Mixing Matters: Callaloo Nation Revisited

Abstract

In Todos Somos Primos (We Are All Cousins), his moving introduction to Callaloo's 2004 special issue on Afromestizo peoples in Mexico, Charles Henry Rowell makes a call to expand the concept of African as site; to interrogate identity politics, race, cultural politics, and forms of power; and to explore how these dimensions of diaspora relate to uncharted regions of the African Diaspora (xiii). The goal of this revisionist work would be to broaden the concept and discourse of African from its connotation as a site to encompass its eclipsed historical, cultural, and regional dimensions (Rowell xiv). In drawing attention to the elision of peoples of African descent by scholars and others, and insisting on the recognition of the absent-presence of these communities (xiii), Rowell underscores the need for a deeper and more politically inflected understanding of race, culture, and memory in Afro-Latin American Diasporas. The recognition of absent-pres- ence, however, requires nuanced efforts because race is not simply a regime of visual ascertainment (Rowell xiii). That is, the visual does not necessarily reveal genealogical descent or its myriad symbolic significance; there are multiple and often subtle ways that the African remains vital. Despite centuries of miscegenation and transforma- tion into mestizos, many Mexicans, Rowell explains, identify themselves as Afromestizo; or they acknowledge some relationship with Africa; or they carry Africa in their bodies (xiii), establishing what Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran calls the biological basis of Mexican nationality (qtd. in Rowell xiii). 2007 brings Callaloo to another special issue, one commemorating its thirty year an- niversary as a major literary voice of the African Diaspora. My invitation to contribute to this issue provides an opportunity to consider how key points in Rowell's 2004 call resonate with another major diaspora of the Americas, that of South Asians (Indians, as they are locally called) in the Caribbean. Ending slavery in its colonies by 1838, the British colonial government struggled to meet the needs of sugar plantation production, particularly with respect to a cheap and plentiful labor supply. In the early post-emancipation period, strategies were debated and experimented with: immigrant and indentured labor were brought from such far-flung places as China, Madeira (Portugal), West Africa, other Caribbean colonies, and, after 1812, the United States. The majority of laborers who were headed for sugar plantations, however, arrived as indentured immigrants from India, the colony commonly known at the time as Britain's jewel in the crown. Beginning in 1838 and lasting until 1917, this indenture scheme contracted laborers from such places as Uttar Pradesh, Oudh, and Bihar, and shipped them out of ports in Calcutta and Madras. Over a period of seventy-nine