Event - Book Launch of “Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments”

Book Launch of “Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments”

07.29.17, 1:00 pm

At this event, co-sponsored by Jahajee Sisters, Lisa Outar and Gabrielle Hosein will launch their recent co-edited anthology, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments, published by Palgrave Macmillan. With some of the contributors to the collection, they will discuss the radical historical and contemporary terrain that the book offers for thinking about the gendered realities of the lives of Indo-Caribbean and dougla women and men, both in the Caribbean and its diasporas. The roundtable discussion will be from 1-3pm and light refreshments and book sales and signing will be from 3-4pm.

RSVP appreciated but not required

Bringing together three generations of scholars, thinkers and activists, this book is the first to trace a genealogy of the specific contributions Indo-Caribbean women have made to Caribbean feminist epistemology and knowledge production. Challenging the centrality of India in considerations of the forms that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought and praxis have taken, the authors turn instead to gender negotiations among Caribbean men and women within and across racial, class, religious, and political affiliations. Addressing the specific conditions which emerged within the region and highlighting the cross-racial solidarities and the challenges to narratives of purity that have been constitutive of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought, this collection connects to the broader indentureship diaspora and what can be considered post-indentureship feminist thought. Through examinations of literature, activism, art, biography, scholarship and public sphere practices, the collection highlights the complexity and richness of Indo-Caribbean engagements with feminism and social justice.

Dr. Lisa Outar is an independent scholar who researches Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. From Port Mourant, Guyana, she has a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from The University of Chicago. She publishes in the areas of Indo-Caribbean literature, feminist writing and the connections between the Caribbean and other sites of the indentureship diaspora. Her work has appeared in the journals Small Axe, South Asian Review, Caribbean Journal of Education, South Asian History and Culture, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, South Asian Diaspora, Cultural Dynamics, in Stabroek News and in the edited book collections South Asian Transnationalisms (Routledge 2012) and Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2015). She serves as an editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature.

Dr. Gabrielle Hosein is Head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She has a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, an M.Phil. in Gender and Development Studies from The University of the West Indies, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from University College London. Her current research areas are politics and governance, Caribbean feminisms, Indo-Caribbean feminist theorizing and sexualities. She has been involved in Caribbean feminist movement building for two decades and is Associate Editor of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She writes a weekly column, Diary of a Mothering Worker, for the Trinidad Guardian.

Image:  Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné