The system of indentureship, which transposed over half a million labourers from Asia across the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the wake of slavery’s abolition, had profound and lasting effects on the bodies of those involved. Recruitment processes, along with the harrowing conditions of transport and labour, radically reshaped the material and physical realities of indentured labourers, influencing not only their immediate bodily experiences but also the socio-cultural practices and embodied memories they would pass down to future generations. As such, indentured corporeality dwells in but also extends beyond the tangible realm of labour, touching on deeper questions of how bodies can be understood, experienced and mediated under colonial exploitation and beyond. To trace the intricate interplay between the concrete and sensory actualities of indentured bodies and the cultural processes inherent to embodiments of indenture, this special issue is dedicated to two entangled questions. We want to ask, in the words of Vanessa Agard-Jones, what happens ‘if we take seriously the body and its constituent parts as another dimension of analysis to which we might turn’, so as to attend to the ways indenture affected embodied experiences and the other way round (2013: 184). Remaining attuned to these analytical potentials, we also want to follow a question posed by one of our interlocutors in her curatorial intervention to this issue, Grace Aneiza Ali, who urges us to consider ‘what work is required of us so that as we rightly account for the violated, commodified, inventoried body we do not eclipse our longing to know the person and the self?’ (this issue: 160). In tracing the contours of a variety of indentured lives, this special issue seeks to balance an understanding of the body as both a site of historical inscription and a medium for cultural expression, remembrance and survival.
Indentureship, like slavery before it, operated as a violent and deathly system in which the human body was reduced to a dehumanized, objectified labouring figure in a ‘calculus of profit and loss’ (Islam 2023: 2). Despite the sometimes strategically placed distinctions between slavery and indenture, 1 the echoes and refractions of slavery are evident in the structures under which indentured labourers worked: poor living conditions, restricted movement and limited, contingent freedom marked their daily existence, contributing to a colonial framework that subjected the migrant body. 2 Subjection should be understood here, as Najnin Islam reminds us, ‘not only in the sense of how, as a population, the emigrants were made objects of colonial inquiry and modes of knowledge production but also in the sense of how, as individual bodies, they were treated, managed, or disciplined’ (2023: 12). In settler-colonial plantations, the bodies of indentured labourers were seen as interchangeable units of production — marked by their fungibility and disposability. As Hortense Spillers contends in the context of Atlantic slavery, the violence inflicted on Black bodies was inscribed onto the flesh itself, with the body bearing the marks of physical trauma such as fractures, punctures and brandings and, as a result, becoming barred from entering into the realm of the human. These ‘undecipherable markings’ on the captive body, she writes, ‘render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh’, they become a form of disjointed and dislocating narrative with the body ‘keeping score’ of the violence it endures, signifying how the body records and communicates the legacy of its suffering (Spillers 1987: 67). 3 In reference to Spillers, Anne Anlin Cheng has expanded our understanding of how bodies were perceived as ‘mere flesh’ in the context of Western primitivism and Enlightenment discourse, and posits that Asian femininity (or, in her words, ‘yellow femininity’) has been ‘persistently presented as something more like portable supraflesh’ (2019: 6). As part of what she defines as ‘ornamentalism’, 4 Cheng juxtaposes Asian-American female corporeality with this constructed otherness, and elucidates how Orientalized femininity ‘has always relied on the spectacularization not of naked skin but of ornament: the excessive coverings and decorations that supposedly symptomize the East’s overdeveloped and hence feminized and corrupt civilization’ (69). In these considerations from both Black and Asian Studies, different processes of bodily ‘subjection’ intersect and build on one another. As Rupa Pillai suggests in her contribution to this issue, such theorizations can also be applied to indenture in colonial Caribbean contexts, where especially female indentured labourers from Asia experienced corporeal violence not only in the flesh but also their ‘supraflesh’ (this issue: 84). Both Spillers and Cheng help us recognize the fraught and visceral materiality of the body as constituted from within the deathly histories of slavery and indenture, forever made and unmade.
Linking these violent realities, Tao Leigh Goffe has argued that such mutilation of flesh should be understood
as foundational to contending with the enslaved and indentured presences in the Americas … It is not merely labor that is being posited as a claim to the land, but broader questions of freedom, property and personhood in the context of the theft of the body and volition. (2019: 28)
Colonial violence sought to fundamentally disrupt the relationship between body and self, turning the realm of the intimate and somatic into a battleground for autonomy and survival. Therefore, reclaiming ‘freedom and personhood’ in the aftermath of such violence involves not only physical liberation but the recognition, and restoration, of the body as more than a vessel for labour. In a continuation of thinking with the Black enslaved body in Spillers and Hartman, Tiffany Lethabo King has considered the fungibility of Black bodies as a way to understand how ‘mid-17th and 18th century plantation landscapes — both actual and imagined’ were made possible in the first place (2016: 1023). In her reading, the fungible, porous, stretchy, leaky and inherently fugitive body comes to enable a kind of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist drive: she conceptualizes Black fungibility
as the capacity of Blackness for unfettered exchangeability and transformation within and beyond the form of the commodity, thereby making fungibility an open-ended analytic accounting for both Black abjection and Black pursuits of life in the midst of subjection. (1023)
In such theorizations, bodies emerge as complicated and complex sites with transformative potential, especially so in contexts where human beings were forcefully being reduced to their labouring bodies in settler-colonial extractive systems such as the plantation complex — the space in which many indentured workers found themselves. Addressing similar capacities of the body to dwell in but also move beyond subjection, Brinda Mehta has thought of bodies as ‘violent wounds of history’, which at both physical and spiritual levels may reveal the traumata ‘embedded in memory, forcible separation from family and country, human rights abuses, and patriarchal violence’ (2009: 1–2). Questions of fungibility, replaceability and exploitation necessarily cling to the body, as do notions of permeability, porousness and relationality. Our study of indenture and its embodied realities and legacies as a material and grammatical continuation of the logics of transatlantic chattel slavery can and needs to learn from these scholars of Black and Brown life and death. One of the central themes in understanding the embodied experience of indenture is the concept of what we call bodies in disagreement, which refers to the tension between external forces that seek to control and exploit the labouring body and the individual or collective agency that resists or negotiates this control. Labouring bodies, caught in systems of dependency and coercion, were subject to volatile transformations — both imposed by the harsh conditions of labour and voluntarily through self-initiated modifications. These acts of in/voluntary bodily transformation not only reflected ongoing negotiations of agency, subaltern status and trauma but could sometimes also be understood as resistant practices: self-imposed bodily changes enabled labourers to reclaim some degree of control over their physical forms, serving as acts of cultural preservation and defiance against colonial oppression. The body, though controlled, thus became a space of adaptation and resilience, where labourers asserted their identities despite the oppressive conditions they faced.
In indenture and post-indenture contexts, for example, many Hindu women were expected to be tattooed to mark their transition into wifehood, a process intricately linked to the notion of womanhood (cf. Kloß 2022). Although this may be categorized as a coercive and involuntary practice deeply embedded within patriarchal structures, in specific historical contexts these practices could also serve as a means of emancipation at least to some women who were allowed to directly serve a guru and deities (aside from their in-laws) without having to rely on a husband: as Sinah Theres Kloß has shown through oral history interviews conducted in Suriname and Guyana, ‘[t]attoos and tattooing practices provide innovative approaches to analyze embodied dependencies and (a)symmetrical power relations’, as they not only ‘symbolize and visualize but they also materialize and actively recreate social relations and power asymmetries’, especially in (post)colonial and patriarchal contexts (2022: 609). As this example demonstrates, however, it was not only the colonial context and plantation labour that made such resistance necessary. Indeed, the bodies of indentured labourers were shaped, transformed and affected by a multiplicity of relations and environments that very much included agricultural labour but cannot be reduced to it. Indentured labourers and their descendants had to work and serve in many different contexts, including the household, reproductive labour, care work and religious service (cf. Kloß 2024). 5 Therefore, when reflecting on the notion of indentured bodies in disagreement, we must not only consider the harsh conditions of physical labour on and off the plantations but also the life worlds, cultural traditions and imaginations that strove beyond the enclosures of the plantation complex.
Such lifeworlds and imaginary potential can be found in Gabrielle Jamela Hosein’s ongoing project The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Mehndi as Imaginative Visual Archive (2024), which addresses the many contexts and gendered divisions of labour that Indian women experienced during indenture. By representing ‘outside and inside forms of feminized labour’, the project emphasizes that women were assigned sexual, reproductive and domestic burdens in addition to their agricultural tasks during indenture (Hosein 2024: 88). The project applies the feminine artistic practice and method of mehndi (henna) to challenge the colonial archives’ silence on indentured women by ‘[u]sing beauty as a decolonizing and embodied method’ (63–64). Applying and visualizing mehndi designs on contemporary women’s bodies, images are produced that criticize the staging, sexualization and hypervisibilization (and thus invisibilization) of Indian women in colonial representations, addressing similar dynamics and processes of ornamentalism as discussed above. Due to mehndis’ association with ‘Indian femininities and rural women’, this kind of inscription becomes a feminist intervention by ‘making [indentured] women visible’ and ‘by countering objectification with subjectivity’ (65). These images create a visual archive which not only frames Indian women with novel designs that challenge and counter the (colonial) gaze, but also includes details of the flora imported by indentured labourers to the Caribbean, thus crafting an alternative Caribbean botanical imaginary beyond the punitive realities of sugar cane.
The female body similarly emerges as a site of disagreement and tension, of both suffering and survival, in Guadeloupian artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s series of paintings Notebook of No Return (2017–2022). Working with watercolour, pastel or oil paints as well as with textiles, mixed media and photography, Sinnapah Mary’s work, as Andile Gosine notes, offers ‘a contention with the consequences of colonisation in the Americas, and include[s] provocations about gendered violence, sexuality and the disciplining of desire, motherhood, labour, human–animal relations, anti-Black racism, and tribalism/nationalism’ (2022: 49). In many of Notebook of No Return’s artworks the female figures are portrayed with sharp spikes protruding from their skin, signifying the mutating and migrating body as a threshold between past and present. These spikes, which Sinnapah Mary identifies in an interview as ‘sea urchin thorns’ (2021), evoke the oceanic passage of the kala pani, the deep and dark waters across which Indian indentured labourers had to travel to reach their destinations: the figures, positioned against a dark green tropical and leafy background which suggest a Caribbean plantation environment, embody the ongoing effects of displacement as the spikes emerge from their skin. By portraying the female body as porous — absorbing the traumas of indenture but also evolving and resisting — Sinnapah Mary negotiates the layered embodiments of indenture through a lens that acknowledges both imposed constraints and internal resilience. Like the sea urchin women, her works often depict other furry, amphibious or crustacean figures that cross human–animal boundaries: as Gosine notes of another painting in Notebook of No Return, ‘through her representation as part conch, part crab, part human, she also gestures toward creolization and its perpetual recreation of culture through the narrative of Hindu reincarnation’, thus acknowledging the specificity of her Indo-Caribbean heritage (2019: 19). In this way, the body becomes a palimpsest of historical experiences, continually evolving in response to the legacies of colonial violence. We find here a visual and symbolic archive of embodied histories, where the porous, layered and gendered experiences of indenture are continually negotiated and reimagined in what Amar Wahab has called ‘vibrant modes of embodiment, experience and relationality’ (2022: 2).
Art like Sinnapah Mary’s or Hosein’s can serve as an example of how the embodied experiences of indentured labourers extend beyond the physical and become memorialized in representations that continue to shape cultural memory. Literature, art and music do the necessary work to interrogate the colonial legacies inscribed on the bodies of ancestors, offering new ways of imagining, visualizing, sensing or vocalizing embodied histories. As such, histories of indentureship encompass not only bodies themselves, but also the historical narratives of bodies and embodiment; or, in other words, the materialities of the indentured body are echoed, adapted or subverted by representations of the indentured labourer’s body in the visual and textual traces left behind by embodied experiences. (Historical) bodies are constructed, expressed and transmitted in art, literature, film, journalistic media and other kinds of representation.
As these three brief examples from the realms of anthropology and art have shown, the study of bodies and embodiment within the context of indentureship requires an interdisciplinary approach that draws on history, philosophy, social sciences, and artistic and creative practices. Such scholarship may challenge traditional mind-body dualisms and emphasize the processual and performative aspects of embodied experiences. By adopting an interdisciplinary framework that aims at disrupting and enriching more traditional academic pursuits by including artistic and creative reflections and interventions, this special issue aims to offer insights into how indentured bodies were shaped by systems of dependency, control and exploitation, but also how they served as expressions and tools of agency, sensation, affect and lived reality across generations and geographies. As our contributors show, the embodied presences, afterlives and futures of indenture continue to channel and challenge the ongoing impact of indenture’s historical experiences.
In a historical study of medical and public health discourse during indenture, Morag Wright intervenes in the colonial archive to discuss how both Indian and British agents construed indentured women as ‘embodiments of problems’, not as people. Although physical violence — including gender-based violence — was part of the indentured experience, colonizers did not view such violence and challenges as emanating from the unfair and brutal system itself, but as caused by what they considered to be the moral and bodily ‘deficiencies’ of the indentured labourers. In this context, indentured women ‘emerged as the true marker’ of the ‘penetrative power of the colonial state finally asserting patriarchal authority’, with the objective of legitimizing indentureship (in contrast to slavery) as a civilizational project (44). According to Wright, three spaces were key in mapping these deficiencies onto indentured women’s bodies: the depot, the ship and the plantation. These spaces were recast as sites of colonial progress in which indentured labourers and especially labouring women could be transformed. Imperial and colonial governments recreated and upheld the gendered tropes and key figures of the promiscuous wife, the diseased (female) body and the unfit womb. These imaginaries supported the policing, criminalization and disciplining of indentured women’s bodies by colonial officials. Moreover, as Wright shows, these tropes were extended beyond their bodies, and imagined to negatively affect their reproductive potential and capacity to birth and raise children. Female indentured labourers were frequently cast as ‘“negligent” and racially inferior mothers’ to be blamed for the ‘incomprehensible’ death of babies and children, rather than acknowledging that pregnancy and motherhood were dangerous experiences during indenture (41). Wright suggests that, ultimately, experiences of indenture were not simply gendered, but that gender was indeed central to the maintenance and legitimization of the system itself.
Continuing our thinking around how structural violence has been experienced with and through female bodies in indenture and post-indenture contexts, the next contribution by Christopher Ballengee focuses on a character of Indian Caribbean oral traditions and folklore, the churile. A churile is the spirit of a woman who died during pregnancy or childbirth. Differentiating Caribbean churiles from their South Asian counterpart, the churel, Ballengee explains that while churiles in the Caribbean are thought to endanger especially pregnant women and the unborn, they also haunt men, particularly male family members or former lovers who have wronged the churile when she was still alive. Churiles are transgressive as they ‘cross ethereal boundaries to materialize as an embodiment of rage and revenge’, Ballengee suggests, challenging restrictive gender expectations and norms which Indian Caribbean women and girls often experience (51). In the context of patriarchal power relations and female marginalization, the churile serves as a ‘robust metaphor’ for transgressive femininity. Ballengee further examines churiles’ continuing relevance and transformative potential within post-indenture artistic representations and narratives, focusing on the work of four contemporary artists: Vanessa Godden’s video performance Churile (2016), Sabiyha Rasheed’s song ‘Choorile’ (2020), Kevin Jared Hosein’s short fiction ‘Maiden of the Mud’ (2016) and Ryan Persadie’s photography series Coolieween. In different ways, these representations of the churile indicate that her discursive power lies in her ‘irrevocably linked victimization, vengeance, and subversion’ as well as in her alterity that, according to Ballengee, is the result of being ‘at once an aberration of proper femininity and a spectral being able to transcend both supernatural boundaries and the confines of respectability’ (73–74). Ballengee concludes that the artistic works make use of the churile as a means of ‘confronting historical and personal wounds’ and of ‘expressing resilience and reclaiming agency, underscoring the enduring relevance of corporeal and embodied experiences in shaping and understanding complex identities’ (52).
Indentured labourers’ bodies are visible not only in contemporary artistic practices, but have been used to create and recreate the notion of the (distant) other in colonial representations, reconstructing an alleged European superiority and state of civilization. In her critical-pedagogical contribution to this special issue, Rupa Pillai reflects on the staging and framing of South Asian indentured bodies in colonial representations, photographed in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century and distributed via picture postcards. These postcards, which gained popularity in Europe during this period, reveal how the visual served to reproduce and reinforce imperial ideologies and scopic regimes of race, gender, progress and modernity. Thinking through Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism, Pillai draws attention to the fact that the images relied heavily upon depicting specific types of objects such as jewellery and clothing, which sought to construct and delineate ‘ethnic types’ of people, denying them individuality. Ornamentalism as a technology, Pillai argues, constructs ‘the Black female body and the Asian female body as different, but never as fully human by Enlightenment standards’, communicating an otherness in relation to African people in the Caribbean (84). Pillai reflects on the inclusion of these colonial picture postcards in her seminar on ‘The Asian Caribbean’, which teaches students not only about the history of indenture in the Caribbean but also to critically assess the visual framing and ‘unique visual grammar’ of these cards (find the syllabus of her course in the appendix to her article). Visiting the collection of postcards, students are allowed to ‘hold a piece of history and to gaze upon individuals who were indentured or whose ancestors were’, allowing for some space to also imagine how the people depicted on the postcard may have returned the gaze of the photographer (89). Pillai addresses the sensual quality of accessing and interacting with the physical postcards, a process that some students experience as ‘visceral and transformative’ (89).
Such tactile engagement with material objects is also addressed in Baishali Ghosh’s reflective article for this special issue. In the context of contemporary Mauritian art, Ghosh examines how artists engage visually, textually and sensorially with specific materials relating to indentured labour histories. Arguing that such interrogation provides insight into indentured corporeality and the ways these practices connect them with their indentured ancestors’ narratives (or how they may even counter these narratives), Ghosh elaborates how some Mauritian artists appropriate materials including colonial records and familial objects to ‘deliberately process embodied indentured labour histories’ (104). By focusing on work by artists and sculptors Dharmadeo Nirmal Hurry and Mala Chummun Ramyead, Ghosh reflects on how the colonial gaze may be countered: one instance of such a ‘counter-stance’ can be found in the two artists’ collaborative project of a mural installed in the Renganaden Seeneevassen Building in Port Louis, which houses the Mauritian Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage. Ghosh suggests that the mural can be understood as a ‘visual critique of the stigmatisation of the indentured plantation workers’ bodies’ (106) by giving voice to subaltern indentured ancestors and by ‘processing through and beyond historical visual regimes’, for example by prioritizing their own intimate and embodied story of indentured labour and by putting forth the ‘sovereignty of an independent Mauritius’ (124). Through her close reading of the mural and other artworks, Ghosh emphasizes that people experience a plethora of different bodily connections and sensory engagements, both by creating and by perceiving art. The installations and art projects discussed throughout this piece thus provide a means to create and recreate bodily connections with an ‘indentured ancestral past’ by creating an embodied knowledge during the process of production. Such knowledge is deeply entwined with indentured family histories which otherwise, as Ghosh warns, too often remain overshadowed by the colonial record.
In her contribution, Sandrine Soukaï similarly illuminates the ways memories, knowledges and affects travel across generations by way of corporeal performance: her object of analysis provides a truly interdisciplinary viewpoint as she combines her readings of the tryptic novel Marianne: fée de notre République du sang-mêlée (2018) by Indo-Guadeloupean writer Ernest Moutoussamy with fieldwork and interviews. In Moutoussamy’s novel, racial prejudices in Guadeloupe and concepts of métissage as well as cultural creolization are foregrounded, with the writer vowing for inclusion of the Indian community in national discourse and memory-making, Soukaï suggests. The novel highlights processes of cultural creolization by including performances of dance and songs, particularly of Tamil nadrons. Nadrons, although deeply rooted in ancestral Hindu rites and ethos, can be regarded as creolized and as contributing to unsettling the plantation’s socio-cultural dynamics by conferring agency to their practitioners and freeing their audience, Africans and Indians alike, from their subservience to sugarcane exploitation. By way of careful literary analyses, Soukaï shows how ‘descendants of Indian indentured labourers reconstruct and transmit the heritage and memory of indenture in the archipelago of Guadeloupe through embodied performances of dance, music, songs and theatre’ (133). In the latter part of her article, Soukaï links her literary analyses to contemporary commemorations of (post-)indenture and celebrations of Indian culture in Guadeloupe by drawing on interviews she carried out with Fred Négrit, Apassamy Murugaiyan and the presidents of two Guadeloupean Indian dance associations, Om Shanti and Shakti. This allows her to draw out ‘the complexity and paradoxes of performances of Indian song and dance in the French Antilles’ and to pinpoint ‘how they oscillate between a return to an ancestral Hindu India, a recognition of the creolization at work in French Caribbean Indianness and, more recently, an opening to the global Indian culture popularized by Bollywood’ (135) in a multitude of embodied ways.
Our contributions are in conversation with the curator and scholar Grace Aneiza Ali, who has gathered a group of artists and their artworks in response to the scholarly and pedagogical interventions offered by the special issue’s authors in order to illuminate ‘the beauty, poetry, power, and vulnerability of the body even whilst subjected to the indignities of indenture’ (160). Morag Wright’s article on ‘Promiscuous, diseased and unfit: Discourses and embodiments of Indian indentured women across the British Empire, c. 1840–1920’, which rattles the cage of the colonial archive, is put in dialogue with Trinidadian artist Tessa Alexander who, in her alternative Caribbean canon, gives voice to the silenced histories of her foremothers; as Alexander connects the experiences of women affected by indenture and slavery through the shared experience of motherhood in her collage Remembering Our Foremothers, we can draw lines to Wrights’ focus on mothering and the special issue’s desideratum to think collectively of Black enslaved and Brown indentured bodies. South African transdisciplinary artist Alka Dass’s Family Heirloom is paired with Christopher L. Ballengee’s article on ‘Ghostly (re)visions: Embodying the Indian Caribbean churile’. In her cyanotype and thread drawing artworks, Dass re-fashions historical photographs, physically weaving together the often-overlooked traumatic narratives of Indian indentured labourers brought to South Africa whose ghosts, just like the churile, haunt our present. Dass’s engagement with found materials, intimate family archives, and modes of artistic creation deeply rooted in feminist craft also speak to the multi-generational transmissions of knowledge and memory at work in the artworks by contemporary Mauritian artists centred by Baishali Ghosh in ‘Indentured impressions: The embodied materiality of artistic practices in Mauritius’. The postcards discussed by Rupa Pillai in ‘Teaching how to critically read Indo-Caribbean bodies in nineteenth-century postcards’ find their counterpart in Fijian-Australian artist Shivanjani Lal’s exhibition, Yaad Karo, which features hand-stitched maps and photographs from Lal’s grandmother’s archive, linking both personal and collective history and posing a poignant response to the question of how to remember agency beyond the logics of colonialism. The focus on how identity and memory can be carried across generations through embodied musical and linguistic rituals which are at the forefront of Sandrine Soukaï’s ‘Embodied performances of (post-) indenture: Creolization of Indian dance, music and nadrons in Guadeloupe’ is taken up by the photographic triptych and sound installation Relative by South African artist Sancintya Mohini Simpson, which overlays handwritten Hindi vowels, consonants and conjuncts onto photographs of the artist’s siblings, whose bodies thus hold and transmit the memories and languages of their ancestors. Finally, Guyanese-born printmaker and weaver Nicholas D’Ornellas’s screen-printed textile piece, Adrian–w/void, which insistently captures a sense of grief emerging out of the lacunae of indenture, speaks to the special issue’s overarching desire to understand the body as both a site of historical trauma and a mediator of memory, community and survival. By generating such intimate and generative dialogue across art and scholarship, Grace Aneiza Ali reminds us of the ‘dual work we are called to do’ — to confront the unspeakable, impossible violence inherent to histories and stories of indenture, while also holding on to, and cherishing, the people who have been lost, to ‘return to the daughter, son, mother, father, brother, sister, friend that has been lost. In other words, return to the loved, desired, seen self’ (160).
The varied embodied experiences of indenture brought together in these contributions and artworks reveal the intricate ways in which bodies were both controlled and resisted control within and beyond colonial systems. Bodies, shaped by labour and loss, continue to bear the marks of these experiences in both physical and symbolic forms, and hence become a ‘repository of individual experience and collective memory’ (Beushausen 2019: 98). Through self-imposed transformations, artistic representations and cultural practices, the labouring body emerges as a contested space where ‘the unwieldy, still-unfolding, and likely irresolvable legacies of indentureship’ are continually negotiated (Gosine and Mohabir 2022: 1). By examining these embodied legacies through an interdisciplinary lens, we gain a more nuanced understanding of how indentured bodies have been intertwined with systems of social difference, inequality, oppression and control. The body, far from being a passive recipient of colonial violence, is revealed as a dynamic and adaptive entity — capable of resisting, remembering and reimagining its place within history.