Friday, November 18, 2022 | 12pm to 1pm
Online Talk
Drawing from the 2021 co-authored text with Dr. Sue Ann Barratt, Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix, Aleah N. Ranjitsingh centers the Dougla, a “distinctly postcolonial subject” which emerged through the meeting and sexual unions of the African and the Indian—two presumably pure ethnic groups, who were transported to the Caribbean region as labor on sugar plantations. The term originated in the Bhojpuri dialect, connoting impurity and illegitimacy of this product of Indiannness mixed with Blackness, Blackness being decidedly of African descent in the Caribbean context. The Dougla experience in Caribbean spaces and the diaspora therefore provides an additional epistemology of mixedness, particularly as situated within an Indian/ African binary.
To be Dougla therefore is to experience mixedness as Blackness modified by Indianness. However, what happens when the Dougla leaves the Caribbean and encounters different racial systems and processes of categorization, and attempts to identify legitimately as Dougla? Ranjitsingh will thus center maneuvering as a descriptive and explanatory tool that summarizes how Douglas contemplate their experience of mixedness outside of Caribbean homeland spaces—maneuvering defaults (Blackness), maneuvering ambiguity, and maneuvering privilege.
Asian American / Asian Studies across CUNY Brown Bag Series
Sponsored by the CUNY Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI) Grant
