The world systems of race, caste, and colonialism have long brought together Black and South Asian peoples and perspectives in conflict and cooperation. However, the same is only intermittently true for the fields of study, especially in the American Academy of Religion, of which they are both subject and object. This panel offers a way forward with reflections on Black and South Asian histories of diaspora, displacement, and devotion, and on the critical theories and methods that accompany and elude their respective fields. It asks what would be possible as a result of thinking these fields together as they oscillate between premodernity and postmodernity, philology and political theory. Papers move geographically between South Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas, and methodologically between intellectual history, ethnography, and critical theory.
This paper is an intellectual history of the self-published journals of the avant-garde jazz musician and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane, also known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda. In these meditations, she received messages from realms beyond (turīya) and displayed them in sound and word. The journals also reveal an autodidact capable in Sanskrit and Hindi and an informed reader engaging with specific religious texts. In this talk, I am interested in Coltrane as Turiyasangitananda – that is, as a self-ordained monastic leader and an independent artist, thinking creatively at the nexus of metaphysical religion, modern Indian spirituality, and the Black radical tradition. Through a close reading of her book Divine Revelations (1995) and other ephemera from her Sai Anantam Ashram, I provide detail into the South Asian forms of knowledge that Turiyasangitananda molded into her “freedom dreams.”
As a South Asianist by training teaching in an African American & African Diaspora Studies Program, my daily task is to advance interdisciplinary conversations in Black Studies and South Asian Studies. I center my research methodologies on the African Diaspora in South Asia within the ideological frameworks animating the field of Black Studies. This presentation highlights the key questions, theoretical framework, methods, archives, and findings of ethnographic field research on the Sidi (African-Indian) Sufi devotional tradition, conducted in the state of Gujarat and the city of Mumbai in western India from 2017-2019. The presentation demonstrates the importance of multilinguistic, multi-sited, and collaborative, multidisciplinary research on the African Diaspora in South Asia (and in Indian Ocean worlds more broadly) to the tandem development of the fields of Black Studies and South Asian Studies.
The year 1838 signifies double histories in the Caribbean—the emancipation of enslaved Black workers and the arrival of the first group of South Asian indentured laborers. After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, South Asians were shipped to plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. They labored alongside emancipated Afro-Caribbean workers in segregated canefields. In this paper, I analyze the entangled histories of emancipation, indenture, and religion from the Caribbean plantation archives. First, I examine how the category “religion” was used to compare and categorize Black and South Asian workers. Then, I turn my attention to fugitives—workers who ran away from the plantations. Fugitive archives, I argue, persist as shadow records of the plantation. They forge errant routes, detours, and new directions for Black and South Asian Studies. Afro- and Indo-Caribbean religions underwent fugitive metamorphoses on the paths scribbled along the margins of the plantation archives.
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.