This seminar invites critical analyses of the representation of Asian-Caribbean subjectivity and cultural productions in the multi-ethnic, multicultural milieu. We encourage papers from all communities exploring Asian experiences in the Caribbean and its diaspora. In the Caribbean space characterised by cultural hybridity, migration, and cross-ethnic relationships, any essentialist notions of identity based on the preservation or reproduction of Asian ancestral culture are difficult to sustain. Asian Caribbean identities, cultural expressions, and presence must therefore be understood relationally, through their encounters and interactions with other cultures, places, and people of different ethnic backgrounds. This seminar welcomes papers from across a range of disciplines that draw on literary and cultural texts, oral histories, archival materials, visual culture, film, and other relevant sources. This call for papers will therefore be widely open to academics, artists, filmmakers, activists, poets, and authors focused on the broad cultural representations and productions in the field.  Research conducted in diverse languages, and cross-cultural, cross-linguistic studies are also welcomed if accompanied by English translations. 

The following questions may be used as a guide to open up broader discussion but should not be seen as limiting. How have Asian Caribbean subjects been positioned within existing racial hierarchies since they arrived in the region through indentureship and other forms of migration? What are the interrelations between slavery and indentureship? What historical, political, and economic conditions shaped racial tensions that impacted the bonds between the different groups or communities? How have interracial and interethnic intimacy, kinship, friendship, and solidarity involving Asian Caribbean subjects resisted colonial constructions in the division of labour? How have Asian Caribbean subjects been included, excluded, foregrounded, or marginalised within discourses of anticolonial struggle, cultural creolisation, and nation-building, as well as within other narratives that shape the Caribbean imaginary of community and belonging?

Possible themes related to Asian experience in the Caribbean and its diaspora include, but are not limited to:

Representations of indentureship and migration

Asian subjectivity and consciousness

Gender and sexuality 

Memory, trauma, remembering, forgetting and reimagining

The history, economy, and politics of transition from slavery to indentureship

Religion, music, literature, and other forms of cultural production

Creolisation, Hybridity, Metissage 

Counter-archives, counter-narratives, and counter-histories

The sea, ecology and the environment

Nation-building, cultural citizenship, and belonging  

Cross-ethnic intimacies, frictions and solidarities

Resistance, resilience and empowerment