Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies

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Latest documents

• 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.

• Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
• 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.

• 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.
• Offspring of a virgin’s womb

  Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace has not yet found the wide readership that might be expected of the winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, perhaps because it does not conform to its readers’ expectations of a Caribbean novel. And yet it is of particular relevance to the legacy of indentureship and the East Indian presence in Trinidad and to the relationships among the different ethnic groups on the island through its central concern with a black madonna on a fictional island unmistakeably resembling the Divina Siparia worshipped by Catholics or the Hindu Siparia Mai. This essay examines the author’s postmodern techniques with particular reference to his treatment of sexuality, stereotypes, the grotesque and religious themes to discover what could be the significance of the idea of the Virgin and her representation in the black madonna. In doing so it engages with Deleuze’s ideas on repetition to investigate the relationship between storytelling and reality, and the nature of the creative imagination.

Featured documents

• Changing Caribbean geographies: connections in flora, fauna and patterns of settlement from Indian inheritances

  There can be no doubt that Indian immigration to the plantation colonies changed the geography of those colonies. However, most analyses have dealt with the sugar industry in the colonies after the abolition of slavery. This paper will argue that, apart from the sugar industry, Indian labour and...

• 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...

• 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...

• Kala pani revisited: Indian labour migrants and the sea crossing

  This article examines the reconstruction and deconstruction of the concept of काला पानी or kālā pānā, meaning the ‘black waters’, which all Indians must cross when migrating overseas. From its origin as a Brahmanic text warning about the dangers of oceanic voyages, through its dissemination as a...

• 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...

• Sensuous movements

  Jordache Ellapen’s Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2018) is a visual art project that explores erotics as an epistemological and methodological frame to think through race, diaspora, memory, history and desire in/of contemporary South Africa. I argue that Queering the Archive is...

• Archives in drag

  ‘Archives in drag: Performing nachaniya towards a queer theory of indenture’ takes as its object the figure of the Indo-Jamaican nachaniya dancer as a paradigm for re-thinking queer theories of indenture. Nachaniya is a highly stylized Indo-Jamaican folk dance featuring a heterosexual male dancing...

• Excerpt from ‘Plantation Port Mourant and the arrival of Indo-Guyanese cricket after the war’, to be published in Brij Lal (ed.), Girmitiyas: Making of Their Memory-Keepers (New Delhi: Primus Books, forthcoming)
• Tanty feminisms

  A geneaology of Caribbean feminism is a geneaology of tanty feminisms. Occupying numerous articulations throughout the history of the Caribbean region and its diasporas, the figure of the ‘tanty’, or ‘aunty’ as they are known in non-Caribbean contexts, and the consequential amital social relations...

• Offspring of a virgin’s womb

  Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace has not yet found the wide readership that might be expected of the winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, perhaps because it does not conform to its readers’ expectations of a Caribbean novel. And yet it is of particular relevance to the legacy of indentureship and ...