This quote was revealed to exemplify Definition 1, but working backwards, how would you determine the meaning of contingent? Even after seeing the context, I'm still vacillating between definitions 1 (not 1.1, the one above 1.1) and 3. Don't they both look right?
But, while personal biographies and group histories are mutually immanent, they are relationally irreducible. The same context may produce several different collective 'histories', differentiating as well as linking biographies through contingent specificities. In turn, articulating cultural practices of the subjects so constituted mark contingent collective 'histories' with variable new meanings.
Source: PP 177, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, by Avtar Brah