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How colonial categories of race and religion together created
identities and hierarchies that today are vehicles for
multicultural nationalism and social critique in the Caribbean and
its diasporas. When the British Empire abolished slavery, Caribbean
sugar plantation owners faced a labor shortage. To solve the
problem, they imported indentured “coolie” laborers, Hindus and
a minority Muslim population from the Indian subcontinent.
Indentureship continued from 1838 until its official end in 1917.
The Deepest Dye begins on post-emancipation plantations in the West
Indies—where Europeans, Indians, and Africans intermingled for
work and worship—and ranges to present-day England, North
America, and Trinidad, where colonial-era legacies endure in
identities and hierarchies that still shape the post-independence
Caribbean and its contemporary diasporas. Aisha Khan focuses on the
contested religious practices of obeah and Hosay, which are
racialized as “African” and “Indian” despite the diversity
of their participants. Obeah, a catch-all Caribbean term for
sub-Saharan healing and divination traditions, was associated in
colonial society with magic, slave insurrection, and fraud. This
led to anti-obeah laws, some of which still remain in place. Hosay
developed in the West Indies from Indian commemorations of the
Islamic mourning ritual of Muharram. Although it received certain
legal protections, Hosay’s mass gatherings, processions, and mock
battles provoked fears of economic disruption and labor unrest that
led to criminalization by colonial powers. The proper observance of
Hosay was debated among some historical Muslim communities and
continues to be debated now. In a nuanced study of these two
practices, Aisha Khan sheds light on power dynamics through
religious and racial identities formed in the context of
colonialism in the Atlantic world, and shows how today these
identities reiterate inequalities as well as reinforce demands for
justice and recognition.
In case studies that include the Caribbean, Latin America, and the
United States, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume
trace the establishment of Islam in the Americas over the past
three centuries. They simultaneously explore Muslims' lived
experiences and examine the ways Islam has been shaped in the
"Muslim minority" societies in the New World, including the Gilded
Age's fascination with Orientalism, the gendered interpretations of
doctrine among Muslim immigrants and local converts, the embrace of
Islam by African American activist-intellectuals like Malcolm X,
and the ways transnational hip hop artists re-create and reimagine
Muslim identities.Together, these essays challenge the typical view
of Islam as timeless, predictable, and opposed to Western
worldviews and value systems, showing how this religious tradition
continually engages with local and global issues of culture,
gender, class, and race.
In case studies that include the Caribbean, South America, Mexico,
and the United States, the contributors to this interdisciplinary
volume trace the establishment of Islam in the Americas over the
past four centuries. They simultaneously explore Muslims' lived
experiences and the ways Islam has been shaped in the New World -
by "Muslim minority" societies such as the Shriners; through the
Gilded Age's fascination with Orientalism; in the embrace of Islam
by American black intellectuals like Malcolm X and the Black Power
movement; and by the ways hip hop artists re-create and reimagine
Muslim identities. Together the twelve essays challenge the typical
view of Islam as timeless, predictable, and opposed to Western
worldviews and value systems, showing how the religion continually
engages with issues of culture, class, gender, and race.
A welcome resource and reference biographical dictionary that
took five years to produce and is aimed at both graduate and
undergraduate students in anthropology, history, and sociology.
Each chapter is a brief autobiography that portrays the
professional and personal lives--the triumphs and tribulations--of
the brave, committed, first- and second-generation pioneers. . . .
Well organized with useful appendixes, indexes, and references.
"Choice"
These concise biographies of a wide and interesting sample of
women anthropologists make a valuable addition to the growing field
of history of anthropology. As the editors point out, the careers
of these women illuminate, usually by contrast, the factors that
shaped the discipline of anthropology in its first century. The
editors also note that these women's careers show far more applied'
and popular' work than characterizes the careers of most prominent
men anthropologists, and this difference calls into question the
values implicit in much mainstream anthropology, implicit values
often at odds with professed values.
"Alice B. Kehoe, Marquette University"
Mixing-whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity,
creolization, or multiculturalism-is a foundational cultural trope
in Caribbean and Latin American societies. Historically entwined
with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about
mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted
and evaluated. As Aisha Khan shows in this ethnography, they reveal
the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality
and identity as an instrument through which social and cultural
hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the
Caribbean, Khan examines this paradox as it is expressed in key
dimensions of Hindu and Muslim cultural history and social
relationships in southern Trinidad. In vivid detail, she describes
how disempowered communities create livable conditions for
themselves while participating in a broader culture that both
celebrates and denies difference.Khan combines ethnographic
research she conducted in Trinidad over the course of a decade with
extensive archival research to explore how Hindu and Muslim
Indo-Trinidadians interpret authority, generational tensions, and
the transformations of Indian culture in the Caribbean through
metaphors of mixing. She demonstrates how ambivalence about the
desirability of a callaloo nation-a multicultural society-is
manifest around practices and issues, including rituals, labor,
intermarriage, and class mobility. Khan maintains that metaphors of
mixing are pervasive and worth paying attention to: the assumptions
and concerns they communicate are key to unraveling who
Indo-Trinidadians imagine themselves to be and how identities such
as race and religion shape and are shaped by the politics of
multiculturalism.
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