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- Title
"Meh Just Realize I's Ah Coolie Bai": Indo-Caribbean Masculinities, Chutney Genealogies, and Qoolie Subjectivities.
- Authors
Persadie, Ryan
- Abstract
In the Anglophone Caribbean, nationalist discourses of sexual citizenship are inextricably linked to the afterlife of colonialism and its far-reaching and affective legacies, resonances, and continuities as it reinscribes alterity on the bodies of sexual and gendered "others." Focusing our optics on the Indo-Caribbean, I explore how archives of chutney music offer disruptive methods, strategies, and praxes of transgression that trouble discourses of "normative" Creole (Afro-Caribbean) and heteronormative nationalisms as "authentic" ideologies of Indo-Caribbean gendering--notably, masculinity. Drawing upon historical genealogies of sexualsacred erotics found within the Hindu, women-exclusive, pre-wedding Indo-Caribbean tradition of matikor, I interrogate how men artists in chutney music spaces perform what I conceptualize as "qoolie subjectivities," or distinct embodied languages of self that operate through what I argue are long-standing entanglements of Indo-Caribbeanness and queerness that, when excavated via the body, cultivate critical forms of Indo-Caribbean knowing and living. In this essay, I specifically focus on acts of remaking the pejorative term "coolie" from a grammar of harm to one of reclamation, and agentive potential. Such performances choreograph embodiments of erotic self-making, or "qoolieness," as methods of pursuing transgressive Indo-Caribbean means of doing nonnormative gender and sexuality, offering us important vocalities that speak through genealogies of (post)indentureship chutney feminisms. My analysis of Indo-Guyanese chutney artist Mystic's viral song and music video entitled "Coolie Bai" (2014) interrogates how such embodied articulations of qoolieness generate alternative forms of Indo-Caribbean citizenships, masculinities and strategies of remaking the self that move us beyond hegemonic ontological paradigms.
- Subjects
CARIBBEAN; GUIANA; MASCULINITY; GENDER; MUSIC videos; GENEALOGY; MUSIC archives; FOCUS (Optics)
- Publication
Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 2020, Vol 4, Issue 2, p56
- ISSN
2474-9621
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.23870/marlas.287