A Choreography of Things: The Making of Indo-Caribbean Identity

Abstract

This thesis emerges from my position as a Canadian-born, Indo-Caribbean woman negotiating identity across geographic and cultural distance. Mediated through my father’s stories of Guyana and my own return to the country, I began to understand identity not as a fixed inheritance but as something spatially and materially practiced. The raised timber houses and colonial-era facades of Guyana, especially the bottom house, introduced architecture as a language through which I could read and perform my history. Everyday acts such as swinging in a hammock or tending the fireside became embodied affirmations of Indo-Caribbean belonging.