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Postdoctoral Lecturer, Department of English, UT Austin
RESEARCH
My first book project, Oceanic Entanglements: Race, Gender, and Fantasies of Freedom in Narratives of Indian Indentured Labor, examines contemporary Caribbean and Indian novels’ literary representations of Indian indentured labor—a British imperial labor regime designed to replace slavery and which often coercively supplied Indian laborers to the Caribbean amongst other island colonies. I chart how reimaginings of indentured labor revise our understandings of indenture and slavery as separate and disconnected systems. Their entanglements in the post-abolition moment, I suggest, trouble conceptions of “freedom” used in abolitionist discourse and expose fault lines in nineteenth-century ideologies of liberalism as well as the colonial “civilizing mission.” The fields of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean studies tend to focus on slavery and indenture respectively with little attention to the interdependencies between these labor apparatuses; such divisions in scholarship largely emerge out of the sustenance of area studies in the US academy, which encourage the isolated and partitioned study of ethnic groups and replicate colonial logics of deliberately organizing archives to obfuscate connections between different imperial regimes and between the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds. I argue that contemporary literary representations of indentured life work against the potential epistemological violences of such separate silos of knowledge production and help to reactivate the possibilities of interracial solidarities in the Caribbean. In rerouting a universal history of racial capitalism through slavery and indenture, my project joins emergent scholarship on the “plantationocene,” which recognizes the role of settler colonial violence, plantation economies, and multiple coercive labor regimes in the rise of the anthropocene.
Through close-reading novels alongside British archival materials that record conditions of indenture and chronicle the 1830s labor debates around abolition and the introduction of a new labor force, I locate contradictions in ideas of liberalism—which simultaneously comes to be associated with expanded free trade in the nineteenth century and false freedoms forced onto the racialized indentured laborer. In excavating archival materials that argue in favor of an Indian labor force in the Caribbean under the logics that the Indian is already “hardworking” but also will be “civilized” in the West Indies, I also trace how that this unique movement of labor—from one global south site to another—destabilizes familiar understandings of Orientalism and reflects a deep ambivalence in colonial ideology: for in order for the Indian to undergo the civilizing mission in a Caribbean colony, colonial authorities must admit that the civilizing mission had to have failed in another colony, India.
As a part of my larger project of demystifying often obscured entanglements that connect the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, I also explore the relationships between the Indian labor diaspora in the British Caribbean and colonial India by considering the interdependencies between the early twentieth century Indian nationalist movement and anti-indenture campaigns, which play out in configurations of the Indian indentured woman. While diaspora studies is largely invested in the lasting impacts of a homeland on its diaspora, the Indian history of resistance to indenture suggests that such influences and connections are instead reciprocal. I argue that colonial, Indian nationalist, and contemporary literary representations of the indentured woman demonstrate that while the Indian anti-colonial movement helped further indenture abolition efforts, such efforts in the Caribbean were also central to Indian national identity and for nationalist ideology.
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