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Spotlight - Research Institute

Usha Iyer (Art & Art History) Brings Faculty Together to Examine Black and Brown Relations Across Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean

Professor Usha Iyer
By
Dr. Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Senior Associate Director of the Research Institute

Led by Dr. Usha Iyer (Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies), this CCSRE Faculty Research Network examines relations across Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. Focusing on under-researched and under-represented scholarship on race and ethnicity related to transoceanic Black and Brown intimacies, this multi-sited research endeavor engages with the logics and languages of negotiation that develop in these multi-directional, transregional, cross-racial encounters.

Studying these regions alongside each other brings to the fore understandings and grapplings with race and ethnicity that are not always commensurate with or addressed by Euro-US frameworks. As such, this network engages histories of colonialism, enslavement, indenture, and mercantile migration, as well as shared movements and imaginations of decolonization, and the enduring contemporary legacies of these encounters. Finally, the initiative is informed by a firm grounding and investment in the people, ecologies, and histories that oceanic routes brought into contact, and the political, artistic, and other collaborations that attest to coalitional solidarity and sensuous intimacies.

Leveraging this Network, Dr. Iyer will produce a journal special issue on this under-studied theme, bringing together scholars and artists who study Afro-Asian relations through political, religious, performance, linguistic, culinary and other forms. The special issue will discuss how these encounters draw our attention to the specificities of region, to structuring hierarchies of ethnic, linguistic, and caste affiliations, and invite us to engage with more granular histories of cross-ethnic and cross-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of connections and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities. 

The graduate student coordinator for the Faculty Research Network is Karishma Bhagani, Theater and Performance Studies.

 

Siparee Mai by Karissa Chandrakate. Image Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=936512274403008&set=pcb.936512321069670 | Every year on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, thousands of Trinidadians, including many Hindus, visit La Divina Pastora (The Divine Shepherdess), a Catholic church in the town of Siparia. For Catholics, the image in this church is the Virgin Mary - but for Hindus, she is Siparee Mai (Mother of Siparia): an avatar of Lakshmi, Kali, Durga, or Sita, worshiped for blessings of health, prosperity, and progeny. Although the origins of her image are unknown, Siparee Mai remains a symbol of religious coexistence to this day.