Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity by Aisha Khan

March 4, 2017 admin

By Aisha Khan

Mixing—whether often called mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism—is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies. traditionally entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, rules approximately blending are robust forces within the methods identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan exhibits during this ethnography, they show the stress that exists among id as a resource of equality and id as an software in which social and cultural hierarchies are strengthened. targeting the Indian diaspora within the Caribbean, Khan examines this paradox because it is expressed in key dimensions of Hindu and Muslim cultural historical past and social relationships in southern Trinidad. In bright element, she describes how disempowered groups create livable stipulations for themselves whereas partaking in a broader tradition that either celebrates and denies difference.

Khan combines ethnographic examine she carried out in Trinidad over the process a decade with large archival examine to discover how Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians interpret authority, generational tensions, and the changes of Indian tradition within the Caribbean via metaphors of combining. She demonstrates how ambivalence concerning the desirability of a callaloo nation—a multicultural society—is show up round practices and concerns, together with rituals, hard work, intermarriage, and sophistication mobility. Khan continues that metaphors of combining are pervasive and value taking note of: the assumptions and matters they impart are key to unraveling who Indo-Trinidadians think themselves to be and the way identities akin to race and faith form and are formed by way of the politics of multiculturalism.

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