Cover art: Danny Amos Flynn, Burning Book Press
Print Name: Beekano (326.164) Size: 80cm x 55cm
Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2023
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Open Access
The Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies is published Open Access. This means you’ll be able to read all our articles for free on JSTOR.
The journal is a bi-annual peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Pluto Journals in partnership with the Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and Its Legacies (ameenagafoorinstitute.org). The journal is 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. No such journal currently exists anywhere in the world, despite the critical importance of the system of indenture to world history.
Through publishing Open Access, important research will reach a wider audience including those who traditionally can’t access academic content through a paywall. This means the work of our authors will be accessed by students and researchers from institutions who don’t have access to large library budgets. It will also reach people outside of academia and will be more readily available to members of the public, civil society organisations, and policy makers.
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Contents
List of contributors vi
Introduction
1. Crispin Bates, Marina Carter and Khal Torabully 1
Coolitude, the concept, its resonances and afterlives
Resonances
2. Nalini Mohabir 14
In the registers of Coolitude: Speaking through speechlessness, interpreting inscriptions
3. Michelle Angela Mohabeer 37
Re-framing and fracturing Caribbean-Canadian diasporas through a self-reflexive lens: Identity and aesthetics in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass and Blu in You
4. Sarojini Lewis 59
Photography and diaspora: Interpretations and explorations in Indian migration studies
5. Nancy Naomi Carlson 87
Translating the untranslatable: Khal Torabully’s poetics of Coolitude
6. Christian Cuniah 95
A linguistic and thematic analysis of Khal Torabully’s Coolitude
Afterlives
7. Rajiv Mohabir 119
My Qoolitude is of whale bone
8. Andil Gosine 127
Man me
9. Matthew Ryan Smith 133
Andil Gosine’s Cane Portraiture and the aesthetics of indenture
10. Reshaad Durgahee 146
Coolitude: A geographer’s perspective
11. Amitav Ghosh 150
Reflections while in Mauritius
12. Suzanne Persard 154
From Calcutta to Kingston: A cartography of Coolitude
13. Danny Amos Flynn 157
Artistic meanderings through Coolitude
Submission guidelines 165
Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
Editors
Amar Wahab, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, David Dabydeen
Editorial assistants
Eve Kanram, Lynne Macedo
Ameena Gafoor Institute Academic Advisory Board
Grace Aneiza Ali (New York University)
Gaiutra Bahadur (Rutgers University)
Eddie Bruce-Jones (Birbeck College, London University)
Ajay Chhabra (Actor and Artistic Director)
Richard Fung (OCAD University)
Rajrani Gobin (Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius)
Andil Gosine (York University Toronto)
Betty Govinden (Alumna, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal)
Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington)
Aliyah Khan (University of Michigan)
Brij Lal (Professor Emeritus, The Australian National University)
Shivanjani Lal (Artist)
Anne-Marie Lee-Loy (Ryerson University)
Kathleen López (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)
Paloma Martin (University of Guyana)
Heidi Safia Mirza (Professor Emeritus UCL, Institute of Education, University of London)
Judith Misrahi-Barak (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
Michael Mitchell (University of Warwick and University of Paderborn)
Nalini Mohabir (Concordia University)
Patricia Mohammed (Professor Emerita University of the West Indies)
Satendra Nandan (Professor Emeritus University of Canberra)
Ken Ramchand (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies)
Tina K. Ramnarine (Royal Holloway University of London)
Lomarsh Roopnarine (Jackson State University)
Brinsley Samaroo (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies)
Verene Shepherd (Professor Emerita, University of the West Indies)
Nur Sobers-Khan (British Library)
Janet Steel (Commonwealth International)
Stephanos Stephanides (Professor Emeritus, University of Cyprus)
Alissa Trotz (University of Toronto)
Mark Tumbridge (University of Guyana)
Athol Williams (University of Cape Town)
Lisa Yun (State University of New York)
Contributors
Crispin Bates is a Research Professor in South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Sunway University in Malaysia and Professor of modern and contemporary South Asian history at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University, where he was also held a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College. He has held Visiting Professorships in Paris, Calcutta, Beijing, Kyoto, Tokyo and the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan. He has authored, co-authored and edited a total of 17 books including a history of South Asia from 1600 to the present entitled Subalterns and Raj (2010), and a series of seven volumes concerning the history of the Indian Uprising of 1857, entitled Mutiny at the Margins (2013–17). In 2015–18 he led ‘Becoming Coolies’, an AHRC-funded project on the origins of Indian overseas labour migration in the Indian Ocean, for which he conducted research in archives throughout the Indian Ocean region.
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a Professor of graduate counselling at Walden University. Her translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull Books, 2021) was the winner of the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Translation Prize. She has authored twelve titles (eight translated), including An Infusion of Violets (Seagull Books, 2019), her second full-length poetry collection, which was named ‘New & Noteworthy’ by The New York Times. A recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Albertine Translation Fund grant, and decorated by the French government with the French Academic Palms, her work has previously appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Writer’s Chronicle, and the Poetry Society of America’s Visiting Poet series. She serves as the Translations Editor for On the Seawall.
Marina Carter is an independent researcher and also works as a cultural heritage and history consultant. She has a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford. Her principal research interests are labour migration, the Indian Ocean, Mascarene Islands, Mauritius and the South Asian diaspora. She has published several monographs and contributed to a number of collectively authored works in these fields.
Christian Cuniah is an independent researcher, educated in Mauritius and at the University of London. He works in the UK as an artist, author, translator and archival researcher. Most recently he has worked with historians and artists in the transcription of audio recordings of traditional sega lyrics of the Chagossian community in the creole language, the translation of these materials into French and English, and their presentation and dissemination online.
Reshaad Durgahee is a geographer whose research has focused on the historical geography of Indian indenture. His research centres on the Indo-Pacific arena in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, placing emphasis on the spatial experience of Indian indentured labourers and on the connectivity and labour movements between sugar colonies of empire. His bookThe Indentured Archipelago: Experiences of Indian Labour in Mauritius and Fiji, 1871–1916 was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. Reshaad is a recipient of the Royal Geographical Society Dudley Stamp Memorial Award for research leading to the advancement of geography and international cooperation, and the 2016 Doctoral Paper Prize from the British Association for South Asian Studies. He holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham and currently works in the UK Civil Service. He can be contacted at <reshaad6@123456hotmail.com>.
Danny Amos Flynn publishes limited edition photography under the name Burning Book Press and has taught Fine Art and Design in UK universities for over fifteen years. He has published academic papers on letterpress and visual dialogues within street art. He has won awards for sculpting, printing and bookwork. He also writes songs, poetry and plays, and collaborates on fine bound artists’ bookworks with Japanese artist and bookbinder Eri Funazaki, which are in public and private collections nationally and internationally, including The Royal Academy Summer Show, The British Library, The Saatchi Gallery, and part of The Crafts Council primary collection. His screen-prints of Indian migrants undertaken with historian Marina Carter featuring photographs and historical texts have been exhibited in India, Mauritius and at several galleries and other venues in the UK.
Amitav Ghosh is a multiple award-winning Indian writer and social anthropologist who worked in journalism and academia before achieving global recognition for his fictional works. His first novel The Circle of Reason was published in 1986, which he followed with later fictional works including The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace. Between 2004 and 2015, he worked on the Ibis trilogy, which revolves around the build-up and implications of the First Opium War across China and the Indian Ocean region. His non-fiction work includes In an Antique Land and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours, by the President of India and in 2018 he won the 54th Jnanpith award, India’s highest literary honour.
Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University in Toronto. His research, writing and artistic practices explore imbrications of ecology, desire and power. He is the author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2021) and curator of Wendy Nanan at the Art Museum of the Americas (2020–21), everything slackens in a wreck at the Ford Foundation Gallery (2022), and Unfinished Work at the Leslie Lohman Museum (2024).
Sarojini Lewis works as an independent researcher and artist and a Visual Studies PhD candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she has examined the connection between contemporary art and historic photographs of indentured labourers. Her artistic background is in Fine Art (MFA Fine Art, Edinburgh University) with a specialization in archival photography, video art and book arts. She participated in several projects at the Tropenmuseum (2022) and Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam (2020, 2022), was a Research Fellow at Aarhus University (2019), the Goethe Institut (2018–2015), and GB Pant Social Science Institut in Allahabad (2018), and participated in the Kochi Biennale (2016) and Casa Tres Patios (2014). She can be contacted at <www.sarojinilewis.com>.
Michelle Angela Mohabeer is a (Guyana-born) Caribbean-Canadian award-winning filmmaker, scholar and teacher. She is a lecturer at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her body of films has been exhibited at over 300 festivals, conferences and galleries globally, written about in scholarly books and journals, and purchased by over 60 leading university libraries across North America. Her latest feature essay documentary, Queer Coolie-tudes (2019) has won numerous awards and is still screening at festivals and conferences.
Nalini Mohabir is an associate professor in the department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University, Montreal. She teaches in the fields of feminist and postcolonial migration geographies, and her research is primarily in the field of Caribbean studies, with a focus on indentureship. She has published articles in various publications including Small Axe, Habitat International, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, and Interventions. She has been working with long-time collaborator Ronald Cummings (McMaster University) on a series of publications about the Sir George Williams ‘Affair’, including the edited collection The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation (Montreal: Black Rose, 2021), a special issue of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (March 2022) on the legacies of the 1969 Sir George Williams student protests, and an upcoming anthology (with Ronald Cummings and Christiana Abraham) on the visualities of the protest.
Rajiv Mohabir is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Emerson College. He is the author of three collections of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books, 2021) which was awarded the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Books Award. He also authored the memoir Antiman (Restless Books, 2021) winner of the Forward Indies Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award. As a translator, his version of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya, 2019) won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2020. His fourth poetry collection, Whale Aria, is forthcoming in September 2023 from Four Way Books.
Suzanne Persard is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Florida. As an interdisciplinary scholar, writer and curator, her research engages with historical archives, post-indenture visual culture, and theories of gender and sexuality within Indian indentureship. Her scholarship appears in the Feminist Review, Journal of West Indian Literature, Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies. Her non-fiction and poetry appear in various international publications, and she is the creator of three public humanities projects archiving ephemera, oral histories and digital narratives from descendants of the indentured Indian diaspora.
Matthew Ryan Smith is the Curator and Head of Collections of Glenhyrst Art Gallery, the literary editor of First American Art Magazine, and an editorial board member for the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies at Kiel University, Germany. He obtained his PhD in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario. His academic research, ranging from the aesthetics of indentureship to autobiographical culture, has appeared in several academic journals and books including Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Journal of Curatorial Studies, The Senses and Society, Canadian Journal of Native Studies and Canadian Film Journal. Matthew has also published critical essays, exhibition reviews and interviews in publications including Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C Magazine and Blackflash. Matthew served as editor of Eli Baxter’s memoir Aki-wayn-zih: A Person as Worthy as the Earth, detailing the author’s Anishinaabay culture and residential school experience, which was awarded the Governor General’s Award for English-language nonfiction in 2022.
Khal Torabully was born in Mauritius in 1956. He left for France to undertake higher studies. He completed his PHD (Semiology of Poetics) in Lyon in 1994. He has published some 20 books, among which the pioneering Cale d’Etoiles: Coolitude, the first world literature text of the coolie voyage exploring its central oceanic dimension and Chair Corail, Fragments Coolies. For some 25 years, he has expanded knowledge about indenture, both poetically and theoretically through the paradigm of Coolitude, an aesthetics of diversity now studied in many countries. Torabully’s work has been translated widely, won prizes and attracted critical attention in many countries, including Canada, the USA, the UK, the Caribbean, India and Germany.