MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
South Asian Studies Council

Usha Iyer - Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean

Luce Hall
34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven CT, 06511
203

“Take the rhythm of India, then take some of Africa
Take the dhantal and tabla, with the fine bay and dambala
Join them together, one with the other, and squeeze them a lil tighter,
Wrap them up closer, closer, closer and closer, and call that chutney soca.” – Ras Shorty I

Tracking the pulsating energies of cultural traffic between the Caribbean and India helps map transoceanic media pathways across the Indian and Atlantic oceans. This talk draws from my book project, which studies the movement of cultural forms between these regions in relation to discourses of race, caste, and gender that have developed around the histories of African enslavement and Indian indentureship. It analyzes transregional media flows and blockages through the figure of jammin’, with its various connotations of improvisation, collaboration, clogging, and as slang for sex in parts of the Caribbean. Media are a key arena where discourses of belonging and citizenship, community and intimacy are forged and contested. Close readings of particular media mashups will serve to illustrate connections between large-scale continental intimacies and granular histories of cross-ethnic and inter-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of affiliations and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities.

About the Speaker:

Usha Iyer is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, and director of the Center for South Asia. They are the author of Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (2020), awarded the British Association of South Asian Studies book prize. Their current book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean, studies the affective engagements of Caribbean spectators with Indian cinema and the impact of Caribbean performance cultures on Indian film industries. They are co-editing the volume, Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves, with Manishita Dass.