Own People: Race, “Altered Solidarities,” and the Limits of Culture in Trinidad

While scholarly and popular attention has focused on both interethnic tensions and hyperdiverse mixtures in Trinidad, this article considers solidarities based neither on mixture nor on bounded, antagonistic cultures. These “altered solidarities” reflect the ways subaltern Indian and African Trinidadians have articulated trust and influence through ethnoracial difference. J. Brent Crosson constructs both a counterhistory of ethnoracial relations in Trinidad and a counternarrative to culturalist explanations for contemporary violence to foreground less-legible forms of interracial connection and intraethnic division. While these counternarratives remain provocations defined by the particular context of African and Indian relations in “rural cosmopolitan” Trinidad, altered solidarities point toward wider interventions in debates that surround pluralism, creolization theory, and the delimitation of national, ethnic, or political communities.