Aliyah Khan is Associate Professor of Caribbean Literature, and Muslim & Islamic Literature, in the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is also Director of the U-M Global Islamic Studies Center.
In September 2017, Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria traveled along the trade wind ship routes... more In September 2017, Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria traveled along the trade wind ship routes of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States. Hurricanes, Anthropocenic climate shift, and enslavement are bound together in what Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, and other writers call the nonlinear, cyclical, nature-culture dialectic of the Caribbean. This essay maps the hurricane, a planetary wind-ocean phenomenon, as a metaphor for the Caribbean Anthropocene and regional climate change, asking: what is our memorial and affective meteorology? Through Caribbean poetry and songs about hurricanes, the essay shows that hurricane tempestology and temporality revolve around tidalectic, cyclical return and an indigenous Americas seasonality. Against acute climate aid responses focused on rebuilding tourism and failing infrastructure, Caribbean artists creatively take on climate trauma mitigation work that express locals’ emotional, gendered relationships with hurricanes and decolonial, anti-globalization responses rooted in relationality, reparations, and communal care.
In this essay, Khan takes a historiographic and speculative fiction approach to examining the 19t... more In this essay, Khan takes a historiographic and speculative fiction approach to examining the 19th century and early 20th century life of her Chinese great-grandfather in colonial British Guiana, and the economic, religious, racial, and gender circumstances of Chinese and Indian indentured labor in the Caribbean.
Book review of Lalbihari Sharma's I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (ca. 1915, original... more Book review of Lalbihari Sharma's I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (ca. 1915, originally Damra Phag Bahar), the only known songbook and book of devotional poetry written by an Indian indentured laborer in British Guiana. Translated by Rajiv Mohabir.
The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-... more The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sugar estate strikes and in the interwar development of trade unionism has been underestimated by colonial authorities, indentured men and historians. This essay combines historiography and literary analysis to contend with gendered archival gaps. First, I chronicle elided instances of Indo-Caribbean women’s participation in labour organizing, with a focus on British Guiana. I then argue that the Guyanese writer Ryhaan Shah’s novel A Silent Life (2015) is a jahaji bahin — “ship sister” — narrative that recovers the Indian ancestress as she was: not the Ramayanic Sita, wifely ideal adopted by Indo-Caribbean migrants, but a woman like the historical Sumintra, a martyred woman strike leader. I show that real women’s labour protests and fictional stories of their descendants speak to each other in a nonlinear, genredefying way across the spatiotemporal gap of archival absence, reshaping traditional narratives of Indo-Caribbean women.
The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-... more The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sugar estate strikes and in the interwar development of trade unionism has been underestimated by colonial authorities, indentured men and historians. This essay combines historiography and literary analysis to contend with gendered archival gaps. First, I chronicle elided instances of Indo-Caribbean women’s participation in labour organizing, with a focus on British Guiana. I then argue that the Guyanese writer Ryhaan Shah’s novel A Silent Life (2015) is a jahaji bahin — “ship sister” — narrative that recovers the Indian ancestress as she was: not the Ramayanic Sita, wifely ideal adopted by Indo-Caribbean migrants, but a woman like the historical Sumintra, a martyred woman strike leader. I show that real women’s labour protests and fictional stories of their descendants speak to each other in a nonlinear, genre-defying way across the spatiotemporal gap of archival absence, reshaping traditional narratives of Indo-Caribbean women.
This dissertation examines the relationship between bodily shapeshifting in the literature of the... more This dissertation examines the relationship between bodily shapeshifting in the literature of the Asian Indian Caribbean and the construction of postcolonial Indo-Caribbean identity. Race, gender, politics, sexuality, and the definition of being human are interconnected and always in flux in the Caribbean colony and postcolony. Metamorphosis, in opposition to hybridity, is the literary lens through which the political and literary relationship between the Indo- and Afro-Caribbean is here interrogated. Mimicry, doubling, and other forms of metamorphosis provide agency in the colony and postcolony. Indo-Caribbean Anglophone literature is a distinct subgenre that includes works produced by the descendants of nineteenth-century East Indian indentured laborers in, primarily, Trinidad and Guyana. Most of the texts under examination are written and set in the 1960s and beyond, i.e., during and after the Anglo-Caribbean independence period. While employing the common theme in Caribbean literature of indigenizing post-independence national identities, Indo-Caribbean literature focuses on tensions over the acculturation and assimilation of East Indian indentured laborers and their descendants into Afro-Creole culture--tensions that are expressed on the bodies of women and queer people. This work draws on fiction and poetry by Shani Mootoo, Ramabai Espinet, Ryhaan Shah, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, and others to show how Indo-Caribbean literature imaginatively configures the way bodies function in the national space and in the natural environment. Metamorphosis offers a non-assimilationist intervention into the Indo-Afro-Caribbean divide by articulating an ever-changing ontological and epistemological diversity in a way that static hybridity cannot.
Indo-Guyanese Canadian writer and poet Cyril Dabydeen’s novel Dark Swirl (1988) imagines the sett... more Indo-Guyanese Canadian writer and poet Cyril Dabydeen’s novel Dark Swirl (1988) imagines the settler-colonial cultural and environmental encounter among a rural Indo-Guyanese family, the indigenous reptilian water spirit the massacouraman, and a white British naturalist, illustrating that the Indo-Caribbean story of migration, indenture, and postcolonial citizenship includes negotiation not only with the Afro-Caribbean, but with the marginalized indigenous presence in the Caribbean. This essay considers, among other aspects of Dabydeen’s novel, the metaphor of water and the bridging of the relational gap between indigenous myth and Indo-Guyanese Hinduism through similar stories of reptilian spirits to argue that, like Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese are interpellated into the nation and accorded postcolonial sovereignty through the appropriation of indigenous myth and the syncretism of religious and folkloric belief. Following the Guyanese writer of magical realism Wilson Harris, Dabydeen’s unusual literary attention to the relationship between the indigenous Caribbean and creolized diasporic communities illustrates that postcolonial rulers invoke continuity with an effaced indigenous presence to establish legitimacy while simultaneously denying living indigenous inhabitants their land rights and identities.
From "Area Impossible: Notes Toward an Introduction" (GLQ 22.2) by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Pat... more From "Area Impossible: Notes Toward an Introduction" (GLQ 22.2) by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel: "Temporality, the promise and peril of area studies, then might provide an epistemic demeanor for the impossible nexus of area with sexuality. Each of the three long essays in this special issue is somewhat configured through time, in [Ronaldo] Wilson’s words 'capturing the patterns,' a 'poetics of asking what happens through improvisation, or in the gesture of writing about the scene, the area/arena where the story is experienced within time that folds through multiple modes of the event.' The essays translate time through area, as it were, in possibly incommensurable directions...Aliyah Khan ferries in the historical legislative record alongside the labor of desire to translate shipboard intimacies between men and between women into kinship. The nominalizations jahaji bhai and jahaji bahin (ship brother and ship sister) provide her leverage into both the racialized landscape of the Anglophone Caribbean and the more contemporary lesbian fictional narrative with which she sites the 'voyager who is not, however, a permanent exile.' Home, then, through the crossed chronologies of desire, of sexuality, of traffic across water, loosens its vantage, dropping area in its wake."
Press: Rutgers University Press
Release date: April 17, 2020
https://www.rutgersuniversitypre... more Press: Rutgers University Press
Release date: April 17, 2020
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic monograph on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
Podcast Interview with author Aliyah Khan by Alejandra Bronfman. New Books Network: Caribbean Studies and Islamic Studies.
Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices.
Aliyah Khan recovers stories that have been there all along, though they have received little scholarly attention.
The interdisciplinary approach takes on big questions about creolization, gender, politics and cultural change, but it does so with precision and attention to detail.
In September 2017, Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria traveled along the trade wind ship routes... more In September 2017, Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria traveled along the trade wind ship routes of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States. Hurricanes, Anthropocenic climate shift, and enslavement are bound together in what Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, and other writers call the nonlinear, cyclical, nature-culture dialectic of the Caribbean. This essay maps the hurricane, a planetary wind-ocean phenomenon, as a metaphor for the Caribbean Anthropocene and regional climate change, asking: what is our memorial and affective meteorology? Through Caribbean poetry and songs about hurricanes, the essay shows that hurricane tempestology and temporality revolve around tidalectic, cyclical return and an indigenous Americas seasonality. Against acute climate aid responses focused on rebuilding tourism and failing infrastructure, Caribbean artists creatively take on climate trauma mitigation work that express locals’ emotional, gendered relationships with hurricanes and decolonial, anti-globalization responses rooted in relationality, reparations, and communal care.
In this essay, Khan takes a historiographic and speculative fiction approach to examining the 19t... more In this essay, Khan takes a historiographic and speculative fiction approach to examining the 19th century and early 20th century life of her Chinese great-grandfather in colonial British Guiana, and the economic, religious, racial, and gender circumstances of Chinese and Indian indentured labor in the Caribbean.
Book review of Lalbihari Sharma's I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (ca. 1915, original... more Book review of Lalbihari Sharma's I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (ca. 1915, originally Damra Phag Bahar), the only known songbook and book of devotional poetry written by an Indian indentured laborer in British Guiana. Translated by Rajiv Mohabir.
The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-... more The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sugar estate strikes and in the interwar development of trade unionism has been underestimated by colonial authorities, indentured men and historians. This essay combines historiography and literary analysis to contend with gendered archival gaps. First, I chronicle elided instances of Indo-Caribbean women’s participation in labour organizing, with a focus on British Guiana. I then argue that the Guyanese writer Ryhaan Shah’s novel A Silent Life (2015) is a jahaji bahin — “ship sister” — narrative that recovers the Indian ancestress as she was: not the Ramayanic Sita, wifely ideal adopted by Indo-Caribbean migrants, but a woman like the historical Sumintra, a martyred woman strike leader. I show that real women’s labour protests and fictional stories of their descendants speak to each other in a nonlinear, genredefying way across the spatiotemporal gap of archival absence, reshaping traditional narratives of Indo-Caribbean women.
The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-... more The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sugar estate strikes and in the interwar development of trade unionism has been underestimated by colonial authorities, indentured men and historians. This essay combines historiography and literary analysis to contend with gendered archival gaps. First, I chronicle elided instances of Indo-Caribbean women’s participation in labour organizing, with a focus on British Guiana. I then argue that the Guyanese writer Ryhaan Shah’s novel A Silent Life (2015) is a jahaji bahin — “ship sister” — narrative that recovers the Indian ancestress as she was: not the Ramayanic Sita, wifely ideal adopted by Indo-Caribbean migrants, but a woman like the historical Sumintra, a martyred woman strike leader. I show that real women’s labour protests and fictional stories of their descendants speak to each other in a nonlinear, genre-defying way across the spatiotemporal gap of archival absence, reshaping traditional narratives of Indo-Caribbean women.
This dissertation examines the relationship between bodily shapeshifting in the literature of the... more This dissertation examines the relationship between bodily shapeshifting in the literature of the Asian Indian Caribbean and the construction of postcolonial Indo-Caribbean identity. Race, gender, politics, sexuality, and the definition of being human are interconnected and always in flux in the Caribbean colony and postcolony. Metamorphosis, in opposition to hybridity, is the literary lens through which the political and literary relationship between the Indo- and Afro-Caribbean is here interrogated. Mimicry, doubling, and other forms of metamorphosis provide agency in the colony and postcolony. Indo-Caribbean Anglophone literature is a distinct subgenre that includes works produced by the descendants of nineteenth-century East Indian indentured laborers in, primarily, Trinidad and Guyana. Most of the texts under examination are written and set in the 1960s and beyond, i.e., during and after the Anglo-Caribbean independence period. While employing the common theme in Caribbean literature of indigenizing post-independence national identities, Indo-Caribbean literature focuses on tensions over the acculturation and assimilation of East Indian indentured laborers and their descendants into Afro-Creole culture--tensions that are expressed on the bodies of women and queer people. This work draws on fiction and poetry by Shani Mootoo, Ramabai Espinet, Ryhaan Shah, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, and others to show how Indo-Caribbean literature imaginatively configures the way bodies function in the national space and in the natural environment. Metamorphosis offers a non-assimilationist intervention into the Indo-Afro-Caribbean divide by articulating an ever-changing ontological and epistemological diversity in a way that static hybridity cannot.
Indo-Guyanese Canadian writer and poet Cyril Dabydeen’s novel Dark Swirl (1988) imagines the sett... more Indo-Guyanese Canadian writer and poet Cyril Dabydeen’s novel Dark Swirl (1988) imagines the settler-colonial cultural and environmental encounter among a rural Indo-Guyanese family, the indigenous reptilian water spirit the massacouraman, and a white British naturalist, illustrating that the Indo-Caribbean story of migration, indenture, and postcolonial citizenship includes negotiation not only with the Afro-Caribbean, but with the marginalized indigenous presence in the Caribbean. This essay considers, among other aspects of Dabydeen’s novel, the metaphor of water and the bridging of the relational gap between indigenous myth and Indo-Guyanese Hinduism through similar stories of reptilian spirits to argue that, like Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese are interpellated into the nation and accorded postcolonial sovereignty through the appropriation of indigenous myth and the syncretism of religious and folkloric belief. Following the Guyanese writer of magical realism Wilson Harris, Dabydeen’s unusual literary attention to the relationship between the indigenous Caribbean and creolized diasporic communities illustrates that postcolonial rulers invoke continuity with an effaced indigenous presence to establish legitimacy while simultaneously denying living indigenous inhabitants their land rights and identities.
From "Area Impossible: Notes Toward an Introduction" (GLQ 22.2) by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Pat... more From "Area Impossible: Notes Toward an Introduction" (GLQ 22.2) by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel: "Temporality, the promise and peril of area studies, then might provide an epistemic demeanor for the impossible nexus of area with sexuality. Each of the three long essays in this special issue is somewhat configured through time, in [Ronaldo] Wilson’s words 'capturing the patterns,' a 'poetics of asking what happens through improvisation, or in the gesture of writing about the scene, the area/arena where the story is experienced within time that folds through multiple modes of the event.' The essays translate time through area, as it were, in possibly incommensurable directions...Aliyah Khan ferries in the historical legislative record alongside the labor of desire to translate shipboard intimacies between men and between women into kinship. The nominalizations jahaji bhai and jahaji bahin (ship brother and ship sister) provide her leverage into both the racialized landscape of the Anglophone Caribbean and the more contemporary lesbian fictional narrative with which she sites the 'voyager who is not, however, a permanent exile.' Home, then, through the crossed chronologies of desire, of sexuality, of traffic across water, loosens its vantage, dropping area in its wake."
Press: Rutgers University Press
Release date: April 17, 2020
https://www.rutgersuniversitypre... more Press: Rutgers University Press
Release date: April 17, 2020
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic monograph on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
Podcast Interview with author Aliyah Khan by Alejandra Bronfman. New Books Network: Caribbean Studies and Islamic Studies.
Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices.
Aliyah Khan recovers stories that have been there all along, though they have received little scholarly attention.
The interdisciplinary approach takes on big questions about creolization, gender, politics and cultural change, but it does so with precision and attention to detail.
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dialectic of the Caribbean. This essay maps the hurricane, a planetary wind-ocean phenomenon, as a metaphor for the Caribbean Anthropocene and regional climate change, asking: what is our memorial and affective meteorology? Through Caribbean poetry and songs about hurricanes, the essay shows that hurricane tempestology and temporality revolve around tidalectic, cyclical return and an indigenous Americas seasonality. Against acute climate aid responses focused on rebuilding tourism and failing infrastructure, Caribbean artists creatively take on climate trauma mitigation work that express locals’ emotional, gendered relationships with hurricanes and decolonial, anti-globalization responses rooted in relationality, reparations, and communal care.
Keywords:
1. hurricane
2. reparations
3. climate
4. environment
5. storm
6. Middle Passage
7. Trade Winds
8. migration
9. ocean
10. enslavement
Release date: April 17, 2020
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/far-from-mecca/9781978806641
https://www.amazon.com/Far-Mecca-Globalizing-Caribbean-Critical/dp/1978806655
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic monograph on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
Exxon oil drilling, hurricanes, flooding and climate change, and COVID-19 in Guyana 2020.
Pree: Caribbean Writing
Issue 5: ECOCIDE
Non-fiction literary magazine essay
Pree: Caribbean Writing
Issue 3: #THECARIBBEANISNOTAREALPLACE
Non-fiction literary magazine essay
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2FpxIbBwR1fdxfqhjcwIOA.
Podcast Interview with author Aliyah Khan by Alejandra Bronfman. New Books Network: Caribbean Studies and Islamic Studies.
Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices.
Aliyah Khan recovers stories that have been there all along, though they have received little scholarly attention.
The interdisciplinary approach takes on big questions about creolization, gender, politics and cultural change, but it does so with precision and attention to detail.
dialectic of the Caribbean. This essay maps the hurricane, a planetary wind-ocean phenomenon, as a metaphor for the Caribbean Anthropocene and regional climate change, asking: what is our memorial and affective meteorology? Through Caribbean poetry and songs about hurricanes, the essay shows that hurricane tempestology and temporality revolve around tidalectic, cyclical return and an indigenous Americas seasonality. Against acute climate aid responses focused on rebuilding tourism and failing infrastructure, Caribbean artists creatively take on climate trauma mitigation work that express locals’ emotional, gendered relationships with hurricanes and decolonial, anti-globalization responses rooted in relationality, reparations, and communal care.
Keywords:
1. hurricane
2. reparations
3. climate
4. environment
5. storm
6. Middle Passage
7. Trade Winds
8. migration
9. ocean
10. enslavement
Release date: April 17, 2020
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/far-from-mecca/9781978806641
https://www.amazon.com/Far-Mecca-Globalizing-Caribbean-Critical/dp/1978806655
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic monograph on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
Exxon oil drilling, hurricanes, flooding and climate change, and COVID-19 in Guyana 2020.
Pree: Caribbean Writing
Issue 5: ECOCIDE
Non-fiction literary magazine essay
Pree: Caribbean Writing
Issue 3: #THECARIBBEANISNOTAREALPLACE
Non-fiction literary magazine essay
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2FpxIbBwR1fdxfqhjcwIOA.
Podcast Interview with author Aliyah Khan by Alejandra Bronfman. New Books Network: Caribbean Studies and Islamic Studies.
Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices.
Aliyah Khan recovers stories that have been there all along, though they have received little scholarly attention.
The interdisciplinary approach takes on big questions about creolization, gender, politics and cultural change, but it does so with precision and attention to detail.