bharatanatyam and hiphop bleed into each other to create a new thing without a name, yet another witness to the continuous production of newness that creolisation indicates.
At the same time, each dancer had already creolised his chosen dance style. Bahoran has been using hiphop to reproduce the robotic machine-metronome of Plantation time, while Subrahmaniam’s pairing of traditional gold necklace with grey trousers and orange belt attested to his creative take on a very codified dance style. Now, dancing together, each with his own vocabulary struggled to make sense of history on a shared stage. As the agility of hiphop met the raised palms, mudras, and stately postures of Bharatanatyam, the difficulty and exhilaration of the experiment was apparent. Starting out as antagonistic, they ending up supporting each other. Their sweating, breathing and panting bodies embraced and intertwined and strained to converse while retaining individuality. Different ancestral histories and dance trajectories notwithstanding, Material Men embodied and performed the process whereby two dancers recognise and celebrate, and not just mourn, their similarities grounded in modernity’s collective traumas of displacement and deracination. The heaving ribcages exposed by the dancers’ bare torsos, which radiated masculinity, fragility, labour and beauty in equal measures, paid homage to another universal truth of modernity: the human body and its capacity to extract enjoyment and transcendence through labour and exhaustion. In Subrahmanyam’s words, “there are moments in the striving for perfection that we forget to enjoy. In enjoying we get to just be, to embody. Shailesh and I were discussing recently that it is in enjoyment that the spirit of the dance is finally revealed. It is in that enjoyment that perfection or ananda (Sanskrit, “happiness”) is attained."[40]
An Intimacy Produced by Degrees of Separation
On 26 February 1873, four hundred and ten people embarked on a ship called Lalla Rookh in the city I would be born in a century later. On the 5th of June that year, three hundred and ninety-nine of them disembarked in Paramaribo in Dutch Guiana, now Suriname (eleven had perished on the journey). They had left a British colony and arrived at a Dutch one. Two imperial powers had collaborated to enable this movement of labour across empires, continents and oceans. On arrival, they remade their lives. One of their descendants chose to retell the history of the voyage through the medium of dance and premiered it within the CaDance Festival in The Hague. I, descendant of those who were not compelled to embark on any voyage from that same city of Calcutta, chanced upon this performance. I was drawn to it, because of my equally chance visit to Suriname some years before I saw Lalla Rookh. And being part of its audience taught me something that no text could: that it was time to come alive to “this sweet touch from the world,”[41] in which we dwell as embodied intersubjective beings. I could not be a jahaji-behen, but I could claim my port-brother.
For a woman to declare a man her brother is an Indic act whose most obvious performative manifestation is the Hindu festival of Rakshabandhan, or the bond of rakhi.[42] The gendered and majoritarian dimensions of such a festival are obvious enough and have been critiqued by many. For me nevertheless to claim Bahoran as my brother is a radical affirmation of those affective intimacies which subtend and survive instrumentalization into all manner of layered oppressive systems. It is through those performed and reclaimed acts that I find a line connecting my work on the archive-repertoire of indentured labour migrations with earlier research on the Kashmir conflict referred to several times in this essay, and that I conducted from a position of citizenship that is now being identified by scholar-activists as contiguous with the Indian nation’s settler colonialist approach to its cartographised peripheries.[43] It is not yet clear to me whether that line traces reparation or reification but it keeps me accountable to the subjects I choose to work on and with. It is not a straight line. This line follows the cracks on Partitioned ground out to the pagal samandar (mad sea). It tracks the rhythm of several subaltern histories to the beat of which some of us privileged enough have been invited to move with, to feel its reverberations at least unsettling the terrain we have come to stand on.
From the CaDance Festival brochures, banners and website, an arresting figure has been watching me. It is Shailesh Bahoran himself, in the guise of a contemporary Amazonian river-deity; painted blue like Krishna, wreathed with feathers and grass like a mythic figure from a Wilson Harris novel; sunglasses jauntily proclaiming his swag, and body arrested in a ribcage move that is typically Afro-diasporic. This palimpsest of a body is what Suriname, one of the most culturally and demographically mixed up places in the world brings to our consciousness. We are all more or less like that body. It is the labours of that body to which we owe the modern world, and which a production such as Lalla Rookh helps us know, and remember.
Notes
[1] The results of his DNA test were shared by Shailesh Bahoran with me in a personal communication. For this, as well as so much else he has shared with me over the past decade, I am deeply grateful to Shailesh.
[2] Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
[3] Lowe, Four Continents, 2–3.
[4] For the proceedings of the conference, see Maurits S. Hassankhan, Lomarsh Roopnarine, Cheryl White and Radica Mahase, eds., Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour: Historical and Contemporary Issues in Suriname and the Caribbean (Suriname: Routledge, 2016).
[5] On the Dutch Caribbean, see Gert J. Oostindie, Paradise Overseas: The Dutch Caribbean: Colonialism and its Transatlantic Legacies (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2005); Francio Guadeloupe, Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); on Suriname’s place both within “the three Guianas” and the Dutch Caribbean, see Rosemarijn Hoefte, Matthew L. Bishop and Peter Clegg, eds., Post-Colonial Trajectories in the Caribbean: The Three Guianas (London: Routledge, 2017).
[6] On the Sufi saint Jhulelal, see Dominique-Sila Khan, “Jhulelal and the Identity of Indian Sindhis,” in Sindh through History and Representations: French Contributions to Sindhi Studies, ed. Michel Boivin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 72–81.
[7] See the proceedings of this conference in Maurits S. Hassankhan, Lomarsh Roopnarine and Hans Ramsoedh, eds., The Legacy of Indian Indenture: Historical and Contemporary aspects of Migration and Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2016).
[8] On some of these complications around competing imperial scripts for Indic languages, and their repercussions beyond peninsular India, see Sonia N. Das, “Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics: Lessons from Tamil Books in French India and French Guiana,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59.4 (2017): 846–883.
[9] See Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Oceans, Cities, Islands: Sites and Routes of Afro–Diasporic Rhythm Cultures,” Atlantic Studies 11.1 (2014): 106–124.
[10] For Bahoran’s biography, see “Shailesh Bahoran,” https://www.ircompany.nl/about/shailesh, Illusionary Rockaz Company (13 February 2023).
[11] See Rosemarijn Hoefte, “Control and Resistance: Indentured Labor in Suriname,” New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 61.1/2 (1987):1–22.
[12] I obtained these details during discussions with the Lalla Rookh dancers during their performance at Wellesley College, Boston, on 9 November 2017.
[13] Thomas F. DeFrantz, “The Black Beat made Visible: Hip Hop Dance and Body Power,” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 64–81.
[14] See, for instance, Matthias Röhrig Assunção, Capoeira: The History of an Afro–Brazilian Martial Art (London: Routledge, 2004). For some complicating elaborations of the terms jahaji–bhai and jahaji–behen (ship-brother and ship-sister), see Rhoda Reddock, “Jahaji Bhai: The Emergence of a Dougla Poetics in Trinidad and Tobago,” Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power 5.4 (1999): 569–601; and Sean Lokaisingh–Meighoo, “Jahaji Bhai: Notes on the Masculine Subject and Homoerotic Subtext of Indo–Caribbean Identity,” Small Axe 7 (2000): 77–92.
[15] The English word “agreement,” which is what the would-be labourer signed to enter indenture, became “girmit” in Indian languages, while “girmitiya” was the person who entered that agreement. The term was particularly prevalent in Fiji but is now being used in a broader, pan–diasporic sense. See Brij V. Lal, “Girmit,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40.2 (2017): 313–315; and Sudesh Mishra, “Time and Girmit,” Social Text 82 (2005): 15–36.
[16] On the connections between zombies and extractive capitalism (in the widest sense of the term), see Sascha Morrell, “Zombies, Robots, Race, and Modern Labour,” Affirmations: of the Modern 2.2 (2015): 101–34; and Michael W. Merriam, “‘Haitian is my Language:’ A Conversation with Frankétienne,” World Literature Today 89.2 (2015): 22–25.
[17] On the term kala pani (Hindustani, “black waters”) and its literary repercussions, see Brinda J. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo–Caribbean Women writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (University of West Indies Press, 2004).
[18] For details on these substyles and their relationship to hiphop dance, see Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman, eds. That’s the Joint! The Hip–Hop Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). On necropolitics, see Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
[19] On the emotional freight of Krishna and his attributes in the labour diasporic context, see Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Beyond Créolité and Coolitude, the Indian on the Plantation Re–creolization in the Transoceanic Frame,” Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies 4.2 (2020): 174–193, here 177–179. It should be noted too that “Kishan” (Hindustani / Bhojpuri form of “Krishna”) is the name of Bahoran’s latest solo dance piece, dedicated to his son (who is also called Kishan): see “Dans op donderdag | Shailesh Bahoran / KISHAN,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= GKKA4Mjt3Zg, Zwolse theaters, Youtube, 28 January 2022 (13 February 2023).
[20] Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).
[21] Barbara Browning, Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), especially chapter 1, “Samba: The Body Articulate,” 1–34.
[22] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
[23] See, for instance, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Rapsodia Ibero-Indiana: Transoceanic Creolization and the Mando of Goa,” Modern Asian Studies 55.5 (2021): 1581–1636; and Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Creole Indias, Creolizing Pondicherry: Ari Gautier’s Le thinnai as the Archipelago of Fragments,” Comparative Literature 74.2 (2022): 202–218.
[24] The allusions are to the title of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988), and to the engagement with “cracks on the ground” and the cracking body of the narrator in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); for my engagement with this metaphor of cracking in these two classic works of Partition Literature in English, see Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Subjectivities, Memories, Loss: of Pigskin Bags, Silver Spittoons and the Partition of India,” Interventions 4.2 (2002): 245–264; and Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Gender, Memory, Trauma: Women’s Novels on the Partition of India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25.1 (2005): 177–190.
[25] My first published article on the topic was Kabir, “Subjectivities, Memories, Loss;” this phase of my research career culminated in two monographs, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2009); and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013).
[26] See Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), and the work of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.
[27] I have discussed these words in more detail in Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World,” in The Future of Trauma Theory, eds. Samuel Durrant and Stef Craps (London: Routledge 2013), 63–75.
[28] Kabir, “Affect, Body, Place” records the start of this journey.
[29] For an elaboration of these possibilities, see, for instance, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Decolonizing Time through Dance with Kwenda Lima: Cabo Verde, Creolization, and Affiliative Afromodernity,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 31.3 (2019): 318–333.
[30] Jaana Parviainen, “Kinaesthetic Empathy,” Dialogue and Universalism 13.11–12 (2003): 151–162.
[31] I allude here to Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); for my critique of these and other approaches to happiness see Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “On Postcolonial Happiness,” in The Postcolonial World, eds. Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim (London: Routledge 2016), 35–52.
[32] See Mbembe, Necropolitics; for my most recent articulation of “alegropolitics,” see Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Hortus Interruptus: A Time for Alegropolitics in Kashmir,” in Routledge Handbook for Critical Kashmir Studies, eds. Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski and Deepti Misri (London: Routledge, 2022), 81–92.
[33] Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 59.
[34] Freeman, Time Binds, 59.
[35] María Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
[36] I saw Blood: Fellowship of the Dance in The Hague on 1 February 2017.
[37] Freeman, Time Binds, 59.
[38] Sudesh Mishra, “Tazia Fiji! The Place of Potentiality,” in Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo–Diaspora, eds. Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 71–94.
[39] Premiered on 16 September 2015. For more information, see “Material Men redux,” https://www.shobanajeyasingh.co.uk/works/material-men-redux/, Shobana Jeyasingh Dance (13 February 2023).
[40] Social media exchange with Sooraj Subramaniam, September 2015.
[41] Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (London: Picador, 2001), 307.
[42] A “rakhi” is a decorative thread that a woman ties on to the wrist of a man in a performative declaration that asserts her claim on him as her brother, who will protect her henceforth. Although it is a Hindu ritual it is extremely common and indeed of added significance to find rakhis being tied across faiths. For some insight into this complex act, see Ruth Vanita, “Gender and Sexuality,” in Hinduism in the Modern World, ed. Brian Hatcher (London: Routledge, 2015), 293–307.
[43] See Hafsa Kanjwal, “Kashmir Diaspora Mobilizations: Toward Transnational Solidarity in an Age of Settler Colonialism,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, eds. Mona Bhan, Deepti Misri and Hayley Duschinski (London: Routledge, 2023), 379–95; Goldie Osuri, “The Forms and Practices of Indian Settler/Colonial Sovereignty in Kashmir,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, eds. Mona Bhan, Deepti Misri, and Hayley Duschinski (London: Routledge, 2023), 341–354; and Samreen Mushtaq and Mudasir Amin, “‘We will Memorise our Home’: Exploring Settler Colonialism as an Interpretive Framework for Kashmir,” Third World Quarterly, 42.12 (2021), 3012–3029.
Bibliography
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Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Browning, Barbara. Samba: Resistance in Motion. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Das, Sonia N. “Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics: Lessons from Tamil Books in French India and French Guiana.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59.4 (2017): 846–883.
“Dans op donderdag | Shailesh Bahoran / KISHAN.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKKA4Mjt3Zg. Zwolse theaters. Youtube, 28 January 2022 (13 February 2023).
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “The Black Beat made Visible: Hip Hop Dance and Body Power.” In Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Ed. André Lepecki. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. 64–81.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Hassankhan, Maurits S. Lomarsh Roopnarine, Cheryl White and Radica Mahase, eds. Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour: Historical and Contemporary Issues in Suriname and the Caribbean. Suriname: Routledge, 2016.
Hassankhan, Maurits S., Lomarsh Roopnarine and Hans Ramsoedh, eds. The Legacy of Indian Indenture: Historical and Contemporary aspects of Migration and Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2016.
Hoefte, Rosemarijn. “Control and Resistance: Indentured Labor in Suriname.” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 61.1/2 (1987): 1–22.
Hoefte, Rosemarijn, Matthew L. Bishop and Peter Clegg, eds. Post-Colonial Trajectories in the Caribbean: The Three Guianas. London: Routledge, 2017.
Guadeloupe, Francio. Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World.” In The Future of Trauma Theory. Eds. Samuel Durrant and Stef Craps. London: Routledge, 2013. 63–75.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Creole Indias, Creolizing Pondicherry: Ari Gautier’s Le thinnai as the Archipelago of Fragments.” Comparative Literature 74.2 (2022): 202–218.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Decolonizing Time through Dance with Kwenda Lima: Cabo Verde, Creolization, and Affiliative Afromodernity.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 31.3 (2019): 318–333.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Gender, Memory, Trauma: Women’s Novels on the Partition of India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25.1 (2005): 177–190.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Hortus Interruptus: A Time for Alegropolitics in Kashmir.” In Routledge Handbook for Critical Kashmir Studies. Eds. Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski and Deepti Misri. London: Routledge 2022. 81–92.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Oceans, Cities, Islands: Sites and Routes of Afro-Diasporic Rhythm Cultures.” Atlantic Studies 11.1 (2014): 106–124.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “On Postcolonial Happiness.” In The Postcolonial World. Eds. Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim. London: Routledge 2016. 35–52.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Rapsodia Ibero-Indiana: Transoceanic Creolization and the Mando of Goa.” Modern Asian Studies 55.5 (2021): 1581–1636.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Subjectivites, Memories, Loss: of Pigskin Bags, Silver Spittoons and the Partition of India.” Interventions 4.2 (2002): 245–264.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2009.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. “Kashmir Diaspora Mobilizations: Toward Transnational Solidarity in an Age of Settler Colonialism.” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies. Eds. Mona Bhan, Deepti Misri and Hayley Duschinsk. London: Routledge, 2023. 379–395.
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Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Röhrig Assunção, Matthias. Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art. London: Routledge, 2004.
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Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
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Join the colloquy
Join the colloquy
Black and Brown Intimacies Across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean
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“The rights of a coolie in California, in Peru, in Jamaica, in Trinidad, and on board the vessels bearing them to these countries are scarcely more guarded than were those of the Negro slaves brought to our shores a century ago.”
Frederick Douglass, “Cheap Labor.” Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, Reconstruction and After, ed. Philip Foner (New York: International, 1955).
From pre-colonial Indian Ocean trade relations to postcolonial formations such as the Non-Aligned movement, from intimacies forged through the related colonial displacements of enslavement and indenture to contemporary mercantile migrations as part of neoliberal globalized orders, Africa and Asia have never been far apart. In their relation, multiple global narratives unfold. Reading Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia alongside each other reveals polycentric and multivalent histories.
Through an engagement with histories of colonialism, enslavement, indenture, and mercantile migration, shared movements and imaginations of decolonization, this colloquy examines how studying Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean alongside each other brings to the fore understandings and grapplings with race and ethnicity that are not always commensurate with or addressed by Euro-US frameworks. Through the work of scholars and artists who engage with Afro-Asian relations through political, religious, performance, linguistic, culinary and other forms, the colloquy draws our attention to the specificities of region, to structuring hierarchies of ethnic, linguistic, and caste affiliations, and invites us to engage with more granular histories of cross-ethnic and cross-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of connections and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities.
Caribbean studies and Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies have developed nuanced and complex frameworks to study the dense racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural encounters and mixing in locations across the Francophone, Anglophone, and Dutch Caribbean as well as along the Swahili coast, and islands such as Mauritius, Madagascar, Zanzibar, and Réunion, among many others. Given disciplinary boundaries and silos, it is unfortunately rare for these frameworks to be studied together, so we might appreciate the rich encounters between a range of creole cultures without flattening continents and regions or only considering nation-state histories and trajectories.
In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe recommends we focus on “the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity,” and, in an essay titled, “History Hesitant,” she calls for “retir[ing] the convention of comparison” to think differently “about the important asymmetries of contact, encounter, convergence, and solidarity.” Édouard Glissant sees collisions between cultures as productive of Relation, where in the multiplicity and diversity of beings in Relation, “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” Our colloquy attends to histories of inter-ethnic and -racial conflict, and political and economic dominance and marginalization, which alert us to the fractious realities of these relations, and equally to political, artistic and other collaborations that attest to coalitional solidarity and sensuous intimacies.
By engaging with work that demonstrates historical depth, theoretical rigor, aesthetic experimentation, and radical political imaginations, this colloquy showcases studies of cross-racial intimacies, conceived as complex entanglements of the many affects generated by proximity. Transoceanic Black and Brown intimacy is under-researched and under-represented in scholarship on race and ethnicity. Our colloquy features work firmly grounded and invested in the people, ecologies, and histories that oceanic routes brought into contact, and the enduring legacies of those encounters.