ABSTRACT
Indo-Caribbean women have been defined at the interstices of colonial power, through colonization in India, indenture and post-indenture, including through the meanings given to race, gender, social class, education and family dynamics in both geographical contexts. They are however not just a joining of India and Caribbean, but a new identity produced in these conditions specific to colonialism. This chapter deconstructs this “postcolonial” identity through unravelling the space-making and self-making processes employed by same-sex loving women of Indian descent in Trinidad, to demonstrate how they utilise their bodies, particularly their erotic selves to engage in a decolonial praxis. I explore the themes of meaning, corporeality and temporality, focusing on how the diaspora maintains the postcolonial ideal while simultaneously allowing a space for the challenging of these identities. I attend to decolonial praxes in the form of self-determination, space-making and mapping using eroticism and spirituality to disrupt colonial ideals of time, space and self.
