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.

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...