Areas of Research/Interest

Race and ethnicity; social stratification; theory and method in diaspora studies; religion; the Caribbean and Latin America.

Fellowships/Honors

Fulbright, Sigma Xi Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and a Richard Carley Hunt Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship

Publications

Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz. Co-edited with George Baca and Stephan Palmie, 2009. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Islam and the Atlantic World, edited by Aisha Khan (current book project)

The Elementary Forms of Religion's Life (current monograph project)

2010 Amid Memory and Historical Consciousness: Locating the Plantation Past. Journal of Historical Sociology 23(1):171-184.

2009 Catching the Wind. Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 29: 200-209.

2009 “Caucasian,” “Coolie,” “Black,” or “White”? Color and Race in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora. In Shades of Difference: Transnational Perspectives on How and Why Skin Color Matters. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, editor. Pp. 95-113. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

2004 Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad, Duke University Press.

2001 "Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol." Cultural Anthropology 16(3):271-302.

2003 "Portraits in the Mirror: Nature, Culture, and Women's Travel Writing in the Caribbean." Women's Writing 10(1).

1997 "Rurality and "Racial" Landscapes in Trinidad." In Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy. Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed, editors. Pp. 39-69. NY: Routledge,

1994 "Juthaa in Trinidad: Food. Pollution, and Hierarchy in a Caribbean Diaspora Community." American Ethnologist 21(2): 245-269.

Current News / Projects
Updated September 2010

   For the past year I have been on sabbatical leave. During this time I have been able to get a few projects off the ground, get a couple of others into full gear, and, finally, to bring some things to completion. Early in the year a number of papers I had been working on saw the light of day as publications in sources that range across disciplines. In the Journal of Historical Sociology I tackled the issue of memory and historical consciousness in terms of a prime Caribbean trope: its plantation past. In a volume on the transnational significance of skin color I analyzed the color pink in relation to Caribbean representations of the body of an ancient Hindu epic villain. Invited to contribute to a journal of Caribbean criticism, I joined other scholars in a discussion of history, historiography, memory, and cultural transformation among the Saramaka.  I was also pleased to be invited to a roundtable at Yale University discussing future directions in transnational studies and Caribbean research.
   On a more ambitious scale, over the course of the year I was able to develop three new book projects. One is on gender justice and socialism in my new field site of The Cooperative Republic of Guyana.  In this initial stage of field research, on these trips I ascertained and interviewed key contacts, and undertook archival research in Guyana’s national archives and libraries. Also related to this book project, I tried my hand at a completely different activity back in New York: I volunteered at a local NGO dealing with the legal and civil rights of immigrants, where I learned a great deal about the daily operation of human rights work among immigrants, and also about the workings of these sorts of not-for-profit organizations.  My second new book project was launched with a panel on Islam and the Americas at the Caribbean Studies Association annual conference in Barbados. Rounded out by the contributions of additional colleagues, this project is an edited volume on Islam and the Atlantic World, which I look forward to being out by 2012. The first of its kind, the volume explores historical and contemporary representations and imaginaries about Islam throughout the hemisphere, and the diverse Muslim populations and communities who have helped create its contours—from as far north as the U.S., through Mexico, south to Brazil, and eastward to the Caribbean island rim.  Finally, my third new book project also took up much of my sabbatical, as I conceptualized, researched, and drafted the first few chapters of what I am provisionally calling The Elementary Forms of Religion’s Life.  Apologies to Durkheim aside (despite my deliberate borrowing), this book is an analysis of epistemology and category formation, a subject that has long fascinated me. Specifically I look at the classification we know as “religion,” by way of two ostensibly antithetical religious traditions, comparing their ideological components and historical development.