Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix

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Friday, November 12, 2021 | 5:30pm to 7pm

Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume, Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora.

The authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time, contemporary Dougla negotiations of social demands, their expansion of ethnicity as an intersectional identity, and the experiences of Douglas within the diaspora outside the Caribbean. Through an examination of how Douglas experience their claim to multiracialism and how ethnic identity may be enforced or interrupted, the authors firmly situate this analysis in ongoing debates about multiracial identity.

Based on interviews with over one hundred Douglas, Barratt and Ranjitsingh explore the multiple subjectivities Douglas express, confirm, challenge, negotiate, and add to prevailing understandings. Contemplating this, Dougla in the Twenty-First Century adds to the global discourse of multiethnic identity and how it impacts living both in the Caribbean, where it is easily recognizable, and in the diaspora, where the Dougla remains a largely unacknowledged designation. This book deliberately expands the conversation beyond the limits of biraciality and the Black/white binary and contributes nuance to current interpretations of the lives of multiracial people by introducing Douglas as they carve out their lives in the Caribbean.

Purchase Book: https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/D/Dougla-in-the-Twenty-First-Century

Co-Sponsor
Department of Ethnic and Race Studies, Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY

Author Bio

Sue Ann Barratt is lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, holding a BA in Media and Communication Studies with Political Science, a MA in Communication Studies, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Her research areas are interpersonal interaction, human communication conflict, social media use and its implications, gender and ethnic identities, mental health and gender-based violence, and Carnival and cultural studies.


Aleah N. Ranjitsingh is Assistant Professor of Caribbean Studies in the Africana Studies Department at Brooklyn College/CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies from the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her research focuses on the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora where she interrogates the concepts of gender, race, mixed race, Blackness, identity, and diaspora. She has published in the Journal for Intercultural Studies, the Caribbean Journal of International Relations and Diplomacy, and the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She is the co-author of Dougla in the 21st Century: Adding to the Mix (University of Mississippi Press, June 2021), a study of race and the mixed race Dougla identity in the Caribbean and the Caribbean.