After “Indo-Caribbean”: Interrogating Interstitial Identities and Diasporic Solidarities in Conversation with Andil Gosine

Abstract

Against the backdrop of a culture-essentializing multiculturalism in Toronto, doubly diasporic Indo-Caribbean peoples have been neither accurately defined as “South Asians” nor always adequately accounted for within Caribbean imaginaries often aligned with phenotypic “Blackness.” The Indo-Caribbean presence and its engaged participation in the development of Toronto have gone largely under-considered. Yet, Toronto-based cultural producers, such as scholar and curator-artist Andil Gosine, have long interrogated the contours of diasporic “Indo-Caribbeanness,” which Gosine values for “its quality of perpetual elision.” Eschewing bounded visions of Indo-Caribbean histories and subjectivities, Gosine’s art draws upon the creative force of transoceanic journeys and plantation ecologies that link Indo- and Afro-Caribbean peoples indelibly. In an exchange at once personal and socio-historical, Gosine here reflects upon the entwined aesthetics, poetics, and politics of his work, his navigation of interstitial identities and solidarities in diaspora, and the perils and pleasures of imag(in)ing “Indo-Caribbeanness” in troubled times.