Keith E. McNeal

Dr. McNeal is an anthropologist with specialization in Caribbean ethnology and Atlantic cultural history and a long-term focus on Trinidad and Tobago. His first book — “Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean: African and Hindu Popular Religions in Trinidad & Tobago” (2011, 2nd ed. 2015) — is a comparative historical ethnography of African and Hindu traditions of trance performance and spirit mediumship in the southern Caribbean, as well as the postcolonial politics of race, religion, diaspora, nationalism and multiculturalism. He has also reconstructed the history and cultural politics of Indo-Trinidadian mortuary ritual, “Death and the Problem of Orthopraxy in Caribbean Hinduism: Reconsidering the Politics and Poetics of Indo-Trinidadian Mortuary Ritual,” which is the subject of my first documentary film project. 

He is currently completing a book on men, sexuality, queer globalization and the politics of citizenship in TT, entitled “Queering the Citizen: Dispatches from Trinidad and Tobago,” in relation to which he has also conducted research in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and published several papers on queer and trans refugeeism and the political economy of Caribbean asylum-seeking in Europe. He is also working on a third book project on Trinbagonian Hinduism, “The Lotus in the Oil Drum: Anthropocene Hinduism in a Caribbean Petrostate.” His research, teaching and activist interests have been moving steadily in the direction of climate change and the Anthropocene in the Caribbean. Finally, growing out of his engagement with migration and asylum studies, he is also now starting to work in collaboration with Ecuadorian geographer/anthropologist Soledad Álvarez Velasco on the political economy of im/mobility in the Americas, with a specific focus on Venezuelan migratory movements. He is also a member of the advisory board of Houston’s Climate Justice Museum.