Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how the yearly Hosay festivities function as a transnational representation of religious belonging and how the local practice of 'liming' provides affective tools for conviviality that enables Trinidadians to relate to the wider superdiverse Trinbagonian society.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on existing scholarship on Islam in the Caribbean as well as ethnographic data from Trinidad and argues that Islam is situated in a dialectic field of socio-cultural creolization and narratives of religious purity. Its multi-ethnic histories include local practices from Sunni and Shi'ia Muslims from both, West Africa and South Asia. In Trinidad, these superdiverse religious histories fuse with the political realities of the postcolonial nation state, which is promoting diversity and unity.

To contextualize my findings, I will refer to the annual Shi'ia Hosay festivities in the cities of Port of Spain and Cedros and illustrate how Islam is oscillating between notions of the pure and the creolized. I argue that the commemoration of Hosay functions as a transnational representation of ethnic and religious belonging that places Islam in the political framework of the postcolonial Trinbagonian nation-state. The local practice of 'liming' is the discursive tool that 1) is a local practice of conviviality that helps to facilitate this representation of cultural-religious difference in the public sphere, and 2) provides the affective-relational tools to connect different Muslim schools to the divers religious landscape of Trinidad.