The Sticky Intimacies of Jammin’

This article studies intimacies that emerge through the traffic of media forms between India and the Caribbean in relation to discourses of race and ethnicity that have developed around the histories of African enslavement and Indian indentureship. I develop the framework of jammin’ to entangle intimacy as a method with Caribbean theorizations of Relation and creolization. In particular, I map the stickiness of transregional flows and blockages, the rubbing up of familiarity and estrangement, of proximity and distance, through the performative repertoires of an Indian orchestra singer, Kanchan, and a double diasporic, Indo-Caribbean-Canadian drag queen, Priyanka. These femme performers illuminate tactical media negotiations across the jammin’ of center and periphery, city and hinterland, the large and the small. The media intimacies that Kanchan and Priyanka make visible between India and the Caribbean invite us to reflect on relating across difference, and on solidarities and disjunctures across transoceanic connections.