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Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies

Publisher:
Pluto Journals
Publication date:
2023-03-02
ISBN:
2634-2006

Description:

The Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies, exists to create a unique and unprecedented academic space where the study of indentureship, as a distinct form of unfree labour, can be analysed in all its forms. The Journal is peer reviewed and published bi-annually. No such Journal currently exists anywhere in the world, in spite of the critical importance of indentureship to world history.

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • Thinking LGBT human rights in Guyana

    Scholar Amar Wahab, co-editor of the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, interviews British High Commissioner to Guyana, Jane Miller, OBE, about her perspectives on LGBT human rights in Guyana. They discuss issues related to the legacies of the colonial regulation of gender and sexuality, the inclusion of diverse identities, and collaboration with LGBT activist organizations in Guyana.

  • The LGBT activism of Jason Jones

    Scholar Amar Wahab, co-editor of the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, interviews LGBTQ+ human rights defender Jason Jones about his advocacy spanning four decades in Trinidad and Tobago and the UK. Jones shares his experiences about the intersections of homophobia and racism to highlight the complexities around LGBTQ+ human rights. He discusses his successful landmark legal challenges against state-sponsored legal homophobia in both spaces.

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  • Krishna kee bansi bhajay

    Nachania (नचंनिया), translated as ‘female dancer’, refers to both a traditional Indo-Jamaican folk dance that has local origins in indentureship, and to those who perform it. The dance is characterized by flamboyant flailing hands, counterbalanced by acrobatic feats and yogic moments synchronous with beat drops. Its unbound choreography salvages important religio-cultural and historical narratives through ecstatic paroxysmal dance often with sexual overtones. This performance is important in ritualized and celebratory spaces to entertain crowds. While performing, Nachanias would have money launched at them, and they would sometimes engage men in dance. The performers were, and still are, frequently men who assume a different gendered role garbed in conscious ‘feminizing’ technologies such as make-up, jewellery and a frock. Especially during indentureship and the period immediately after, it was ‘vulgar’ for women to dance publicly or perform at religious ceremonies. Early women Nachanias were read as tainted spectacles, some of whom the archives record as professional ‘entertainers’. Inspired by the author’s curiosity, Indo-Jamaican identity, observations of Nachania and discourses with Ghanesh Maragh (one of the few contemporary performers of this artform), this article casts Indo-Jamaicans into the unbound erotic gendered tradition of Jamaica and indentureship by (a) tracing the (inter)religious, gendered, and historical anatomy of the lauded folk performance from the period of indentureship to the present in Jamaica and the Indo-Jamaican diaspora; (b) exploring themes of bidesia; and (c) examining possible problems with situating Nachania within categories of queer.

  • Reclaiming power

    Intimate partner violence against women and children is a growing concern for feminist scholarship in the Anglophone Caribbean. This scholarship is significant in challenging patriarchal gender ideologies at the intersections of race, class and sexuality. This body of work reveals how violence is embedded in the state and governmental bodies, and highlights the overall disparities in the implementation of laws. Furthermore, this work demonstrates how neoliberal restructuring policies implicate and affect women differently based on their positionality. While this work is critical in addressing intimate partner violence against women and children, the LGBTQ community in the region has remained vulnerable to violence at multiple levels of society. This article contributes to this work by focusing on same-sex intimate partner violence between women in Guyana. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to map out the traditional gendered framing of violence against heterosexual and women loving women; second, to argue that in Guyana’s context of persistent social, political and economic inequalities, women loving women use violence as a resource of resolution to reclaim and secure power.

  • Trans-oceanic erotics: sexing indentureship

    Through creative speculation and intervention, this research project probes the ‘coolie homoerotic’ (Wahab 2019) as a critical reflection on the place of the homoerotic and queerness within the trans-oceanic lifeworld of coolie indentureship. The four artworks presented are informed by a series of questions that might help to build a platform for queering indentureship and trans-oceanic space beyond identity recovery and respectability politics. In this regard, the work in progress is aimed at sexing indenture by (1) focusing on Brown same-sex sexual intimacies and erotic relations on coolie ships, as a way of undoing the historically constructed disconnect between the categories ‘sex’ and ‘indentured labour’, and (2) critically engaging the colonial heteropatriarchal discourse of ‘sex/gender/sexuality’ that continues to condition the unthinkability of same-sex relations in the context of indentureship and its legacies.

  • Introduction
  • Vinod Busjeet, Silent Winds, Dry Seas (New York: Doubleday, 2021), 288 pp.
  • Arunima Datta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History Of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 254 pp.
  • Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies

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