Contradictory Omens: Repatriation and Resistance in Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird
Contradictory Omens: Repatriation and Resistance in Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird
This chapter delineates the multilayered Indo-Caribbean experience of the region’s nationalism as it sought to balance pride in the realization of independence from Britain on the subcontinent in 1947 with a recognition of the need to forge permanent affective links within the Caribbean basin. Examining Khan’s The Jumbie Bird in the context of the influential creolization theories of Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Édouard Glissant, the author argues that Khan’s book advocates for a version of creolized Caribbean nationalism inflected by its characters’ South Asian lineage. By highlighting the novel’s explicit repudiation of the “back-to-India” movement and its valorization of a syncretic Indo-Caribbean aesthetic practice, the chapter reveals that Khan’s political aesthetic is quite in keeping, on a structural level, with the more celebrated, more Afro-centric theories of creolization in concert with which it arose.
Keywords: Ismith Khan, Creolization, Indo-Caribbean, Nationalism, Edward Kamau Brathwaite
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