Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix

By Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh

Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume, Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora.

The authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time, contemporary Dougla negotiations of social demands, their expansion of ethnicity as an intersectional identity, and the experiences of Douglas within the diaspora outside the Caribbean. Through an examination of how Douglas experience their claim to multiracialism and how ethnic identity may be enforced or interrupted, the authors firmly situate this analysis in ongoing debates about multiracial identity.

Based on interviews with over one hundred Douglas, Barratt and Ranjitsingh explore the multiple subjectivities Douglas express, confirm, challenge, negotiate, and add to prevailing understandings. Contemplating this, Dougla in the Twenty-First Century adds to the global discourse of multiethnic identity and how it impacts living both in the Caribbean, where it is easily recognizable, and in the diaspora, where the Dougla remains a largely unacknowledged designation. This book deliberately expands the conversation beyond the limits of biraciality and the Black/white binary and contributes nuance to current interpretations of the lives of multiracial people by introducing Douglas as they carve out their lives in the Caribbean.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: May 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496833716

Sue Ann Barratt

Sue Ann Barratt is lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, holding a BA in Media and Communication Studies with Political Science, a MA in Communication Studies, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Her research areas are interpersonal interaction, human communication conflict, social media use and its implications, gender and ethnic identities, mental health and gender-based violence, and Carnival and cultural studies.

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Introduction: Adding to the Mix

Introduction

Mixed people have long captured attention as both a promising and troubling part of the human condition. The notion of mixed in relation to race and ethnicity is contentious. However, we situate mixedness as relevant to the lived experiences in focus. Research internationally, regionally, and local to Trinidad and Tobago has interrogated multiple factors affecting and/or constituting mixed experiences. In summary, factors evaluated and theorized include how the mixed are categorized and accounted for in the population; how the individual experiences race/ethnic identities; how these identities are mediated by other social identities such as gender and class; and how mixed individuals deal with the politics of identification both by self and other at multiple life stages from childhood to adulthood. It is with these evaluations and theorizations in mind that we enter the ongoing conversation on mixedness. We assert our text as an updated contemporary perspective from the standpoint of people who live as mixed in the Caribbean, with particular reference to Douglas in Trinidad and Tobago and to a segment of the Dougla diaspora in the United States. Our update takes as its point of departure and central organizing idea, a question posed by these Douglas, Am I Mixed Enough?

Adding to the Mix: Ontological Maneuverability beyond the Black/white Binary

In Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix we interrogate the ontology of the Dougla as a mixed individual. The articulation of self as Dougla and experiences of Douglaness presents as a variation from the theme in general mixed race literature and further expands knowledge of the embodied complexities of the Dougla individual. Experiences of Douglaness and the politics of occupying the Dougla body are thus most salient. We therefore privilege the personal and intersubjective, not in service of an epistemological or political project that attempts to elaborate on race relations, emancipatory nationalist projects, or cultural ambiguity, upheaval or idealization, but in service of the individual never really able to define self in keeping with essentialized notions of ethnic identity, always compelled to consider the inquiry, appraisal and evaluation of the other. We build on focused studies of Dougla experiences, such as Regis’s 2016 exploration of how Douglas employ linguistic strategies to express identity, and England’s 2008 and 2010 exploration of the experiences of mixed race people in Trinidad and the meaning of the mixed identity in select Caribbean spaces. We examine the Dougla body as mediated by the politics of identification, of personal power and agency, of beauty, of belonging, of passing, of kinship and lineage within the Caribbean and specifically Trinidad and Tobago. We, however, now extend this to the diasporic space, particularly New York City, an analytical strategy elaborated in the methodology summarized below. Ultimately, our entry into the diaspora is with the intent to evaluate how Dougla identity may at once be interpreted as legitimate in the Caribbean while being disrupted, dismissed, or challenged once the individual migrates outside the Caribbean space and encounters different understandings of mixedness that take the relevance of whiteness for granted and reflect limited knowledge of the embodied complexities of the Dougla individual. We therefore examine how the Dougla identity as a mixed identity is maneuvered once it leaves the Caribbean space by staging a conversation about how notions of mixedness migrate or fail to translate across cultures. This maneuvering we theorize in depth in chapter 4, defining it within our theoretical framework (elaborated below) as a performative act, a strategic meaning-making process enacted by those who live the inbetweeness of mixedness, giving them a site for recognizable connection.

Hence, we not only elaborate Dougla in the contemporary, asserting the state of affairs as it has changed or as it has remained in the Caribbean spaces where popular, but through further explorations of Dougla outside of these spaces, we claim to add to mixedness. We do this by introducing the Dougla as neither Black nor white, just Black, just Asian nor just other, but as just Dougla (to assert the position of our respondents); an individual who is well understood, taken for granted, and easily recognizable as mixed in Caribbean spaces where popular.

Discourses of Mixedness: Contentious Frames of Understanding

In the Caribbean, theorizing focused on mixedness is framed within multiple foundational yet contentious discourses, including hybridity, mestizaje, métissage, jibarismo, creolization, and douglarization. We do not engage all these discourses in depth in our work as we focus on creolization, hybridity, and douglarization in their salience to the Anglophone Caribbean spaces that preoccupy our attention and in which Dougla finds most relevance (in our case, mostly Trinidad and Tobago but not excluding Guyana and Suriname). These discourses bring into inevitable salience even more contentious ideologies of race and ethnicity and the epistemological relevance and significance of such, along with the associated biological, cultural, and linguistic meanings that shape our imagination and expression of mixedness, be it in terms of mixed as a combination of race, mixed as a combination of ethnicity, or mixed as both simultaneously. For our exploration of contemporary Dougla experiences, we understand and articulate mixedness as both and beyond both, using purposively the language mixedness to incorporate the multiple dimensions of race and ethnicity (racial, cultural, linguistic) that are ontologically relevant and significant for mixed people, Douglas in particular.

Caribbean mixedness, be it framed within hybridity, mestizaje, métissage, jibarismo, creolization, or douglarization, is taken as an inevitable reality; it is the lens of nationhood in the region. A turn to literature establishes this as a colonial inheritance. Acheraïou (2011) explains that in relation to colonial cultures, hybridity is deeply inscribed in the structure of colonial discourse and power. Therefore, it is not surprising that creole culture, according to Misir (2006), has emerged as dominant. As Hintzen (2006) explains, societies in the region emerged out of the representations and institutional practices of colonialism, with creole discourse emerging as the bonding agent of Caribbean society—discursive space in which Caribbean identity occurs as a product of cultural and racial hybridization, along with the understanding of organic connection across boundaries of ethnicized and racialized difference (Hintzen 2006, 10–12). Tate and Law (2015) assert similarly explaining mixing as emblematic of the nation across the Caribbean region, and nowhere more so than Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, where mixing is integral to national imaginings and identifications (51). Jelly-Schapiro (2005) declares in his theorizing of Caribbean identity and culture that indeed in all senses of the word we are all creoles (50).

However, as dominant as these perspectives remain, they are subject to contention and debate. For scholars, the contention rests at the level of signification, troubling the origins, intent, meaning, and historical-to-contemporary implications of these discourses often found to be steeped in colonial and national ideologies that racialize and reinforce racisms. Acheraïou’s (2011) evaluation of hybridity and associated discourses that signify biological and cultural mixing is most extensive and foregrounds their contentiousness. Acheraïou (2011) cites hybridity and metissage in its early incarnation as a space of impossibility and unbelonging that reproduces dominant binaries. He sees hybridity in particular as vexed in terms of signification, strategic in its supremacist intent, racist in origin, persistently discriminatory, and driven by hegemonic powers and dynamics. Hintzen (2001) critiques similarly, explaining creolization as a discourse which has functioned in the interest of the powerful, whether represented by a colonialist or nationalist elite and which accommodates racialized discourses of difference upon which rested the legitimacy of colonial power and exploitation (477).

Acheraïou (2011) also critiqued dominant postcolonial reconfigurations, for example Homi Bhaba’s theory of hybridity and the third space, as abstracted from earlier racist biases and functioning as a sanitized trope that reroots troubling assumptions of purity and makes questionable hybridity’s potential for subversion and emancipation. At the same time, Acheraïou (2011), views hybridity as too fundamental a feature of civilizations to be undermined or devalued, asserting:

I largely endorse the idealistic projections attached to the concept of hybridity. At the same time, being aware of the ways in which hybridity discourse has been manipulated across history by hegemonic, coercive, political, ideological, and economic forces presiding over the practice of metissage, I cannot share in the widespread postcolonial enthusiasm about hybridity’s capacity for transgression and emancipation. (103–4)

Tate and Law (2015) remind us to be aware of this troubling history. They state: Let us not forget that in colonial discourse, hybridity and hybrid were terms of abuse for those born from miscegenation used by eugenicists and scientific racists (55). But despite the trouble of history, hybridity, as Acheraïou (2011) explains, is a dominant paradigm of postcolonial discourses of culture and identities which celebrates the ambivalent, the multiple, the fluid, the open-ended and the shifting, though these very characteristics along with vagueness and elasticity of the concept are also sources of criticism and discontent. Cohen (2007), who also acknowledges this troubling colonial history that backgrounds such discourse but in terms of creolization in particular, upholds the universal applicability of the term (381). The relevance of each of these interconnected discourses of mixedness is similarly contentious as such terms, according to Tate and Law (2015), overlap and subsume each other.

Therefore, we acknowledge the contentions that mediate discourses of mixedness, but we still speak within them and through them to articulate Dougla mixedness. What constitutes a Dougla has been elaborated by multiple scholars writing from different perspectives over time. We draw from Regis (2016, 2011), Puri (2013), Parsard (2010), Rahim (2010), England (2010, 2008), Mehta (2004), Rampersad (2000), Kempadoo (1999), Puri (1999), Hernandez-Ramdwar (1997), Segal (1993), and Reddock (1999) to establish how Douglas have been situated historically and how they have been characterized, but we expand Dougla further in chapter 2. Scholars have been clear in articulating the Dougla as a distinctly postcolonial subject (a colonial invention whose relevance became apparent in a postcolonial moment). Douglas find their "roots in both the memory of the Middle Passage, the inauguration of the practice of chattel slavery, and the kala pani or the oceanic voyage that transported Indian men [and women] lured by the promises of recruiters to the Caribbean (Parsard 2011, 1). The Dougla emerged through the meeting and sexual unions between these two peoples—the African and the Indian—two presumably pure ethnic groups (a notion contended with in chapter 2), who were transported to the Caribbean region by those who saw the trade of flesh as critical to economic prosperity in a time when sugar was gold. The Dougla found linguistic, cultural, social, and political meaning in especially Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname, and though it exists in other Caribbean spaces, it is in these three spaces that the term Dougla" is most popular. The term originated in the Bhojpuri dialect, connoting impurity and illegitimacy of this product of Indiannness mixed with Blackness, Blackness being decidedly of African descent in the Caribbean context. Such a construct of the Dougla continues to have some influence on understandings of Dougla identities and Dougla experiences today, though contemporary usage is less pejorative.

Therefore, the Dougla experiences we add to the mix are not only articulated through Caribbean discourses discussed above, but in relation to the global discourse of mixed race. We enter this conversation especially sensitive to Mahtani and Moreno’s (2001) call for a more unified discourse in mixed race theory through breaching the framework of the Black/white binary and accounting for mixedness that does not necessarily include whiteness. From their personal positioning, Mahtani and Moreno (2001) assert the need to dispel popular and limiting conceptions of what ‘mixed race’ constitutes (66) to account for many other marginalized voices which are lost in the existing discourse on ‘mixed race’ (67), particularly those of dual minority mixes, or who are not part white (67). They are insistent that

… the assumption that mixed race equals part white cannot be sustained … [I]t is vital that we move away from a sole focus on white/Black mixture … [I]f we do not begin to assert and give consideration to alternative perspectives on mixed race, we fall prey to binary traps of categorization, where a majority mixed race group (with some white heritage) exists and other minority mixes find themselves silenced or ignored. Other groups should not be negated or overshadowed in the generalized discourse of mixed race … [W]e would emphasize the importance of producing theory and analysis which resonate with the experiences of diverse individuals of various mixes. (Mahtani and Moreno 2001, 72–73)

Daniel (2002) also cites the need to accommodate diversity of experiences in theorizing mixedness:

Because there are as many different types of multiracial identification and experience as there are multiracial-identified backgrounds, there has been some debate as to whether multiracial-identified individuals actually form a group … [T]he common denominator among multiracial-identified individuals is the direct experience of liminality originating in identification with multiple backgrounds. It is this shared experience that has been instrumental in the formation of a multiracial collective subjectivity, irrespective of the specific backgrounds that give rise to and define various multiracial experiences and identities. (114)

Daniel (2002) concludes by asserting that there is no single multiracial voice but many different voices, including those of reactionaries and radical visionaries (189). Elam (2011) also sees mixed race as a category that is political, under construction and thus open to reconceptualization especially as very specific ideas about what it means to be mixed race have been "aggressively scripted, marketed, and institutionalized

with there appearing to be a nominal consensus about what a mixed race person looks like"

(6).

One might say we take on Song and Parker’s (2001) transectional view of mixed race. In their rethinking of mixed race, they theorize from intersectionality but see this as too static a rendition of the interactions between the multiple histories, images and transnational networks comprising any social identity, but most especially ‘mixed race.’ A more conceptual analysis demonstrates how ‘mixed race’ reveals the transectional nature of identity formation (16). Song and Parker (2001) explain this transectional analysis as one that

… does not assign mixed race to a single third space safely beyond the Black/white binary. Nor does it reify the hybrid as an inherently transgressive figure of intercultural bricolage. A transectional understanding of mixed race highlights the transformation of categories and social relations when they do not merely intersect but transect one another in antithetical combinations where component parts may be aligned in the same plane. Attention to diversity within mixed race experiences brings home how racialization is transected by other formative social relations: class, gender and sexuality. The results of these transections cannot be resolved neatly into pre-assigned fractions, and require analysis grounded in particular performative contexts. (16–17)

Therefore, with an understanding of the need to expand the discourse of mixedness and deploying this transectional view for its utility to such a project, we express contemporary Dougla experiences as an additional epistemology of mixedness. We do recognize Dougla as situated within an Indian/African binary that exists in the Caribbean spaces of relevance, which has emerged within a similar principle of hypodescent denoted by the Black/white binary. This was first stirred on by fragments of an Indian caste system which cast Blackness, that is African descended Blackness, as inferior, and persisted through a colonial project which purposely created ethnic tensions between the former enslaved Africans and the newly arrived Indian indentured laborers to Caribbean spaces like Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname. However, even though notions and understandings of hypodescent exist in the Caribbean, in the subsequent chapters, we are able to demonstrate that the Dougla as mixed race is not necessarily locked into hypodescent. The Dougla as mixed race in the Caribbean space that is homeland, can be legitimately so—mixed race.

The Dougla as mixed race places us amid a larger conversation about the politics of mixed race identities, which in turn emerges from an even larger debate of race and ethnicity. These concepts are not articulated with any degree of consensus (Bhopal 2004; Collins 2004; Markus 2008; Phillips et al. 2007). Though we determine the term mixedness as most useful to account for the inevitable relevance of both without being trapped in the limits of the linguistic signs of race and ethnicity, we cannot naively pretend that our meaning making is not steeped in their signification.

Therefore, we take the experiences of Douglas as the basis for deploying concepts in a way that reflects their dynamic experience of mixedness as perceived biological, social, cultural, and linguistic inheritance. We embrace as a most plausible engagement with such contentious language the position in literature that asserts race as a subset of ethnicity, which becomes real in its consequences (Denton and Deane 2010); consequences that emerge through mechanisms that produce race, racialize, and categorize not only for the purpose of typing, but for the purpose of valuing and assigning degrees of privilege, empowerment or advantage in social contexts. Kivisto and Croll (2012) explain race and ethnicity as categories of practice that depend on the social and historical contexts in which they occur, with meanings that can change over time, and are used in the discourse of the everyday as well as in the creation of official government classifications (13). They explain race as racialized ethnicity, a component or subset of ethnic identity and group definition that reflects

… socially created and embedded notions about group differences predicated on observable physiological differences that are defined as having consequences for innate ability, moral characters, and persistent inequality … a definition of the situation that, to the extent that it is embraced by large numbers of people, will have real