This introduction situates the rebellions in British Guiana within the larger context of unrest in the Caribbean during the 1930s. I also discuss the concepts of solidarity, overlapping diasporas, and modern politics to explore how this story fits into the broader historiography, and why the stakes of this project have implications both within and beyond the region.

Chapter 2 explores racialization through identity development on the ground. The diasporic projects led by African- and Indian-Guianese communities during the 1930s demonstrate how they expressed racial consciousness at the time. African-Guianese celebrated the centennial of their emancipation from enslavement, while Indian-Guianese celebrated the centenary of their arrival in the colony. African-Guianese continued to build connections across the Black world; projects ranged from the development of a local Tuskegee (loosely modeled after African American leader Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama), dedicated to gendered projects of economic uplift, to the British Guiana branch of the Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which organized support for Ethiopia against Italy’s invasion in 1935. Indian-Guianese were concurrently expressing their desire to retain Indian languages and culture, requesting steamship services to India, and fighting for inclusion during the post-indenture period. Both communities supported anticolonial projects in Ethiopia and India but drew on their identities as British subjects to do so. I also explore a tradition of protest through which both communities came together in the city and on the plantation, with the examples of rebellions in 1905 and 1924. This chapter breathes life into the term “overlapping diasporas.”

The conclusion explores the meaning and takeaways of the 1935 uprisings and explores ideas about solidarity that gain power from recognizing and understanding difference, and it notes this legacy of possibility.