Overview

Mixing - whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism - is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies. Historically entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan reveals in this ethnography, they reveal the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, Khan examines this paradox, as it is expressed in key dimensions of Hindu and Muslim cultural history and social relationships in southern Trinidad. In vivid detail, she shows how disempowered communities create livable conditions for themselves while participating in a broader culture that both celebrates and denies difference. Khan combines ethnographic research conducted in Trinidad over the course of a decade with extensive archival research to explore how Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians interpret authority, generational tensions, and the transformations of Indian culture in the Caribbean through metaphors of mixing. She demonstrates how ambivalence about the desirability of a ""callaloo nation"" - a multicultural society - is manifest around practices and issues including rituals, labor, intermarriage, and class mobility. Khan shows that metaphors of mixing are pervasive and worth paying attention to: the assumptions and concerns they communicate are key to unraveling who Indo-Trinidadians imagine themselves to be and how identities such as race and religion shape and are shaped by the politics of multiculturalism.

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Reviews

Callaloo Nation is a solid contribution to anthropological theory and Caribbean ethnography. In helping us to understand that group identity is in constant flux, Aisha Khan shows, far better than just about anybody else, what the term 'essentialize' really means. --Sidney Mintz, author of Caribbean Transformations Aisha Khan is an exceptional ethnographer. Callaloo Nation brings to fruition her many years of ethnographic research focused on both Indo-Trinidadians and the social construction of their identities. There is nothing like this work in the literature on the Caribbean or on postcolonial societies in any region. It will be a shaping force in social science research on the Caribbean. --Dan Segal, coauthor of Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities

"""Callaloo Nation is a solid contribution to anthropological theory and Caribbean ethnography. In helping us to understand that group identity is in constant flux, Aisha Khan shows, far better than just about anybody else, what the term 'essentialize' really means.""--Sidney Mintz, author of Caribbean Transformations ""Aisha Khan is an exceptional ethnographer. Callaloo Nation brings to fruition her many years of ethnographic research focused on both Indo-Trinidadians and the social construction of their identities. There is nothing like this work in the literature on the Caribbean or on postcolonial societies in any region. It will be a shaping force in social science research on the Caribbean.""--Dan Segal, coauthor of Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities"

Author Information

Aisha Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is a co-editor of Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies.

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