Dr. Niranjana will discuss her most recent book Mobilizing India. Descendants of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad's population. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what Indian signifies-about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion-in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent, but are intimately related. Drawing on a variety of historical and contemporary materials, Dr. Niranjana argues that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad's most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians-male and female, of both Indian and African descent-in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.
Dr. Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context and a coeditor of Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India.