“Indo-Caribbean Feminist Futurities: Literary Imaginings”

“Indo-Caribbean Feminist Futurities: Literary Imaginings”

A talk by Indo-Caribbean scholar Lisa Outar

What are the forms of feminist thinking that appear in Indo-Caribbean literary imaginaries during the independence and postcolonial eras, ones that point the way forward to alternative liberatory futures? Indo-Caribbean writers such as Samuel Selvon and Lakshmi Persaud have long interrogated the lasting effects of colonization and indentureship on the psyche, the body and on community belonging and offered visions of alternative lives built upon renegotiating relationships to brutal histories and to dehumanizing contemporary settings both in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Tracing intergenerational literary connections and with a particular focus on Indo-Caribbean poetry, this lecture will explore the world-making engaged in by writers such as Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Shivanee Ramlochan, and Rajiv Mohabir, highlighting how these poets draw transgressively on tradition and initiate new ethics of relational care. These iterations of Indo-Caribbean futurities build decolonizing paths to new relationships to the natural world and to the unending work of untangling our humanity from the oppressive legacies of colonialism and heteropatriarchal nationalism.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER

Dr. Lisa Outar is an independent scholar whose research explores post-indentureship feminism, Indianness and cosmopolitanism in Caribbean literature and culture. From Port Mourant, Guyana, she has a B.A. in English from Princeton University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of English Language and Literature from The University of Chicago. Outar has published in the areas of Indo-Caribbean literature, feminist writing and the connections between the Caribbean and other sites of the indentureship diaspora, as well as conducted and published interviews with Caribbean artists, activist organizations and early Indo-Caribbean women writers. Her collaboration with Dr. Gabrielle Hosein and the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus has yielded two coedited works: a 2012 special issue of The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies that focused on Indo-Caribbean feminisms and the book collection Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her work has appeared in the journals Small Axe, Cultural Dynamics, South Asian Review, Caribbean Journal of Education, South Asian History and Culture, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, South Asian Diaspora, 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 a senior editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature where she was the editor of the April 2018 and April 2017 issues. The latter featured a special section on constructions of Indo-Caribbean femininities and masculinities. She is at work on archival research for a manuscript about early twentieth-century Indo-Caribbean female writers and the versions of feminist cosmopolitanism that they represented.