Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 2020 Vol. 4, No. 2, 56-86 “Meh Just Realize I’s Ah Coolie Bai”: Indo-Caribbean Masculinities, Chutney Genealogies, and Qoolie Subjectivities Ryan Persadie Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto
[email protected] In the Anglophone Caribbean, nationalist discourses of sexual citizenship are inextricably linked to the afterlife of colonialism and its far-reaching and affective legacies, resonances, and continuities as it reinscribes alterity on the bodies of sexual and gendered “others.” Focusing our optics on the Indo-Caribbean, I explore how archives of chutney music offer disruptive methods, strategies, and praxes of transgression that trouble discourses of “normative” Creole (Afro-Caribbean) and heteronormative nationalisms as “authentic” ideologies of Indo- Caribbean gendering—notably, masculinity. Drawing upon historical genealogies of sexual- sacred erotics found within the Hindu, women-exclusive, pre-wedding Indo-Caribbean tradition of matikor, I interrogate how men artists in chutney music spaces perform what I conceptualize as “qoolie subjectivities,” or distinct embodied languages of self that operate through what I argue are long-standing entanglements of Indo-Caribbeanness and queerness that, when excavated via the body, cultivate critical forms of Indo-Caribbean knowing and living. In this essay, I specifically focus on acts of remaking the pejorative term “coolie” from a grammar of harm to one of reclamation, and agentive potential. Such performances choreograph embodiments of erotic self-making, or “qoolieness,” as methods of pursuing transgressive Indo-Caribbean means of doing nonnormative gender and sexuality, offering us important vocalities that speak through genealogies of (post)indentureship chutney feminisms.