Abstract
As an Indian mother of a Dougla (mixed Indian-African) daughter, I bring together the personal, epistemological and political to interrogate conceptualizations of Dougla poetics and feminism in Indo-Caribbean feminist thought. Analyzing the politics of knowledge production in six texts, I show that their focus on Indo-Caribbean women misrepresented and displaced Dougla particularities and politics, foreclosing theorizing of Douglas’ different negotiations with race, class, gender and sexuality. I therefore argue for a Dougla feminist literature instead defined by complexities of Dougla embodiment. Following this, I then reconceptualize these six texts as a genealogy for an Indo-Caribbean poetics and feminism open to embodiments of Indianness which neither displace nor efface Douglas in scholarly writing. In this way, I examine openings as well potential displacements in Indo-Caribbean feminist intellectual trajectories.
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Hosein, G.J. (2016). Dougla Poetics and Politics in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Reflection and Reconceptualization. In: Hosein, G.J., Outar, L. (eds) Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1_13
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