East Indianness in the West Indies: Representations of post-indentureship in Indo-Trinidadian literature

My dissertation argues that post-colonial theories of hybridity, however well-intentioned, lose their "anti-essentialism" when applied to the Caribbean. Because of the region's complex histories of enslavement and its racial diversity many critics argue that essentialisms of some order are perhaps unavoidable. I argue that the rhetoric of hybridity associated with the Caribbean, in particular its literary counterpart "creolization," imposes a new essentialist framework that continues to mark Indo-Caribbean identity as an "exotic" other. My analysis of four novels by post-indenture Indo-Trinidadians shows the continuing ambivalence surrounding post-indenture Indian identity in the Caribbean, which also, I suggest, obscures the contribution of Indo-Caribbean writers to the development of Caribbean literature. Drawing on the works of anglophone and francophone Caribbean poet-theorists of creolization such as Derek Walcott, George Lamming, David Dabydeen, and Edouard Glissant, I analyze post-indenture fictions developed alongside creolization's rhetoric of Afro-Indian syncretism, but which reveal, from an Indo-Caribbean perspective, the continuing social and cultural minoritization of post-indenture Indian identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora. In this comparative study, I examine the role of indenture history and post-indenture identity in the works of V. S. Naipaul, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Shani Mootoo, and Clem Maharaj. The authors' depiction of these issues in their portrayal of interracial conflict, rural labor, working class struggle, and sexuality illustrate, I contend, that cultural hybridity in the post-colonial Caribbean can be viewed as both a liberating and delimiting process.