Passing, Performance, and Perversity: Rewriting Bodies in the Works of Lawrence Hill, Shani Mootoo, and Danzy Senna

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2012-04-16 16:50Z by Steven

Passing, Performance, and Perversity: Rewriting Bodies in the Works of Lawrence Hill, Shani Mootoo, and Danzy Senna

49th Parallel: An interdisciplinary journal of North American studies
Issue 26: Autumn 2011
ISSN: 1753-5794
19 pages

Natalie Wall
University of Calgary

This paper examines the function of passing in the works of Lawrence Hill, Shani Mootoo, and Danzy Senna. It traces the historical use of the term passing, following its development from a static conception of the black person passing for white to a theoretical practice of acting out any/every race, in order to open the term up and explore why passing is considered perverse by so many and enlightened by a few. Passing, the essay suggests, exposes the dual nature of race – a construct that is arbitrary and fictional but which also possesses immense social and material power. Finally, by juxtaposing the works of these three authors, the essay argues for a conception of passing as an intersectional phenomenon, defined not only by race but also by its interactions with class, gender, and sexuality.

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Gender, Mixed Race Relations and Dougla Identities in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Fiction

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Women on 2011-07-14 00:59Z by Steven

Gender, Mixed Race Relations and Dougla Identities in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Fiction

6th International Conference of Caribbean Women’s Writing: Comparative Critical Conversations
Goldsmiths, University of London
Centre for Caribbean Studies
2011-06-24 through 2011-06-25

Christine Vogt-William
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

Once a pejorative term in Hindi meaning ‘bastard’, dougla is used nowadays to designate those of African and Indian parentage in the Caribbean. Relations between African and Indian communities in the Caribbean have been fraught, due to the divide-and-rule policies implemented by the colonial plantocracy, missionaries and state regimes, in order to discourage interracial solidarity and cooperation. Vijay Prashad observes: “the descendants of the coolies and the slaves have struggled against the legacy of both social fractures and of the mobility of some at the expense of others“ (Prashad, 2001: 95). Yet, despite this there were transcultural alliances between Afro-Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans. However the figure of the dougla was considered by many middle class Indians as a potential threat to Indian cultural coherence and by extension to a powerful political lobby under the demographic category of “East Indian” (Prashad, 2001: 83). Indo-Caribbean culture, history and literature cannot be examined without acknowledging the transcultural aspects of dougla heritages.

The focus of my paper will be on how gender and mixed race relations are addressed in novels by Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writers Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo. The genre of the novel could be read as an adequate site to address the interrogation of hybrid identities with a view to engendering a Caribbean feminist dougla poetics, since literature is “a medium that is not understood to be exclusively the cultural capital of Indo- or Afro-Trinidadians” (Puri, 2004: 206). Gender roles and expectations from both Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean communities inform and complicate racial relations—factors which are rendered even more complex due to the histories of slavery and indentured labour and how these served to shape Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean women’s self-perceptions. In view of these histories, I read The Swinging Bridge (Espinet) and He Drown She in the Sea (Mootoo) with the aim of charting spaces to articulate alternative perspectives normally disallowed by hegemonic racial representations (Afro-Creole and Indian “Mother Culture”), which also repress the gender and class inequalities within Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities. These spaces then might provide the dougla potential of disrupting dominant racial and gendered stereotypes, thus allowing for specifically transcultural feminist interventions in prevalent gender and race imagery.

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