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Background

Ramaesh J. Bhagirat-Rivera is a Caribbean historian and assistant professor of Critical Mixed Race Studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ. His research focuses on the intersection of Asian and African diasporas in the Americas, race and racism, nationalism, and cultural history. 

He is completing his book manuscript — Festival Nations: Violence, Festivity, and Cultural Nationalism in Guyana and Trinidad â€” which examines how multiracial societies in the Global South grappled with racialized violence during the process of decolonization. It considers the role of cultural festivals as spectacle, ritual and social practice in creating national cohesion in Guyana and Trinidad, two countries where the descendants of African slaves and Asian indentured laborers each constitute half of the population. Due to the privileging of oral and performative traditions in these spaces, festivals became the cultural battlegrounds where Caribbean people made sense of their world, imagined a utopian future without racialized violence, and made claims of belonging to a transnational and multiracial region. By engaging with the multifaceted work of cultural producers, government officials, and community organizers, Festival Nations shows how South Asian-, Chinese- and African-descended peoples shaped each other’s racial formation and cultural knowledge.

Stemming from this monograph, Bhagirat-Rivera has published an article on Carifesta â€”  Building from this work, he co-organized a symposium called , which was held as part of the  annual Guyana Folk Festival. This symposium was envisioned as an opportunity for an intergenerational exploration of the origins, events, experiences, missteps, legacies and stories of Carifesta ’72. In collaboration with the University of Guyana’s Caribbean Research Library, the symposium also launched the , which will become a repository of cultural documents and oral histories of Carifesta and beyond.

Education

• PhD, MA, University of Chicago
• BA, Oberlin College

Research Interests

• Race, racism, and mixed race studies
• Asian and African Diasporas in the Americas
• Latin American and Caribbean history
• South Asian diasporas
• Festivals, music, and performative culture
• Indigeneity

Awards

• Fulbright IIE, Trinidad & Tobago
• Mellon Mays Fellow
• Ronald E. McNair Scholar