Post-Indentureship Caribbean Feminist Thought, Transoceanic Feminisms, and the Convergence of Asymmetries

Connection does not, however, imply an automatic equality or solidarity. Seriously considering the question, “how are we related to each other and what have I not understood about my situation when I didn’t understand hers?,” demands rigorous attention to asymmetries of power and the uncomfortable ways in which we are variously invested in relationships of difference from each other.

I say something
you ask what it is
I reword my question
you answer another
I speak of cooking
you talk of roasting –
tongues converse ¹

Introduction

What happens when feminisms and feminist thought, in Caribbean societies which experienced post-emancipation experiments with indenture, ² begin to locate themselves as post-indentureship feminisms? Better put: what happens when post-indentureship feminist theorizing becomes a framework for Caribbean feminist theorizing in which neither indentureship and its afterlife, nor scholarly writing that conceptualizes its cross-relational and transoceanic significance, is marginal? Can any feminisms articulated in these sites be separated from the gendered and sexual identities, relations, and resistances sparked by the arrival of indentured laborers? How does the afterlife of indenture cross race, space, and time? How is Indo-Caribbean feminist theorizing therefore relevant to Caribbean feminist thought, and Caribbean feminisms connected to transoceanic feminisms, in ways still to be considered?

To answer these questions, in this essay I propose a transoceanic approach to what I call post-indentureship Caribbean feminist thought. ³ Exemplified further below, transoceanic imaginaries map waves of migrations and containment across both Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, cyclical and complex exchanges between land and sea, and aesthetics of deconstruction and regeneration across time. ⁴ Such imaginaries can be described as transcolonial and illuminate horizontal south-to-south interconnections, relations, and exchanges. ⁵

On this basis, I make two provocations. The first is to consider Indo-Caribbean feminist thought as only one of many instantiations of this historical period in the plantation economy and its afterlife, the others being racialized in differential, but always intersecting, ways. ⁶ In other words, “Indo-Caribbean feminisms” and “post-indentureship feminisms” are not interchangeable terms. There are multiple histories of indenture beyond Indians’ indenture. Rather, post-indentureship feminist thought fundamentally points to transcolonial and cross-race considerations central to gender negotiations and feminist organizing in sites such as Guyana, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Suriname, and of course the wider geography of, inter alia, Mauritius, Fiji, and East and South Africa. ⁷

The second is to think of other racialized Caribbean feminisms as shaped by the indenture experience and its afterlife in ways insufficiently discussed, and to provoke such thinking by proposing these as forms of post-indentureship feminist praxes. Can Caribbean feminist thought as it has emerged in Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, and Guadeloupe, for particular example, consider itself post-indentureship feminist thought, accepting indenture as a post-slavery, plantation-economy-structured experience which transformed gender identities and relations within and among all groups in those societies? ⁸

“The arrival of thousands of Indians in the Caribbean, Mauritius, and South Africa constitutes an indisputable turning point in the historical and cultural development of regions,” writes Veronique Bragard. ⁹ Patricia Mohammed thus proposes that “the constantly emerging space of creoleness in the region is as much Indian as it is European or African at this time.” ¹⁰ I draw on this for its suggestion of entanglement, proximity, fluency, and “unexplored mutuality,” ¹¹ as well as for the “clandestine countermemories” ¹² present in Caribbean feminist and queer ¹³ histories. As Sarah Nuttall explicates, “entanglement … is intended less to imply that we contest that forms of separation and difference still do occur, materially and epistemologically, than to draw into our analyses critical attention to those sites and spaces in which what was once thought of as separate – identities, spaces, histories – come together or intersect in unexpected ways.” ¹⁴

Such an approach does not negate the particularities of history, embodiment, and violence experienced by any racialized group. Neither is it a call for douglarisation or mixing, repudiation of Blackness or African descent, effacement of Indian or other ethnic identification, or negation of Indigenous people’s struggle for their “humanity beyond the regime of labor.” ¹⁵ Rather, it seeks to spark consideration of how historical periods of indenture and their afterlife are constitutive of contemporary gender and sexual negotiations and navigations across all racial and ethnic categories in post-indenture sites, for the racial, (hetero)sexual, and gender logics introduced with indenture have co-constituted all groups in relation to each other since then and have changed those societies as a whole. ¹⁶

Indenture extended the structural power of European norms of the human to produce asymmetrically subordinated categories of womanhood and manhood in relation to bourgeois respectability, family, heteropatriarchal conjugality, and domesticity. This produced women as “‘othered’ in relation to each other and positioned as markers of ‘racial,’ ethnic and national difference” ¹⁷ just as it produced queer subjectivities as impossible and unthinkable identities, solidarities, and intimacies. These are not separate processes.

Puar illustrates this in her reflections on the “relative absence of Indo-Trinidadian lesbians on the one hand and the long history of anxieties about disruptive East Indian female sexualities during indentureship,” ¹⁸ the founding of state management on “postcolonial ideologies of ruling black masculinity,” ¹⁹ the assumption of homosexual subjects as African and Indian women as more “homophobic,” ²⁰ the heteronormativity of the state as “an apparatus that regulates sexual norms, but one that also reproduces racial norms,” ²¹ and cross-race and cross-ethnic male legislators’ punishment of any women citizens’ “serious indecency” as an enactment of patriarchal domination over women’s bodies, sexuality, fertility, labor, and autonomy first violently authorized through slavery. At the same time, Preity Kumar interviews Indo-Guyanese (and Afro-Guyanese) women-loving women who articulate anti-heteronormative and anti-heterosexual desires produced by “racial fetishization” and “anti-blackness.” These desires are transgressive, but not anti-colonial. ²² Asymmetrical convergences abound.

Writing of the legacy of racialized violence in Guyana, Alissa Trotz highlights how “colonial productions of racial difference between Africans and Indians – productions that hinged on the culturalization of a racialized division of labor in the colonial plantation economy – would come to depend critically on representations of women in the closing years of indentureship.” ²³ Such representations, as they strengthened post-emancipation “subordination and criminalization” of insurgent bodies, desires, pleasures and practices, ²⁴ would produce Guyanese transwomen’s working-class and cross-race struggles over the regulation of femininity one hundred years after the end of indenture, ²⁵ just as they produced working-class Afro-creole women’s mati relationships ²⁶ and fluidities in the Hindu matikor.

Centering indentureship and its postscripts therefore intersects Indo-Caribbean feminist thought with feminist theorizing emerging from other post-indenture sites, rerouting away from India. ²⁷ It highlights the relevance of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought to the development of Caribbean feminist theorizing, and provokes consideration of the impact of indentureship and post-indentureship periods on the emergence and articulation of Caribbean feminisms. ²⁸ This connects the field of Caribbean feminist studies to wider transoceanic (not just trans-Atlantic) geographies which as yet have been insufficiently explored outside of Indo-Caribbean feminist creative and scholarly writings. ²⁹ In this essay, I thus explore post-indentureship feminist thought, as an historically defined discourse in a larger cartography of plantation-economy feminisms, and its Caribbean and transoceanic significance.

To that end, first I outline the rationale for proposing a transoceanic approach to post-indentureship Caribbean feminist thought. Second, I highlight how this approach acknowledges the antagonisms, asymmetries, and solidarities that can propel genealogies and cartographies of Caribbean feminisms in new directions. Finally, I highlight how transoceanic and Indo-Caribbean feminist theorizing have long taken up considerations of transcoloniality and cross-relationality, and I offer an intellectual legacy of imagined intimate connections.

Beyond Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought

I began to conceptualize post-indentureship feminist theorizing in the context of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought. ³⁰ Although Europeans, Africans, Indonesians, and Chinese were also indentured (and in some colonies, Indians and others were also enslaved), in this essay I focus on the implications of Indian indenture, though the argument can be made to indenture more broadly. Framing Indo-Caribbean feminist thought as post-indenture recognizes that neither India past or present is a primary point of reference, and that feminist scholars have drawn on the gendered realities and resistances, and cross-ethnic relations and solidarities, which had come into their own within the specificities of post-slavery and post-indentureship temporalities. Rising above the old “limbo consciousness” ³¹ frame of neither authentically Indian enough nor sufficiently creolized, Indo-Caribbean feminist thought established its own genealogies, not defined by diasporic belonging to India as much as by the odyssey of indenture itself. ³² This crossing was a turning point not just for generations of Indians, but also for the Caribbean societies to which tens and hundreds of thousands of Indians arrived. ³³

The first step in thinking about post-indentureship feminist thought and feminisms began with this recognition of plantation history and labor as a locus of younger generations’ Indo-Caribbean feminist knowledge and “revolutionary praxis.” ³⁴ Echoing this, Mehta summarizes that Indo-Caribbean feminisms emerged from diasporic displacement, gendered violence, resistance to Hindu and Muslim religious patriarchies, and traditions of hard work. It includes negotiations with Afro-centeredness, shifts in public-private sphere participation, revisions to heteronormative sexuality, calls to creativity, and affirmations of women’s political agency. ³⁵

Thus, Lisa Outar and I defined post-indentureship feminisms as “feminist consciousness, theorizing and activism that traces its genealogy through indentureship and post-indentureship experience,” provides “greater attention to the ways that feminist desires call upon and articulate post-indentureship culture and cosmologies,” and develops “a significant intellectual tradition, which has evolved within the specific conditions of post-indentureship and post-slavery societies and is inextricably intertwined in cross-ethnic solidarities and relationality.” ³⁶ In this framing, the Indian plantation-economy experience is one layered onto and into negotiations with apparatuses, hierarchies, openings, and forms of discipline repetitively experienced, resisted, redefined, and reformed through slavery and indentureship in the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, parts of Africa and South-East Asia, and, later, India itself. ³⁷

Second, while giving visibility to embodiment, particularity, and cultural inheritances mobilized in feminist praxis, ³⁸ I began to think about how an historical, political, and discursive space that has been read as distinctly Indo-Caribbean could be claimed beyond Indo-Caribbean feminist thought. This may have been sparked by thinking about Dougla feminisms in relation to my daughter, ³⁹ and my concern to open the discourse of indentureship and its afterlife to multiple and differential experiences as well as disavowals and violence and how these are constituted. Such consideration of a wider range of gender and sexual imbrications could advance how Caribbean feminist historiography illuminates the convergences and intersectionalities of racialization and cross-race intimacies and solidarities today.

Third, I was inspired by Rosanne Kanhai’s evocative lines: “These Bhowjees … are demanding the right to celebrate their female bodies in a way that denies neither their Indian heritage nor their claim to elements of Afro-centric cultural expression available to them. They reject the call to Hindu purity that is being made, seeing its repressive intent … They willingly reach for elements of Afro-Caribbean culture … Their demand is that they take their Indianness and femaleness with them.” ⁴⁰ I had for a long time searched for similar citations in Caribbean feminist writing that acknowledged the resources that indentureship and its afterlife brought to Caribbean gender negotiations. Sheila Rampersad has written, “Indian women have been using, and can continue to use, African women’s resistance as a framework for their own liberation and in so doing can draw attention to the Afro-centricity of the regional women’s movement in a tone that also celebrates the elements of trust and intimacy implicit in these relationships.” ⁴¹ Could there be the same recognition, celebration, trust, and intimacy in relation to Indo-Caribbean feminisms? ⁴² Might the erotic possibilities of Indian indentureship and its afterlife “offer the means to connect Afro-Caribbean, trans, mixed-race, and non-Hindu subjects”? ⁴³ Without such recognition, how would necessary possibilities for transcolonial queer convergences across jahaji-mediated time and space appear foreclosed?

Fourth, I wanted to respond to the idea that Indo-Caribbean women were belated political and intellectual actors. Indian women’s negotiations and navigations ⁴⁴ grew out of the specific opportunities provided by indentureship, such as economic autonomy, greater sexual freedom, escape from collective and structurally embedded patriarchal and caste-based religious authority, and opportunity for specific kinds of legal and labor politicization. ⁴⁵ They were also articulating feminist ideals, whether as Muslim laborers in the 1930s as imagined by Ryaan Shah in her 2005 novel A Silent Life, or as Presbyterian women like Amala Ramcharan, an editor of the Spectator in the 1940s as documented by Lisa Outar, ⁴⁶ or as Hindu women such as Urmilla as described by Sam Selvon in the 1958 novel Turn again Tiger, or as sugar workers such as Phoolbasie in her collaborations with Elma Francois. ⁴⁷

All this created opportunity for cross-race relations among women, intersected by class, geography, sexuality, gender, age, ability, and religion, as they worked together on plantations and met in markets and eventually in villages, towns, and other public locations as Kaneesha Parsard describes for Indian and African women living in Trinidadian barrack yards, and as they met in civic and political organizing. ⁴⁸ For example, Rhoda Reddock writes about the participation of Gema Ramkeesoon in the Coterie of Social Workers, “the leading organization of ‘black and coloured’ middle-class women of the 1920s to 1940s.” ⁴⁹ In 1949, Ramkeesoon cofounded the Indo-Caribbean Cultural Council, which aimed to improve relations among Indians and Africans in Trinidad and Tobago. Diana Wells documents the anti-racism work of Trinidad and Tobago’s Women Working for Social Progress (Workingwomen) from 1995. In 2003, at the organization’s eighteenth-anniversary lecture, Merle Hodge and Sheila Rampersad described, “We bring to this anti-racism campaign our concern for equity, the strength of these networks, and the diversity of our experiences and friendships.” ⁵⁰ Andaiye has also described the aims of Red Thread, founded in 1986 in Guyana, “to initiate dialogue and mutual cooperation between urban Afro-Guyanese and rural Indo-Guyanese women by demonstrating that race is not a barrier to inter-ethnic collaboration.” ⁵¹

Fifth, I wanted to historicize co-produced subjectivities, rather than nostalgia. As Trotz points out:

If we accept the argument about making visible women’s contribution to the forging of Caribbean cultures, and if we agree that culture is often announced as the making of racial difference, then it follows that women bear some culpability for culture’s various exclusions … In the case of Guyana, we need to look not only at shifting representations of racial differences among women in the post-emancipation/post-indentureship periods but at the ways in which women occupied subject-positions defined by such difference, and how this (constrained) choice was partly a condition of their belonging to communities defined in relation and often in opposition to each other. ⁵²

If, as Thomas Eriksen observes, “Indians of Trinidad, for example, would not have been Indians in the way they are unless they had been forced to relate to black, brown, off-white and white Creole culture, and vice versa,” what was the impact of their presence? ⁵³

Finally, influenced by the work on landscape, ⁵⁴ aesthetic, ⁵⁵ ganja, ⁵⁶ masculinity, ⁵⁷ and other areas, which highlights how legacies of Indian indentureship transformed the region and all those within it, I wanted to challenge Caribbean feminist thinking and organizing to theorize, rather than efface, the effect of indentureship and post-indentureship on the geographies and feminist praxes that began to rise out of complex plantation-economy formations. This would also affirm that the knowledge economy of gender ⁵⁸ and feminist thought is one in which post-indentureship relations and feminisms cannot be separated from the cross-ethnic development of transoceanic feminist cartographies. My call is for attention to such racialization, and to cross-race and -class and transcolonial solidarities and intimacies, to be taken up in post-indentureship Caribbean feminist theorizing and organizing beyond the Indo-Caribbean.

Post-indentureship Intimacies

In her study of the rise of European liberal modernity, Lisa Lowe suggests attending to the “circuits, connections, associations, and mixings” ⁵⁹ among coeval histories of slavery, settler colonialism, and indentured labor. Her study of the “intimacy of four continents” involves “tracking the ways in which race, geography, nation, caste, religion, gender, sexuality and other social differences become elaborated as normative categories for governance.” ⁶⁰ This occurs “through precisely spatialized and temporalized processes of both differentiation and connection,” for example, in the way that “colonized populations were differentially racialized through their proximities from normative ideas of family reproduction,” freedom, humanity, and property. ⁶¹ Such tracking is significant for understanding how these categories get taken up by contemporary feminist theorizing and feminisms. “The operations that pronounce colonial divisions of humanity … are imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment, not temporally distinct nor as yet concluded,” Lowe writes. ⁶² The concept of post-indentureship feminisms exactly fits this framing, provoking us to explore how indenture’s “braided” impact on “political, sexual, and intellectual connections and relations” among Asians, Africans, and Indigenous people in the Americas continues to emerge. ⁶³

Lowe thinks of intimacy in terms of the colonial political economy that governed its production, distribution, and possession. Here, intimacy is not just about how “desire, sexuality, marriage, and family are inseparable from the imperial projects of conquest, slavery, labor, and government.” ⁶⁴ Rather, it is more globally about the relationships between the abolition of Caribbean slavery and the biopolitics of Asian indentured and “free” labor, as labor, reproduction, and society were managed and disciplined through racialized and sexualized classifications and fantasies central to liberal modernity. ⁶⁵ It is also about the ways that jahaji-bhai and jahaji-bhain same-sex loving and familial possibilities, just like mati work, potentially enabled populations to recognize fluidity within and among women and men, however opaque such race and class cross-currents appear in plantation archives. ⁶⁶

As Lowe puts it:

The repeated injunctions that different groups must be divided and boundaries kept distinct indicate that colonial administrators imagined as dangerous the sexual, laboring, and intellectual contacts among enslaved and indentured nonwhite peoples. The racial classifications in the archive arise, thus, in this context of the colonial need to prevent these unspoken “intimacies” among the colonized … So, while this emergent sense of intimacies – the varieties of contacts between laboring peoples – is not explicitly named in the documents, it is, paradoxically, everywhere present in the archive. ⁶⁷

Thus, a post-indentureship cartography highlights the intimacy of Caribbean and transoceanic feminist theorizing. As Tonya Haynes points out, this also has potential to transform Caribbean feminism’s invoking of a paradigmatic “essentialized, afro-maternal, working class subject” in ways that “Other both black and non-black women” and “resul[t] in a missed understanding of Caribbean feminist ideas and movements that is racialized, exclusionary and ultimately inaccurate.” ⁶⁸ It also has the potential to fundamentally challenge stereotypes about Indian men, just as much as African women, ⁶⁹ and to counter effacement of indentureship in scholarship on post-plantation crises of masculinity.

Transoceanic Cartographies

I now outline some contributions of a transoceanic lens, highlighting its focus on identities, relationalities, and post-indentureship feminist possibilities. For example, Bragard extensively documents articulations of cross-race sorority, solidarities, and desires in her focus on “transoceanic dialogues,” including the writing of women from post-indentureship sites in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean such as Lakshmi Persaud, Jan Shinebourn, and Ananda Devi. In these Indian women’s writing, Bragard observes, “an imaginary of cross-culturality. Highlighted is the shared experience of oppression of African and Indians, regretted is the ‘unspoken rivalry’ that has pervaded their relationship in many former colonies.” ⁷⁰

Similarly, Brinda Mehta writes, “The feminism of Indian and African women has known a long tradition in Trinidad and Guyana despite the traditional erasure and obfuscation that this form of activism has suffered in the historical documentation of the Caribbean.” ⁷¹ Her concept of “kala pani hybridity” aims, further, to expand from “two turbulent transatlantic crossings, African and Indian, that highlight a political commonality of experience … to include Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese and other ‘minority’ constituencies that do not necessarily subscribe to the dougla aesthetic as a locus of self-identification … In this way, kala pani hybridity could offer a solution to the problematics of naming and to the privileging of particular ethnic experiences” ⁷² as part of producing transformational Caribbean feminisms. Kala pani poetics comes closest to a transoceanic formulation of feminism. ⁷³ However, Mehta considers these to be expressions of diasporic (dis)locations, not post-indentureship feminist articulations.

Coolitude has provided another trajectory in this literature. The term “coolie” began to be mobilized in the Caribbean in the 1970s, for example by women such as Mahadai Das, Rajkumari Singh, and Shana Yardan who were part of the theatre, writing, and arts Messenger Group in Guyana. Caribbean feminist scholars have noted the importance of such women’s early creative works for exploring the particularities of Indo-Caribbean women’s experience of survival, resistance, and politicization. ⁷⁴ However, it was not until the work of Khal Thorabully ⁷⁵ and the collection by Marina Carter and Khal Thorabully ⁷⁶ that a “coolie epistemology” began to be used in ways that named and even exalted the connections across the sites of plantation indentured labor in terms of “the trauma of settlement as well as the strength in recreation of cultural patterns.” ⁷⁷

Here, coolie is not an ethnic definition, but a juridical one. ⁷⁸ Thus, coolitude “is not a racial or ethnic movement” (i.e., not Indianite), but an experience of bondage and servitude that constitutes “an imaginary community of the Indo-Black Atlantic” and priorities transoceanic crossing and detachment from India. Like waves coming to and returning from shores, it anchors a “mosaic self that is irrevocably influenced by the other bodies and histories that shaped the land and sea spaces of indentureship, one that recognizes and forges links to others who have gone through the upheaval, ruptures and uprootings that were involved in slavery, indentureship and plantation life.” ⁷⁹ However, Mehta contends that “Coolitude discourse tends to elide the complexity of the lives lived by Indo-Caribbean and Indo-Mauritian women, ignoring the continued stratification that shape women’s circumstances, especially in relation to ways in which they are allowed to claim public space, defiantly and in versions that invoke cross-racial and cross-class solidarities.” ⁸⁰

Indo-Caribbean feminist scholarship has led Caribbean theorization of inclusive feminist models based on douglarization, dougla feminism, and dougla poetics. These all create space for affirming cross-race, post-plantation gender transgressions, feminist navigations, and women’s creation of alternatives. For example, fitting squarely with a transoceanic “female epistemology of cane,” Kaneesha Parsard examines Andil Gosine’s use of the cutlass as art object “to join – black feminist and Indo-Caribbean feminist thought, past and present – as well as to cut.” ⁸¹ She continues: “In that spirit, I meditate further on dougla feminism to argue that the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds have been and continue to be linked through labor migrations, plantation economies, and contemporary political and economic crises.” ⁸²

I suggest that “post-indentureship” is more productive and does not problematically occupy the category Dougla, ⁸³ mobilize racial categories, marginalize the indentureship experience of Indians, or reduce indentureship history to Indian “coolitude.” It also provokes exploration of its implications for non-Indians, particularly in relation to feminist thought and feminisms. It foundationally includes the significance of the plantation economy as established through slavery in the Caribbean, and globally circulated in the post-emancipation period through indentureship relations, positing these as interdependent processes of capitalist accumulation. In this way, post-indentureship feminist theorizing centers long-shared spaces with historical, political, and intellectual points of overlap. It directs our attention to historical and contemporary gender negotiations and feminist navigations with, for example, labor, (hetero)sexuality, violence, and family, mapped transcolonially.

Conclusion

What transoceanic solidarities does a post-indentureship Caribbean feminist approach produce? Mohammed asks similar a question at the end of her essay, “The Asian Other in the Caribbean”: “How do we imaginatively enter each other’s predicament of identity and belonging and collectively rebuild the desecration of the past?” ⁸⁴

This cartography of struggle draws from gender negotiations as established by and from within plantation-economies. It includes the significance of African slavery to the development and circulation of plantation models from the Caribbean as indentured labor relations were established. It traces its genealogy through these systems and their post-indenture legacies. It is not only exemplified by Indo-Caribbean feminist contributions, though this body of work is a forerunner in providing concepts and continual attention to cross- and mixed-race constitution of subjectivities, sexualities, and social relations.

Indenture introduced classifications and fantasies that racialized genders and sexualities into new assemblages through the dissemination of a gendered, sexualized, racialized, violent, exploitative, and divisive plantation economy model. As feminisms and feminist thought emerge from Caribbean, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean sites, inescapably affected by indentureship, it is productive to ask how such articulations have been shaped by Indian arrival, ⁸⁵ just as Indians’ experiences were shaped by non-Indians’ gender and labor negotiations, cross-race and cross-religious familiarities, and queer desires and lives. Such asymmetrical convergences push Caribbean feminist thought into wider waters and situate it in broader geographies, hopefully sparking new circulations in comparative and collaborative feminist praxis and solidarity.

1. The title phrase “convergence of asymmetries” comes from the line, “I focus on relation across differences rather than equivalence, on the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity,” in Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 11. The epigraphs come from D. Alissa Trotz, “Red Thread: The Politics of Hope in Guyana,” Race and Class 49, no. 2 (2007): 71–130; and Gloria Wekker, “Tower of Babel on the Suriname River,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 6 (2012): 4.[↑]
2. In the nineteenth century, over a million Indians were sent to European colonies in the Caribbean, and Indian and Pacific Oceans, as indentured workers. Of those, for example, 239,000 went to Guyana, 147,000 to Trinidad, and just over 68,000 to Martinique and Guadeloupe. The proportion of women recruited was rarely was more than 33 per cent to 40 per cent. See Brinsley Samaroo, “Orientalising Caribbean Society: Chinese and Indian Diasporic Journeys,” Arts Journal 11, no. 1 and 2 (2018): 61–8, 51, 54. Another 453,000 went to Mauritius, 152,000 to Natal, 61,000 to Fiji, 27,000 to Reunion, 36,000 to Jamaica, and 34,000 to Suriname. Devjyot Ghoshal, “The Forgotten Story of India’s Colonial Slave Workers Who Began Leaving Home 180 Years Ago,” Quartz, 3 November 2014, https://qz.com/india/290497/the-forgotten-story-of-indias-colonial-slave-workers-who-began-leaving-home-180-years-ago/.[↑]
3. My goal is not to privilege scholarship and writing as representations of Caribbean feminisms, but to reflect on Caribbean feminist intellectual genealogies and futures, and both complexify and clarify theoretical propositions made in the collection Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments. See Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and Lisa Outar, “Introduction: Interrogating an Indo-Caribbean Feminist Epistemology,” in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments, ed. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and Lisa Outar (New York: Palgrave McMillian, 2016), 1–19.[↑]
4. A transoceanic imaginary, as developed by Elizabeth DeLoughrey in Routes and Roots (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 2, in her comparative study of Caribbean and Indigenous Pacific Island literatures, can also be considered a tidalectics which “images the ongoing and palpable heritage of “submerged mothers” who cross the seas, “coming from one continent/continuum, touching another, and then receding … from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future.” See Kamau Brathwaite, Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey (New York: We Press, 1999), 34.[↑]
5. Judith Mishrahi-Barak, “Strategies of Resistance in Transcolonial Literary Constructions – Translations from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean,” Arts Journal 11, no. 1 and 2: 33–46, 35.[↑]
6. “Racialization” refers to the process of using phenotype, physical features, and area of origin to define and construct social groups and inequitable relations among them. See Rhoda Reddock, “Diversity, Difference and Caribbean Feminism: The Challenge of Anti-racism,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 1 (2007): 1–24.[↑]
7. Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labour in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); and Prem Misir, The Subaltern Indian Woman: Domination and Social Degradation (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2018).[↑]
8. More than twenty years ago, Ramabai Espinet asserted, “I think that the experience of Indo-Caribbean people should not remain within their relatively isolated community. It is part of the general historical movement of peoples into this archipelago and as such belongs to all, impacts on all and should be known by all. That this experience is not part of our common intellectual heritage, when Indo-Caribbean people make up 20% of the region’s population, is ample evidence of the way this ethnic community has been marginalized.” My argument differs. It is that indentureship has impacted on the whole of post-indenture societies and should be considered common to those sites’ feminist trajectories. See Ramabai Espinet talks to Elaine Savory, “A Sense of Constant Dialogue: Writing, Woman and Indo-Caribbean Culture,” in The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Caribbean Literature, ed. Makeda Silvera (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1995), 106.[↑]
9. Véronique Bragard, Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 28.[↑]
10. Bragard, Transoceanic Dialogues, 67.[↑]
11. Tracy Robinson, “The Properties of Citizens: A Caribbean Grammar of Conjugal Categories,” Du Bois Review 10, no. 2 (2013): 425–46; and D. Alissa Trotz, “Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: Intimacies, Proximities, Relationalities,” Small Axe 22, no. 2 (56) (2018): 219–31, 229.[↑]
12. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2, in Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 4.[↑]
13. “Queer” here refers to non-normative sexes, sexualities, and genders as well as desires, identities, relations, and practices. I am aware of ambivalence about the term as representative of how non-normativity is lived, but use it here as a short-hand for multiple alternatives to colonial and contemporary hegemonic expectations. See Krystal Ghisyawan, “Queer-(in’) the Caribbean: The Trinidad Experience,” in The Global Trajectories of Queerness: Re-thinking Same-Sex Politics in the Global South, ed. Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015).[↑]
14. Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), 20, in Trotz, “Coolie Woman,” 229.[↑]
15. Shona N. Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).[↑]
16. Brackette Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Rhoda Reddock, “Competing Victimhoods: A Framework for the Analysis of Post-colonial Multi-ethnic Societies,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (2019): 1–20. DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2019.1572503.[↑]
17. Reddock, “Diversity, Difference and Caribbean Feminism,” 1. She continues: “Afro-Caribbean women, for example were constructed as loose, immoral, loud, independent and sexually available; In contrast Indo-Caribbean women were constructed as chaste, pure, controlled and sexually unavailable. This is so although historical records seriously challenge these stereotypes” (4–5).[↑]
18. Jasbir Puar, “Chutney to Queer and Back: Trinidad 1995–1998,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 3 (2009): 1–10, 6.[↑]
19. Puar, “Chutney,” 5.[↑]
20. Ibid., 3.[↑]
21. Ibid., 5.[↑]
22. Preity Kumar, “Women Lovin’ Women: An Exploration of Identities, Belonging, and Communities in Urban and Rural Guyana” (PhD diss., York University, 2018), 200–03. [↑]
23. D. Alissa Trotz, “Between Despair and Hope: Women and Violence in Contemporary Guyana,” Small Axe 15, no. 8 (1, 2004): 1–20, 8. Trotz continues: “How do these discursive deployments of ‘woman’ combine with the legal and social production of second-class female citizens, to create spaces wherein masculinized violence against women becomes sanctioned (within communities, as a way of keeping women in their respective places, and between communities as a way of attacking a racialized group identity)? How is such violence implicated in the creation of Indian and African male identities?” (7–8).[↑]
24. Gopinath, “Impossible Desires,” 21.[↑]
25. See U-RAP Admin, “Joint Press Release on McEwan v. AG of Guyana,” Grrlscene, 13 November 2018, http://www.u-rap.org/web2/index.php/component/k2/item/77-joint-press-release-on-mcewan-v-ag-of-guyana-nov-13-2018; and U-RAP Admin, “Diary of a Working Mother,” 28 June 2018, Grrlscene, https://grrlscene.wordpress.com/2018/06/28/diary-of-a-mothering-worker-june-28-2018/.[↑]
26. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2/3 (2008): 191–215.[↑]
27. Lisa Outar, “Post-indentureship Cosmopolitan Feminism: Indo-Caribbean and Indo-Mauritian Women’s Writing and the Public Sphere,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 93–112.[↑]
28. Asha Natalia Maharaj, “Crossing Difference through Trinidadian Feminist Scholarship” (MSc project, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, 2018), 52–71.[↑]
29. Brinda Mehta, Diasporic Dislocations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004); Joy Mahabir and Miriam Pirbhai, Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012); Jordache A Ellapen, “When the Moon Waxes Red: Afro-Asian Feminist Intimacies and the Aesthetics of Indenture,” Small Axe 21, no. 2 (2017): 94–111; and Alison Klein, Anglophone Literature of Caribbean Indenture: The Seductive Hierarchies of Empire (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).[↑]
30. Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought.[↑]
31. Bragard, Transoceanic Dialogues, 18.[↑]
32. David Dabydeen, Coolie Odyssey (London: Hansib, 1988), 9.[↑]
33. Bragard, Transoceanic Dialogues, 17.[↑]
34. Joy Mahabir, “Naparima Feminism: Lineage of an Indo-Caribbean Feminism,” paper presented at the 40th Annual Caribbean Studies Association Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2015.[↑]
35. Brinda Mehta, “Feminism, Indo-Caribbean,” in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss020.[↑]
36. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and Lisa Outar, “Introduction: Interrogating an Indo-Caribbean Feminist Epistemology,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 1–19, 9.[↑]
37. Mariam Pirbhai, Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); and Kris Manjapra, “Plantation Dispossessions: Tracing the Global Travels of Caribbeanity,” lunchtime seminar, Institute for Gender and Development Studies, St Augustine Campus, 18 November 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iLWsnMkiMk.[↑]
38. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and Lisa Outar, “Introduction: Interrogating an Indo-Caribbean Feminist Epistemology,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 1–19, 2.[↑]
39. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, “Dougla Poetics and Politics in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Reflection and Reconceptualization,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 245–69.[↑]
40. Rosanne Kanhai, “The Masala Stone Sings: Poetry, Performance and Film by Indo-Caribbean Women,” in Matikor: The Politics of Identity for Indo-Caribbean Women, ed. Rosanne Kanhai (St Augustine: School of Continuing Studies, University of the West Indies, 1999), 209–37, 227–34.[↑]
41. Sheila Rampersad, “Douglarisation and the Politics of Indian-African Relations in Trinidad Writing” (PhD diss., Nottingham Trent University, 2000), 164.[↑]
42. As early as 1999, Rosanne Kanhai was asking, “The Indo-Caribbean woman poet is subverting ethnic and gender taboos that alienate her from her Afro-Caribbean sister with whom she shares history, landscape and gender. The question which must be asked is to what extent are her efforts being reciprocated and valued? Is there evidence that Afro-Caribbean women are receptive to the Indian elements of Caribbean culture?” See Kanhai, “The Masala Stone,” 221.[↑]
43. Lauren Pragg, “The Queer Potential: (Indo-)Caribbean Feminisms and Heteronormativity,” CRGS no. 6 (2012): 1–14, 13. See also Krystal Ghisyawan, “Queering Cartographies of Caribbean Sexuality and Citizenship: Mapping Female Same-Sex Desire, Identities and Belonging in Trinidad” (PhD diss., University of the West Indies, Trinidad, 2016).[↑]
44. Gabrielle Hosein, “Ambivalent Aspirations: Assertion and Accommodation in Intro-Trinidadian Girls’ Lives,” in Gender in the 21st Century: Caribbean Perspectives, Visions and Possibilities, ed. Barbara Bailey and Elsa Leo-Rhynie (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004), 528–63.[↑]
45. Patricia Mohammed, “Writing Gender into History: The Negotiation of Gender Relations among Indian Men and Women in Post-indenture Trinidad Society, 1917–1947,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, ed. V. Shepherd, B. Brereton, and B. Bailey (London: James Currey Publishers, 1995), 40. See also Rhoda Reddock, “Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845–1917,” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 43 (1985): WS79–S87; Prabhu Mohapatra, “‘Restoring the Family’: Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860–1920,” Studies in History 11, no. 2 (1995): 227–60; and Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indentureship (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013).[↑]
46. Lisa Outar, “Post-indentureship Cosmopolitan Feminism: Indo-Caribbean and Indo-Mauritian Women’s Writing and the Public Sphere,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 107–33.[↑]
47. Rhoda Reddock and Elma Francois, The NWCSA and the Worker’s Struggle for Change in the Caribbean (London: New Beacon, 1988), 4.[↑]
48. Kaneesha Parsard, “Improper Dwelling: Space, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernity in the British West Indies, 1838–1962” (PhD diss, Yale University, 2017).[↑]
49. Rhoda Reddock, “Diversity, Difference and Caribbean Feminism: The Challenge of Anti-racism,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 1 (2007): 10.[↑]
50. Merle Hodge and Sheila Rampersad, “Challenging Everyday Racism,” 18th anniversary lecture, Women Working for Social Progress, Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago, 2003, 1.[↑]
51. Andaiye, “The Red Thread Story: Resisting the Narrow Interests of a Broader Political
    Struggle,” in Suzanne Francis-Brown, ed., Spitting in the Wind: Lessons in Empowerment from the Caribbean (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000).[↑]
52. Trotz, “Between Despair and Hope,” 11–12.[↑]
53. Thomas Eriksen, Us and Them in Modern Societies: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Mauritius, Trinidad and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press, 1993), 123.[↑]
54. Samaroo, “Orientalising Caribbean Society,” 61–8.[↑]
55. Patricia Mohammed, Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation (New York: Palgrave, 2010).[↑]
56. Peter Hanoomansingh, “Crown Colony and the Problem of Ganja in Nineteenth Century Trinidad: A Sociology of Knowledge on Cannabis in Colonial Context” (PhD diss., University of the West Indies, St Augustine, 2011).[↑]
57. Rhoda Reddock, “‘Looking for ah Indian Man’: Popular Culture and the Dilemmas of Indo-Trinidadian Masculinity,” Caribbean Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2014): 46–63; and Dave Ramsaran and Linden Lewis, Caribbean Masala: Indian Identity in Guyana and Trinidad (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018).[↑]
58. Tonya Haynes, “Mapping the Knowledge Economy of Gender in the Caribbean, 1975–2010: Feminist Thought, Gender Consciousness and the Politics of Knowledge” (PhD diss., Dame Nita Barrow Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, 2011).[↑]
59. Lowe, “The Intimacies,” 21.[↑]
60. Ibid., 7.[↑]
61. Ibid., 8, 36.[↑]
62. Ibid., 7.[↑]
63. Ibid., 38, 2.[↑]
64. Ibid., 17.[↑]
65. Lowe, “The Intimacies,” 32.[↑]
66. Aliyah Khan, “Voyages across Indenture: From Ship Sister to Mannish Woman,” GLQ 22, no. 2 (2016): 249–80. See also Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo, “Jahaji-bhai: Notes on the Masculine Subject and Homoerotic Subtext of Indo-Caribbean Identity,” Small Axe 7 (2000): 92–9; Krystal Ghisyawan, “Social Erotics: The Fluidity of Love, Desire and Friendship for Same-Sex Loving Women in Trinidad,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 17, no. 3 (2016): 17–31; and Mariam Pirbhai, “The Jahaji-Bhain Principle: A Critical Survey of the Indo-Caribbean Women’s Novel, 1990–2009,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45, no. 1 (2010): 37–56.[↑]
67. Lowe, “The Intimacies,” 35.[↑]
68. Tonya Haynes, “Interrogating Approaches to Caribbean Feminist Thought,” Journal of Easter Caribbean Studies 42, no. 3 (December 2017): 26–58, 35–6. See Michelle Rowley, “Whose Time Is It? Gender and Humanisms in Contemporary Feminist Advocacy,” Small Axe 1, no 4 (2010): 1–15.[↑]
69. Audra Diptee, “Indian Men, Afro-Creole Women: ‘Casting’ Doubt on Interracial Sexual Relationships between the lndo and Afro Communities of the Late Nineteenth Century Caribbean,” Immigrants and Minorities 19, no. 3 (November 2000): 1–24; and Reddock, “Looking for ah Indian Man,” 46–63.[↑]
70. Bragard, Transoceanic Dialogues, 253.[↑]
71. Mehta, “Diasporic,” 63.[↑]
72. Ibid., 15.[↑]
73. Kala pani poetics is defined as “a gendered discourse of exilic beginnings that simultaneously reclaims and contests otherness by highlighting the traditional invisibility of female historical subjectivity in androcentric colonial and nationalist narratives.” See Mehta, “Diasporic,” 24.[↑]
74. Anita Baksh, “Indentureship, Land, and Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought in the Literature of Rajkumari Singh and Mahadai Das,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 73–91.[↑]
75. Khal Thorbully, Coolitude (Notre Librairie, CLEF Paris, October 1996).[↑]
76. Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2002).[↑]
77. Bragard, Transoceanic Dialogues, 38.[↑]
78. Carter and Thorabully, Coolitude, 150.[↑]
79. Outar, “Post-indentureship Cosmopolitan,” 102.[↑]
80. Outar, “Post-Indentureship Cosmopolitan,” 103.
    Coolie has re-emerged in contemporary Indo-Caribbean feminist production such as in the 2009 film Coolie Pink and Green by Patrica Mohammed and the historical narrative Coolie Woman by Gaiutra Bahadur. Mehta suggests that coolitude presents “a displaced imaginary construction of nostalgia” and “depoliticized agenda of cultural affirmation” (56). She questions the extent to which this “mythical stereotype” provides a relevant analytic device for women’s contemporary agency and increased educational and occupational success, men’s backlash to women’s assertions of power, and feminist praxes that press for a multiplicity of choices as well as against the continuity of gender-based violence.[↑]
81. Kaneesha Parsard, “Cutlass: Objects toward a Theory of Representation,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 245.[↑]
82. Parsard, “Cutlass,” 254, writes, “As an Indo-Caribbean artist, Andil Gosine inherits not singular but multiple genealogies: work in the cane fields and sex work, black cultural production and Indo-Caribbean cultural practice.” By theorizing these as “dougla” and not as Indian, she continues to position Indianness in the Caribbean in the domain of the pure, allowing it to be stereotyped as insular and homogenous rather than as impure and mixed. This an example of where “post-indentureship” is more useful.[↑]
83. For a critique of the symbolic use of “dougla” to describe Indian-African solidarities as well as transgressions of gender and racial boundaries, see Mehta, “Diasporic,” 14–15; Hosein, “Dougla Poetics”; and Kaneesha Parsard, “‘Douglarise de nation’: Politicized Intimacies and the Literary Dougla,” proceedings of the 2010–11 Penn Humanities Forum on Virtuality, University of Pennsylvania, 1 April 2011.[↑]
84. Mohammed, “The Asian Other in the Caribbean,” Small Axe 13, no. 2 (2009): 71.[↑]
85. When some ask why commemorate arrival, rather than only the end of indentureship, as important, this is why. Rajiv Mohabir, “Why I Will Never Celebrate Indian Arrival Day,” Stabroek News, 27 June 2016, http://www.stabroeknews.com/2016/features/in-the-diaspora/06/27/will-never-celebrate-indian-arrival-day/.[↑]