Imagining India(ns): cultural performances and diaspora politics in Jamaica

This dissertation is a study of the emergence of racial, national and transnational identities in “East Indian’ diasporic communities in Jamaica. The goal of the work is to delineate the mutually constitutive relationships between expressive cultural forms – festivals, music, speech-play – and the social worlds in which such expressions are created, evaluated, and interpreted. As a means of achieving this goal, analysis is brought to bear on ethnographic and historical materials in order to investigate: 1) the centrality of expressive forms for the construction of cultural, racial, and class identities; 2) the tension between artistic creativity and the authority of tradition; 3) the gendering and racialization of individual bodies in performative cultural spaces; and 4) the impact of colonial, national and transnational agendas (ideologies) on local community practice and .consciousness. As a study of representative practices, “Imagining Indians” encompasses questions of cultural transformation, invention, and hybridity, but also implicates the domain of political practice and raises questions concerning community, nationality, subalternity. The dissertation demonstrates the effectiveness of analyzing referential and non-referential ways of producing meaning in conjunction with questions of the importance of place, race, gender, class, and power in and through performance.