Beyond Margins, Towards Methods: Thinking about Religion, Diaspora, and South Asia from the Caribbean

After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, South Asians were shipped to sugar plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. Indentured labor—a colonial scheme of migration and labor—produced the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. In recent decades, Indo-Caribbean groups have been migrating to North America, often finding themselves on diasporic and discursive margins. How can scholars move beyond the tropes of centers and margins, and towards methods and disciplinary directions that allow us a different perspective on diasporic religions? This roundtable invites scholars to think about religion and diaspora from (Indo-)Caribbean perspectives. By raising questions about ethnographic and archival methods, and addressing inter-diasporic dynamics, positionality, and disciplinary approaches in the study of Indo-Caribbean religions, we hope to make space for a larger discussion about navigating and negotiating the geopolitical and demographic assumptions that have come to shape the study of religion in South Asia, the Caribbean, and North America.