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How has a movement built on the consciousness of sisterhood become so fragmented between the end of the 20th and into the second decade of the 21st century? As different political tendencies, widely varying economic conditions and cultural dissimilarities emerged in global struggles to achieve diverse visions of women's and gender equality, the current feminist movement appears to be characterized by chasms between the east, west, north and south rather than viewed as a movement whose basic tenets are parallel across racial, geographic and social barriers. By looking at lived examples of confrontations, and through a deliberate process of self-reflexive questioning, this paper looks at what elements might sustain the global nature of the feminist movement into the future. Through a re-examination of key authors who have identified differences wrought by geography and culture, among them Chandra Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes", and in conversation with two feminist scholars from North America and India, the author interrogates the concept of difference and argues that confronting and accepting difference might teach us more about our "sameness under the skin" and about the continued building of consciousness across borders.

This essay examines the organic connection between the methods and materials used by Indian artist Wendy Nanan and the metaphysical ideas that underpin her creativity. Her exposure to a mixture of religious and cultural practices drawn from Presbyterianism and Hinduism, to the variegated festivals of a postslavery postindenture society of Trinidad is re-presented in the symbolic and allegorical pieces that Nanan has produced for over two decades. These evoke messages of harmony despite difference and of political agency for a nation. Her symbolism establishes an Indian aesthetic and iconography that has evolved in this society beyond its original moment of entry to a point of no return to an imagined purity.

This essay examines the problem of being Asian in the Caribbean, Asian referring generically to settled groups originating from the sub-continent of Asia. The essay traces how demographic minority status and religious difference have historically led to the process of becoming the outsider in the region. Focusing primarily on Indians, the essay explores the tropes of the "home and the world" in which "otherness" emerges as metaphors in the fictional works of Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World which resonates in V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas. The `Other' in this essay extemporizes on Edward Said's concept in Orientalism. Othering excludes Asians from the creole project of nationalisms in the region, conferring instead a script of antiquity and cultural spirituality that Asians have colluded with for negotiating difference. This collusion comes with its own metaphysical dilemmas of identity and belonging that remain unresolved.

One of the most common threads in the Caribbean tapestry races which have populated the region over the last five centuries largely through forced or voluntary migration, is that there have emerged mixtures of the different racial groups. A large proportion of Caribbean women and men are referred to euphemistically as 'mixed race'. The terms used to describe people of mixed race vary by territory and have been incrementally added to or changed over time. The original nomenclatures such as sambo, musteephino, mulatto, creole, etc. have been replaced at present to include terms like brown skin, mulatto, clear skin, light skin, red-nigger, dougla and browning. The title of the article comes from a contemporary dancehall song in Jamaica in which the black singer, Buju Banton, unwittingly echoes an unspoken yet shared notion of female desirability in the Caribbean: a preference for 'brown' as opposed to black women or unmixed women. In the ongoing constructions of femininity in the region, class and skin colour have intersected with race to produce hierarchies and stereotypes of femininity based on racial mixing. Drawing on some of the historical data available, particularly that of the pioneering research in this area produced by Lucille Mathurin in 1974, this article interrogates some aspects of miscegenation in the Jamaican past, to configure these with gender, race and class relations in the present. The article does not attempt to arrive at conclusive findings but to contribute to the ongoing process in the region, and elsewhere, of differentiating the category 'woman' in historiography and sociology.

This attempt to develop an indigenous reading of feminism as both activism and discourse in the Caribbean is informed by my own preoccupation with the limits of contemporary postmodern feminist theorizing in terms of its accessibility, as well as application to understanding the specificity of a region. I, for instance, cannot speak for or in the manner of a white middle-class academic in Britain, or a black North American feminist, as much as we share similarities which go beyond the society, and which are fuelled by our commitment to gender equality. At the same time, our conversations are intersecting as a greater clarity of thought emerges in relation and perhaps in reaction to the other. Ideas of difference and the epistemological standpoint of 'Third World' women have been dealt with admirably by many feminist writers such as Chandra Mohanty, Avtah Brah and Uma Narayan. In this article I draw on the ideas emerging in contemporary western feminist debates pertaining to sexual difference and equality and continue my search for a Caribbean feminist voice which defines feminism and feminist theory in the region, not as a linear narrative but one which has continually intersected with the politics of identity in the region.