Hindu in the Making: Racialization and Diasporicate Cultures of Reification and Exchange between Trinidad and the United States

By means of two case studies, Charles Bartholomew and Jovedah de Rajah, one from the Caribbean and one from the US, this paper will examine the ways in which peoples of African descent in the Americas have mobilized Hindu identifications and Hindu identified rituals, in these cases spiritism and hypnotism, to construct diaspora-like cultures or virtual diasporas, cultures sometimes practiced jointly with peoples of South Asian descent. Thinking beyond African American appropriations South Asian identities, these are examples of what I will call Hindu diasporicate cultures—which use constructions of others’ homelands to make a home in the here/now. Thinking with Tina Chen’s ideas on imposture and impersonation regarding Asian American negotiations of racial regimes in the Americas, I will argue that we eschew binaries of real/fake or authentic/inauthentic to understand the ways in which African Americans’ mobilizing of Hindu identifications engaged in a politics of the imposture of religion.