Trans-oceanic erotics: sexing indentureship

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0149
• Pages: 149-157
• Published date: 22 December 2022
• Date: 22 December 2022
• Author: Amar Wahab
• Subject Matter: Indentureship,erotics,trans-oceanic,coolie homoerotic,intimacies

Journal of Indentureship 2.2 December 2022

Research spotlight

Trans-oceanic erotics: sexing indentureship

Amar Wahab

Amar Wahab is professor of Gender and Sexuality in the School of

Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, Canada.

ABSTRACT

Through creative speculation and intervention, this research project

probes the ‘coolie homoerotic’ (Wahab 2019) as a critical reection

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 be-

tween 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.

KEYWORDS

Indentureship, erotics, trans-oceanic, coolie homoerotic, intimacies

Histories of British colonial indentureship remain submerged,

silenced and marginalized in global history. During the official

period of British indentureship (1838–1917) in the post-slavery

Caribbean, over 2 million Indian indentured labourers or ‘coo-

lies’ were brought to the region to work on sugar, cocoa and

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0149