Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T13:11:01.652Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“A Hindu is white although he is black”: Hindu Alterity and the Performativity of Religion and Race between the United States and the Caribbean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2016

Alexander Rocklin
Alexander Rocklin*
Affiliation:
Religious Studies, Willamette University
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali's “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 181 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Albanese, Catherine L. 2007. A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Ali, Hazrat Ismet. 1928. The White Carnation, and other Inspirational Poems. [Chicago]: Printing Products Corporation.Google Scholar
Allen, Ernest. 1998. Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. In Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck and Esposito, John L., eds., Muslims on the Americanization Path? New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Alter, Joseph S. 2009. Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy. New Delhi: New Age Books.Google Scholar
Aravamudan, Srinivas. 2006. Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bald, Vivek. 2013. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Belluscio, Steven. 2006. To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge Classics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cook, Fannie. 1946. Mrs. Palmer's Honey. Garden City: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Daggett, Mabel Potter. 1912. The Heathen Invasion of America. Missionary Review of the World 35, 3: 210–14.Google Scholar
de Laurence, L. W. 1915. The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic and East Indian Occultism. Chicago: The De Laurence Company.Google Scholar
De Michelis, Elizabeth. 2005. A History of Modern Yoga. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Domingo, W. A. 1925. Gift of the Black Tropics. In Locke, Alain, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: A. and C. Boni.Google Scholar
Dorman, Jacob B. 2009. “A true Muslim is a true spiritualist”: Black Orientalism and Black Gods of the Metropolis. In Curtis, Edward E. IV and Sigler, Danielle Brune, eds., The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and The Study of African American Religions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Dorman, Jacob B. 2013. Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehlers, Nadine. 2012. Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Fields, Karen K. 2001. Witchcraft and Racecraft: Invisible Ontology in Its Sensible Manifestations. In Bond, George Clement and Ciekawy, Diane M., eds., Witchcraft Dialogues: Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Forster, E. M. 1983. The Hill of Devi and other Indian Writings. London: Edward Arnold Publishers.Google Scholar
Genn, Celia A. 2007. The Development of a Modern Western Sufism. In van Bruinessen, Martin and Howell, Julia Day, eds., Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Goode, William. 1948. Turkish Towels versus Racism. Negro Digest 6, 8: 20–25.Google Scholar
Gopinath, Gayatri. 1995. “Bombay, U.K. Yuba City”: Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 4, 3: 303–21.Google Scholar
Gopinath, Gayatri. 2005. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Haanel, Charles F. 1919. The Master Key System in Twenty-Four Parts with Questionnaire and Glossary. St. Louis: n.p.Google Scholar
Howard, David H. 2006. Yesterday's Evangelist from India: A. K. Mozumdar. At: http://www.mozumdar.org/yesterdaysevangelist.html (accessed 7 July 2014).Google Scholar
Jackson, Carl T. 1994. Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Sylvester A. 2010. The Rise of Black Ethnics: African American Religions and the Ethnic Turn, 1916–1945. Religion and American Culture 20: 125–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieb, Frederick G. 1939. Sight Unseen: A Journalist Visits the Occult. New York: Harper and Brothers.Google Scholar
Lowe, Lisa. 2006. The Intimacies of Four Continents. In Stoler, Ann Laura, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Magus, Jim. 1995. Magical Heroes: The Lives and Legends of Great African American Magicians. Marietta: Magus Enterprises.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
McKay, Claude. 1968. Harlem: Negro Metropolis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.Google Scholar
Nance, Susan. 2002. Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple: Southern Blacks and American Alternative Spirituality in 1920s Chicago. Religion and American Culture 12, 2: 123–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nance, Susan. 2009. How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Oberoi, Harjot. 1994. The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Palmié, Stephan. n.d. (forthcoming). On Talking Past Each Other, Productively: Anthropology and the Black Atlantic, Twenty Years On. In Kummels, Ingrid, Rauhut, Claudia, Rinke, Stefan, and Timm, Birte, eds., Crossroads of the World: Transatlantic Interrelations in the Caribbean.Google Scholar
Prashad, Vijay. 2000. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Putnam, Lara. 2013. Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rana, Junaid. 2011. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Reed, Elizabeth A. 1914. Hinduism in Europe and America. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.Google Scholar
Rocklin, Alexander. 2015. Obeah and the Politics of Religion's Making and Unmaking in Colonial Trinidad. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83, 3: 697–721.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roopnarine, Lomarsh. 2003. Indo-Caribbean Migration: From Periphery to Core. Caribbean Quarterly 49, 3: 30–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2003. “Passing”: Race, Identification, and Desire. Criticism 45, 4: 435–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Parama. 1998. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Said, Edward W.Orientalism. 1994. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Shah, Nayan. 2005. Between “Oriental Depravity” and “Natural Degenerates”: Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans. American Quarterly 57, 3: 703–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singleton, Mark. 2010. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloan, Mersene Elon. 1929. The Indian Menace: An Essay of Exposure and Warning Showing the Strange Work of Hindu Propaganda in America and Its Special Danger to Our Women. Washington, D.C.: The Way Press.Google Scholar
Snow, Jennifer. 2004. The Civilization of White Men: The Race of the Hindu in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. In Goldschmidt, Henry and McAlister, Elizabeth, eds., Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Swami Vivekananda and His Guru; with Letters from Prominent Americans on the Alleged Progress of Vedantism in the United States. 1897. London: The Christian Literature Society for India.Google Scholar
Thind, Bhagat Singh. 1931. House of Happiness. Salt Lake City: Dr. Bhagat Singh Thind.Google Scholar
Thomas, Wendell. 1930. Hinduism Invades America. New York: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David. 1906. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Vols. 6–7. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Tinsley, Omise'eke Natasha. 2008. Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, 2–3: 191–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Urban, Hugh B. 2003. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vivekananda, Swami. 1913 [1896]. Vedânta Philosophy: Lectures by the Swâmi Vivekânanda on Râja Yoga and other Subjects; also Patanjalis’ Yoga Aphorisms, with Commentaries, and Glossary of Sanskrit Terms. New York: Baker & Taylor Co.Google Scholar
Watkins-Owens, Irma. 1996. Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Weir, David. 2011. American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
White, David Gordon. 2009. Sinister Yogis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina. 2014. Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar