Andil Gosine: COOLIE COOLIE VIENS (original) (raw)
Commodification of Identity: Dissecting the Coolie Body in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora
NEW LITERARIA- An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
Following the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, the mass labour emigration between 1837 and 1917 became a potent mechanism in the formation of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. Over time, this "new system of slavery" emanated a new canon of studies related to migration and (re)settlement, the formation of new identities, experiences, and affiliation through assemblages of material. My study will analyse a selected texts from the Indo-Caribbean oeuvre. In the exploration of the intersectionality between migration and materiality, I will posit the significance of human identity and the process of commodification stimulated under the draconian indenture trade. My paper will engage in the binary prejudice and consequent, the commodification of the Indian coolies during and after the indenture system.
Another Look at the Caribbean Psyche: 50 Years after Mr. Biswas
It is more than 20 years since Clement Branche first wrote on the Caribbean Psyche through the eyes of V.S. Naipaul in " A Little Glass of Rum. " His focus was on power and identity creation. Since then the media explosion of the internet, digital cable and a variety of affordable technology has occurred. Additionally, the sons of another Caribbean generation have become men. The questions that we attempt to answer today are still as real as the ones asked more than two decades ago. However, are the answers still the same? Is the Caribbean Psyche still the same powerless one presented in Naipaul's work of a people transported across oceans, hills and plains and made to lose their language and their culture? Has the Caribbean psyche evolved into a more overt triump hant spirit that can and should be applauded for its existence and its resilience? We explore Naipaul's works, particularly A House for Mr. Biswas which captures the family patterns and socialization practices which we contend typify the Caribbean region, and suggest how the Caribbean Psyche keeps finding strength in each accomplishment or each event of survival, and redefines self in an ongoing and dynamic process. We extend the analysis through deconstruction and reconstruction to include Branche's Social Affirmation Framework as a deliberately positive conceptual approach to understanding and articulating the Caribbean Psyche.
Andil Gosine's Cane Portraiture and the aesthetics of indenture
Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies, 2023
Andil Gosine’s participant-driven performance Cane Portraiture aestheticizes the social history of indentured labourers in the Caribbean. The work expands the field of relations surrounding the discourse of ‘coolitude’ – the dissemination of Indian labour during the 19th century – by redressing the ‘coolie odyssey’. By doing so, Gosine suggests that the pathos of displacement produced by the 'coolie odyssey' moves through generations of the Caribbean diaspora. In an attempt to define and reconcile this tension, Cane Portraiture attempts to locate a renewed sense of place and of ‘home’. For Gosine, then, the conceptualization of 'home' is approached as an embodiment of a person or site that is shared with others. This article was originally published in issue 36.3 (2019) of Blackflash Magazine.
Tangled Up: Gendered Nationhood in Indo-Caribbean Indenture Narratives
Novels that explore the British imperial system of indentured labor in the Caribbean often contain the trope of a relationship developing between a British man in power and a female Indian laborer. This essay explores the use of this relationship as a metaphor for Britain’s colonial relationship with India in two novels by contemporary Indo-Caribbean authors, David Dabydeen’s The Counting House and Sharlow’s The Promise. The Counting House and The Promise use this metaphor to attack the racist interventions of imperialism and indenture, but maintain the more conventional views of gender that were concretized under these systems and that persist in the Caribbean today.
The Indian Diaspora in the West Indies/Caribbean: A Cultural History of Triumphs and Tribulations
The abolition of slavery in the early 1830s in the British, French and Dutch colonies of the West Indies/Caribbean led to a severe shortage of labour in the sugarcane plantations. Soon, British-controlled India became a source of abundant cheap labour under a semi-slave contract system known as Indentureship. In 1838, Britain introduced the first Indian labourers to the Caribbean in British Guiana (now Guyana). The system later extended to Trinidad and Jamaica [1845] and then to other Caribbean islands like St. Lucia [1856], St. Vincent [1856], Grenada [1857] and St. Kitts [1861]. The system was also adopted by the French and Dutch who took Indians to Martinique [1853], Guadeloupe [1854], French Guyana [1855], St. Croix [1862] and Suriname [1873].
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2008
This broad and provocative collection of essays has an ambitious goalto systematize the history of past human interactions with the environment, to understand our environmental future better. It is hard to imagine a larger task. The thirty-four contributors seek to craft a "fully integrated history of humans and the rest of nature" (4). These essays are the ªrst steps of the larger project, called the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (ihope). Theirs is not a purely academic exercise. The contributors hope to produce a practical model (or a series of practical models). The data include knowledge of such events as the rise and fall of the Roman and Mayan Empires, the historical impacts of El Niño, twentieth-century geopolitics, and so on. The resulting models will enable predictions about such diverse phenomena as land-use patterns, ecosystem dynamics, and climate shifts. Should accurate predictions appear too tough a proposition, the volume editors are comfortable instead with the expectation that "IHOPE can use a deeper understanding of the past to help us create a better future, rather than to predict the future" (14). The volume is divided into ªve parts. The ªrst introduces the volume and discusses methodology. The following parts attempt to integrate history and nature within four time frames-the millennial (up to 10,000 years ago), the centennial (up to 1,000 years ago), the decadal (up to 100 years ago), and the future. Each of the last four parts contains three-to-ªve topically focused essays, as well as a longer "group report" that draws larger conclusions and relates the lessons of each time scale to the ihope project. This project reveals interdisciplinarity at its best and worst. The authors come from a wide variety of ªelds-economics, anthropology, climatology, resource management, and a host of others. Almost all of the contributors take approaches derived from the social and natural sciences; only two or three humanistic perspectives are represented. One of the greatest challenges facing the ihope project is the difªculty of bridging disciplinary divides, especially in the assessment of data. How might someone assess-for modeling purposes-the information drawn from pollen sediments, archeological sites, and written documents? More generally, how can human social processes like land-use patterns or information ºows be integrated with such quantiªable natural processes as soil erosion or greenhouse-gas concentration? Costanza suggests a system for "grading" data as a place to start. The volume makes its greatest contribution to interdisciplinary history in answering these types of questions. Some of the essays are dense, jargon-laden, and hard to follow. But the authors are asking important, hard questions, and their answers to these questions are nearly always provocative. ihope is certainly a wor-Reviews man and Nazi genocide, Japanese atrocities in East Asia, Soviet terror, Maoism in China, and mass killing in Cambodia and Rwanda. An epilogue slips in the cases of Bangladesh, East Timor, Guatemala, Iraq, Bosnia, the Sudan, and al-Qaeda. Kiernan closes by reasserting the generality of his four themes in mass killing, which after 600 pages have mutated into "race, antiquity, agriculture, and expansion" (605). He leaves the logical status of the four themes unclear. Are they necessary conditions for mass killing, jointly sufªcient conditions for mass killing, separate elements that independently increase the probability of mass killing, or simply characteristics that frequently accompany mass killing? The book neither identiªes systematic variations in genocide from time to time or place to place that require explanation nor proposes explanations for change, variation, and continuity in genocide. Its exclusive concentration on genocidal attempts that produced massive deaths deprives us of the opportunity to learn under what conditions popular resistance or third-party intervention prevented or mitigated massacres. Its descriptions, furthermore, concentrate overwhelmingly on ideologies and actions of perpetrators rather than on analyzing victims' responses or interactions between perpetrators and victims. Kiernan's forty-three-page treatment of English killing in Ireland between 1565 and 1603, for example, portrays Shane O'Neill as a rebel against English rule but neither as a military contender for the earldom of Tyrone nor as the Irish lord who accepted Queen Elizabeth's support in his bid to head the O'Neill clan. Such are the perils of universalizing history.
Indian Diasporic Formations in Guyana: Reading Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 2016
This paper deals with Gaiutra Bahadur’s recently published non-fiction narrative, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013). As a sequel to the end of slavery in the 1830s, the system of indenture, though equally exploitative, served as the source of voluntary migrant labour to manage the plantation economies in far-flung British colonies. In reconstructing the traumatic experience of her great-grandmother as an indentured worker uprooted from her homeland in 1903, Bahadur has meticulously researched archival sources from which we can extrapolate the adaptive persistence of nearly 240,000 Indians who migrated to Guyana between 1838 and 1917 and became the vanguard of the Indian diaspora there. We propose to discuss the key characteristics of diasporas as well as the typological criteria of existing diaspora models. For this paper we adopt the theoretical conceptualisation of Susan Koshy’s term “neo-diaspora” because it fits well with the Indian case in Guyana. The Indian relat...
Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance And Accommodation, 1838-1920
2006
This broad and provocative collection of essays has an ambitious goalto systematize the history of past human interactions with the environment, to understand our environmental future better. It is hard to imagine a larger task. The thirty-four contributors seek to craft a "fully integrated history of humans and the rest of nature" (4). These essays are the ªrst steps of the larger project, called the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (ihope). Theirs is not a purely academic exercise. The contributors hope to produce a practical model (or a series of practical models). The data include knowledge of such events as the rise and fall of the Roman and Mayan Empires, the historical impacts of El Niño, twentieth-century geopolitics, and so on. The resulting models will enable predictions about such diverse phenomena as land-use patterns, ecosystem dynamics, and climate shifts. Should accurate predictions appear too tough a proposition, the volume editors are comfortable instead with the expectation that "IHOPE can use a deeper understanding of the past to help us create a better future, rather than to predict the future" (14). The volume is divided into ªve parts. The ªrst introduces the volume and discusses methodology. The following parts attempt to integrate history and nature within four time frames-the millennial (up to 10,000 years ago), the centennial (up to 1,000 years ago), the decadal (up to 100 years ago), and the future. Each of the last four parts contains three-to-ªve topically focused essays, as well as a longer "group report" that draws larger conclusions and relates the lessons of each time scale to the ihope project. This project reveals interdisciplinarity at its best and worst. The authors come from a wide variety of ªelds-economics, anthropology, climatology, resource management, and a host of others. Almost all of the contributors take approaches derived from the social and natural sciences; only two or three humanistic perspectives are represented. One of the greatest challenges facing the ihope project is the difªculty of bridging disciplinary divides, especially in the assessment of data. How might someone assess-for modeling purposes-the information drawn from pollen sediments, archeological sites, and written documents? More generally, how can human social processes like land-use patterns or information ºows be integrated with such quantiªable natural processes as soil erosion or greenhouse-gas concentration? Costanza suggests a system for "grading" data as a place to start. The volume makes its greatest contribution to interdisciplinary history in answering these types of questions. Some of the essays are dense, jargon-laden, and hard to follow. But the authors are asking important, hard questions, and their answers to these questions are nearly always provocative. ihope is certainly a wor-Reviews man and Nazi genocide, Japanese atrocities in East Asia, Soviet terror, Maoism in China, and mass killing in Cambodia and Rwanda. An epilogue slips in the cases of Bangladesh, East Timor, Guatemala, Iraq, Bosnia, the Sudan, and al-Qaeda. Kiernan closes by reasserting the generality of his four themes in mass killing, which after 600 pages have mutated into "race, antiquity, agriculture, and expansion" (605). He leaves the logical status of the four themes unclear. Are they necessary conditions for mass killing, jointly sufªcient conditions for mass killing, separate elements that independently increase the probability of mass killing, or simply characteristics that frequently accompany mass killing? The book neither identiªes systematic variations in genocide from time to time or place to place that require explanation nor proposes explanations for change, variation, and continuity in genocide. Its exclusive concentration on genocidal attempts that produced massive deaths deprives us of the opportunity to learn under what conditions popular resistance or third-party intervention prevented or mitigated massacres. Its descriptions, furthermore, concentrate overwhelmingly on ideologies and actions of perpetrators rather than on analyzing victims' responses or interactions between perpetrators and victims. Kiernan's forty-three-page treatment of English killing in Ireland between 1565 and 1603, for example, portrays Shane O'Neill as a rebel against English rule but neither as a military contender for the earldom of Tyrone nor as the Irish lord who accepted Queen Elizabeth's support in his bid to head the O'Neill clan. Such are the perils of universalizing history.
Indialogs: Spanish Journal of India Studies, 2022
This article argues that the novel A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), by Nobel-prize winner V.S. Naipaul reflects, through the metaphor of the house, characteristically Caribbean concerns regarding the meanings of home. Therefore, it is argued that the Indo-Caribbean community should be accounted for in theories of creolisation which, until recently, have ignored this community in favour of a unified Afro-creole identity that was to support the struggle for independence and other rights. The aim of this article is to understand creolisation by taking into account the interactions between the diverse diasporas that have created the contemporary Caribbean. As such, the novel unveils the conflicts that arise when there is a neglect of such negotiation. With its ending, even if not openly, A House for Mr. Biswas emphasises the immanence of lived experience in the perception of identity. The home in the novel eventually transitions into Avtar Brah's homing desire, a concept that challenges essentialism in the apprehension of diasporic identities. Reading the novel through this lens reconsiders the meanings of home in the context of the Caribbean in general and the Indo-Caribbean community in particular.
Growing up in the Caribbean: A Reading of The Nowherians and Other Stories
Ars Artium, vol. 12, 2024
Krishna Samaroo's The Nowherians (2016) is a coming-of-age story, a bildungsroman, of two brothers who are at the mercy of Trinidadian societal practices at the time. The details of childhood are a capsule of memory from pre-independence to post independence. In this article, I examine some key issues that arise from Samaroo's work and make connections to two other works set in a similar time in Trinidad and Tobago-Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey (1970) and Persaud's Butterfly in the Wind (1990). Growing up in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1950s and 1960s includes experiences that are determined by social class and specifically in these works, the rural-urban dynamic as it affects social issues. These three works include childhood as a major theme and as a result, home spaces and caregivers in the forms of grandmothers and aunts are also issues of importance. My own family stories offer connections to thematic discussions in the article.
'Habitable Identities'— A Review of Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women
Our understanding of the complex journeys of women of Indian ancestry through several centuries in the Caribbean and its diasporas is expanded in valuable ways by Rosanne Kanhai's 2011 collection Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women. In a collection commendable for its multidisciplinary nature, we learn of the particularities of Indo-Caribbean women's agency in areas as varied as literature, art, beauty/cultural pageants, rural domestic work, religious performances, traditional healing, and their coping with the conditions of contemporary life. There is an unevenness to the collection as it moves across this disparate terrain, but in the strongest of the pieces, which include the work of Shaheeda Hosein, Gabrielle Hosein, Anita Baksh, and Paula Morgan, we depart from essentialized notions of what constitutes an Indo-Caribbean female subject to complex discussions of the multiple positionings that Indian women utilize in their engagement with concepts of femininity, Indianness, citizenship, individuality, and communal belonging. One of the most striking aspects of the collection and one that makes a key intervention in the thinking about forms of feminism is the extent to which the contributors reread venues of action that seem to be associated with tradition, continuity, and conservativism and find the nuanced ways in which Indian women transgress norms and clear space for the achievement of individual desires. In her essay " Unlikely Matriarchs, " for example, Shaheeda Hosein redirects potential thinking about feminist goals from a focus on the quest for individual liberation to that of the self-sacrificing actions of older rural women who had set their eyes on opening up possibilities for the next generation. In so doing,
What the Caribbean Teaches Us: The Afterlives and New Lives of Coloniality
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2022
If the Caribbean was (and remains) central to modern processes of extraction, labor organization, and racial hierarchy, and if it has also been a space of conceptual mining, then it is worth asking about the status of the Caribbean (in anthropology) today. As anthropologists continue to reorient the field away from "coloniality" (Wynter 2003) and toward something like "radical humanism" (Jobson 2020), what might research in the Caribbean teach us? In this essay, I will focus on recent work on sovereignty emerging from ethnographic research in the region in order to argue that focusing on the ephemeral, the performative, and the affective charts sovereignty as something that is constantly in process, something that emerges through dialogue and practice. In doing so, contemporary ethnographies raise questions about the afterlives, and new lives, of imperialism and slavery, and about the potential for reparation and repair. [sovereignty, affect, afterlives of imperialism, coloniality, repair] R e s u m e n Si el Caribe fue (y sigue siendo) central en los procesos modernos de extracción, organización laboral y jerarquía racial, y si también ha sido un espacio de búsqueda conceptual, entonces vale la pena preguntarse sobre la situación del Caribe (en la antropología) hoy. A medida que los antropólogos continúan reorientando el campo lejos de la "colonialidad" (Wynter 2003) y hacia algo como el "humanismo radical" (Jobson 2020), ¿qué nos puede enseñar la investigación en el Caribe? En este ensayo, me enfoco en trabajos recientes sobre soberanía que emergen de la investigación etnográfica en la región, para argumentar que centrarse en lo efímero, lo performativo y lo afectivo traza la soberanía como algo en constante desarrollo, algo que emerge a través del diálogo y la práctica. Al hacerlo, las etnografías contemporáneas plantean preguntas sobre las vidas posteriores y las nuevas vidas, del imperialismo y la esclavitud, y sobre el potencial de reparación.
Indian Arrival or Indian Survival? Indentureship in Trinidad
Sunday Market Network, 2021
There is no denying that the Indian community has significantly impacted the social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics of Trinidad. We have seen these contributions in our everyday lives; Indian dance, music, art, language, cuisine, religion, healing practices, fashion, literature, and political involvement to name a few. Yet, what is often underrepresented and thus overlooked in our history and heritage, are the torment and pain, the lies and death, the violence, assault, and rape that many of our ancestors endured under the system of indenture – a legacy of trauma that still bleeds onto many of the descendants of indentured labourers.