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Cutlass: Objects Toward a Theory of Representation
Abstract
This chapter traces the cutlass, a plantation tool that Indian men sometimes used to harm their partners, across contemporary Indo-Caribbean feminist writing and arts. It thinks across black feminist and Indo-Caribbean feminist thought in order to offer a materialist history of “wife murders” in the post-emancipation period. In Coolie Woman, Gaiutra Bahadur reproduces the spectacular violence in the colonial archive by recounting “wife murders” in stark detail. In contrast, Andil Gosine’s metal brooch “Cutlass” revises the colonial narrative of “wife murders” as Gosine invokes his grandmother’s domestic work with the cutlass. Through these readings, this chapter poses a dougla feminist theory of representation, which understands Indian women’s desires and sex work in the context of African wage labor and Indian indentureship.
... (Shah 2005: 70) Andil Gosine has produced significant work on the cutlass as an object, writing, He reminds us that 'The cutlass is mired in blood' and it references 'misery, but it also aspires to match the elegance of the ways my grandmother Ramadai wielded hers' (ibid.: 3). Yet, cane cutting also connected women beyond the fields (Parsard 2016). For her championing of their cause as a Marxist and Muslim woman in the first decades of the twentieth century, Shah created a new world where women always brought Nani 'something from their kitchen gardens, so our house was always packed with pumpkins and mangoes and cassava ' (2005: 44). ...
This article presents artwork from the project, ‘The botanical afterlife of indenture: Mehndi as imaginative visual archive’, which memorializes the legacy of Indian indenture by recording the flora brought by indentured workers as they exist in the midst of contemporary social life and in the region’s landscape. In the project, mehndi works as a decolonializing and embodied, post-indenture feminist aesthetic praxis and a method for contributing to a new world visual archive. Indo-Caribbean imaginative visual archives can challenge gendered and racialized exclusions in colonial and creole visual representations, and can instead image indenture and post-indenture histories in ways that are accessible, inclusive, consensual and popular; connecting all in the Caribbean and its diaspora to the afterlife of indenture. The article reflects on the images produced, how they echo biographical and fictional writing, and how they critically engage with the orientalising lens of colonial-era photography. In presenting these original designs of a botanical imaginary, the project aims to transform mehndi in post-indenture sites so that art forms which are both traditional and contemporary can be seen as post-plantation techniques for making memory-work an act of beauty. Inspired by his scholarship and encouragement, the project is dedicated to beloved Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo.
... Gender studies and feminist empowerment movements were indeed central well before migration: they account for an important share of the literature on Indo-Caribbean communities (Hosein, 2012;Kanhai 1999Kanhai & 2011Khan, 2016). Socially, the poor ratio of women among indentured labourers resulted in new gender roles with cases of polyandry and major involvement of women in strikes, for instance (Parsard, 2016). As for religion, Sita has been a rallying but ambivalent character among Hindu diasporic communities. ...
This chapter examines how Michelle Mohabeer’s documentary film Queer Coolie-tudes (2019) and Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) act as queer reimaginings of the archive that disrupt culturalist constructions of Indo-Caribbean identity, dismantling the links between heterosexualised narratives of Indo-Caribbean indenture and oppositional Indo-Afro politics. Simultaneously, the chapter critiques heteronormative and woman-centric paradigms within Indo-Caribbean feminist scholarship on indenture. Mohabeer and Mootoo refigure the tropes of the violent Indian patriarch, heteronormative diaspora, and the teleology of Indianness as regressive, backwards, and homophobic. Thus, they imagine Indo-Caribbeanness outside the bounds of cultural and ethnic identity, refusing to view “Afro” and “Asian” as irreducibly separate and opposed. By breaking down culturalist formations of identity through queerness, these works reframe Afro- and Indo-Caribbean histories and communities as intimately interconnected.
Komfa is a Guyanese practice involving elaborate rituals dedicated to “the Seven Nations” of ancestor-spirits who re/present colonial British demography. Komfa’s Spanish nation is most frequently understood as presenting queer subjecthood through overtly sexualized and (trans)gendered performances. To Guyanese, “Spanish” generally refers to Venezuelans. Pre- and post-emancipation histories of mobility within the borderlands of Guyana and Venezuela illuminate how Komfa practitioners embrace ambiguities of “noncompliant” genders and sexualities. Devotees who embody Spanish spirits tend to be transgender, identify as gay or antiman , and/or share intimate relations with partners of the same sex. Many also engage in sex labor. Such orientations, identifications, and occupations performed during trance possession and “secular” contexts of daily life may be re-valued through Komfa, providing non-conforming Guyanese with a refuge from societal discriminations through which they transform conceptions of selfhood by embracing the agencies and lived experiences of “non-Guyanese” within a symbolic economy of erotic alterity.
In this article, I describe Andil Gosine’s artistic archives as ‘watery’ to chart a feminist genealogy of archival practice. I argue that routing interdisciplinary studies of Atlantic and Indian Oceans through the Caribbean provides a transoceanic method to analyse race and sexuality within Indo-Caribbean connections. To that end, I examine the representation of water and waterways in Gosine’s Our Holy Waters, and Mine (2014) to illustrate how relations with water provides a heuristic and representative practice for critiquing afterlives of colonialism and indentureship. I bring together Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology, scholarship on feminist and queer archival practices and ocean studies to read Gosine’s experimental artistic practice as offering ways to rethink oceanic materiality in the context of historical and archival knowledge production.
What is possible when empire is uncertain about its authority? This essay looks to West Indian Emancipation, a moment of crisis, for a method. As emancipated peoples of African descent became wage laborers, and set the terms of their work, the sugar industry required free—unbonded—labor. With the arrival of Asian indentured labor, however, it became more difficult to manage the imbrications of race, gender, sexuality, capital, and labor. Proposition takes advantage of this epistemological and enunciative quandary. By dwelling in cultural and historical archives, proposition offers new possibilities about emancipation’s present and the futures that might follow. This essay considers this matrix through an 1871 correspondence between the secretary of state for the colonies and Governor Rawson William Rawson of Barbados and the Windward Islands. The question at hand: “the increasing disposition of Creole women to form connection with Chinese and Indian immigrants.” This question does not compel a fantasy of interracial intimacy. Rather, it suggests that good work and the racial family were crucial to the life of the plantation—and that unsanctioned “connection” might hasten its demise. Proposition is a critical mode of speaking back, a mode of testing alternative timelines and scenes of freedom.
This essay examines the trope of jahaji-bahin consciousness through a de-colonial feminist lens to highlight the ways in which Indo-Caribbean women claim a sense of identity and belonging in the Caribbean while resisting colonial and patriarchal stereotypes, social marginality, and gender anomie in circumscribed spaces. What is the scope of jahaji-bahin consciousness as a form of de-colonial feminist thought? How does it engender localised forms of resistance to colonial and patriarchal forms of oppression within the Anglophone Caribbean? How are the silenced voices of Indo-Caribbean women given form and texture within these self-generating paradigms of feminism to create an important global south feminist positionality? These questions will be explored in the Anglophone writings of Indo-Caribbean authors Ramabai Espinet and Gaiutra Bahadur.
Many Caribbeanists have attributed the limited social and sexual intercourse between Indian men and Afro-creole women in areas of high Indian migration (such as Trinidad and British Guiana) during the nineteenth century to the prejudicial nature of the Hindu caste system. This article challenges this notion. It argues that there were structural factors, such as residential separation for example, which limited their social interaction. Moreover, it will demonstrate that scholars have overlooked the perspective of Afro-creole women and have presented them as sexual objects to be had at the whims of Indian men when, in fact, these women had a decisive role in negotiating sexual relationships - interracial or not - and this was influenced by the earning power of potential spouses, existing stereotypes and cultural differences.
With the recent transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, questions of translocalism have come to dominate the academic agenda. Where southern African studies has engaged with transnationalism, this has generally been pursued through the framework of the black Atlantic. This article argues that we need to supplement this perspective with a systematic engagement with the Indian Ocean. The article outlines various major historiographical traditions associated with the Indian Ocean and then seeks to draw out how these themes challenge assumptions which have been theorised on the basis of black Atlantic patterns. The paper concludes with a discussion of how a consideration of the Indian Ocean would enlarge the maps of South African literary and cultural studies.
In this study of the development of a colonial Caribbean territory in the late nineteenth century the diverse peoples of Trinidad - Europeans, white Creoles of French, Spanish and English descent, Africans, Creole blacks, Venezuelans, Chinese and Indian immigrants - occupy the centre stage. They formed a society deeply divided along lines of race, skin colour, economic position and educational level. Dr Brereton looks at how the white elite, both European and Creole, was able to control the society, largely unchecked by the Imperial power and its agents in Trinidad, and then investigates the emergence of a group which would challenge that control: the coloured and black middle class. This book makes an important contribution to the history of the West Indies, and especially to the history of Trinidad, still largely unresearched. It will interest historians and sociologists concerned with the development of post-emancipation Caribbean societies and with race relations in the Americas after slavery.
The task of the feminist historian is not restricted to adding women, the sex whose history has been denied, to historical accounts of society. In order to engender history itself, the discipline must be challenged from both theoretical and methodological perspectives. To write gender into history, the historical construction of masculinity and femininity or the construction of gender identities must itself be posed as the problem. In this approach gender must be conceived of as another category of historical analysis in which the cadences in gender relations are juxtaposed and connected with the ongoing conflicts in society, especially the confrontations of class, race and ethnicity.
Drawing on the long and varied history of discourses of cultural hybridity across the caribbean, this book explores the rich and fraught cultural crossings that are often theorized homogeneously in postcolonial studies as ‘hybridity’. What is the relationship of cultural hybridity to social equality? Why have some forms of hybridity been enshrined in the caribbean imagination and others disavowed? What is the appeal of cultural hybridity to nationalist and post-nationalist projects alike? What can we learn from the hybridization of Afro-caribbean and Indo-caribbean cultures set in motion by slavery and indentureship? In answering these questions, this book intervenes in several important debates in postcolonial studies about cultural resistance and popular agency, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an age of globalization.
While the "standard" version of the Rāmāyana is a 14th-century Sanskrit text by Valmiki, the diversity and adaptability of this narrative are extraordinary. Many regions and languages have their own versions of the tale that they consider authoritative. In addition, the basic tale of the Rāmāyana is continually adapted to new contexts, forms, and media. It is, in one form or another, read, recited, sung, danced, and acted. Yet the vast majority of scholarship on the Rāmāyana has dealt exclusively with the textual editions, and mainly with Valmiki's Sanskrit version. This book examines the epic in its myriad contexts throughout South and Southeast Asia. It explores the role the narrative plays in societies as varied as India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia. The essays also expand the understanding of the "text" to include non-verbal renditions of the epic, with particular attention to the complex ways such retellings change the way the narrative deals with gender.
Deborah A. Thomass Exceptional Violenceis at once methodologically astute, richly researched, and critically engaged. In reframing the historical object of violence in Jamaica, she enables us to see hitherto obscured dimensions of its embodied constitution as social practice and social imaginary, its relation to citizenship and gender, the state and community, racial subjectivities and transnational migrations. It is a fine achievement.-David Scott, Columbia University.
Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of "citizenship from below" to describe the contest between "proper" spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment. While acknowledging the internal contradictions and damaging exclusions of subaltern self-empowerment, Sheller roots out from beneath the historical archive traces of a deeper freedom, one expressed through bodily performances, familial relationships, cultivation of the land, and sacred worship.
Attending to the hidden linkages among intimate realms and the public sphere, Sheller explores specific struggles for freedom, including women's political activism in Jamaica; the role of discourses of "manhood" in the making of free subjects, soldiers, and citizens; the fiercely ethnonationalist discourses that excluded South Asian and African indentured workers; the sexual politics of the low-bass beats and "bottoms up" moves in the dancehall; and the struggle for reproductive and LGBT rights and against homophobia in the contemporary Caribbean. Through her creative use of archival sources and emphasis on the connections between intimacy, violence, and citizenship, Sheller enriches critical theories of embodied freedom, sexual citizenship, and erotic agency in all post-slavery societies.
Review
"Citizenship from Below is an important contribution to debates about the complexities of citizenship, particularly in post-slavery, postcolonial societies. Mimi Sheller traces the relations between constructions of gender and sexuality, transnational and diasporic imaginaries, and the various incarnations of Caribbean societies, from the colonial to the postcolonial and nationalist. She expands our notion of citizenship by showing how it is constructed by the state over time amid changing circumstances, and by alternative politics and modes of belonging that emerge from 'below.'"—Deborah A. Thomas, author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica
"This is a stimulating, thought-provoking book of lasting significance to scholarship on the Caribbean, citizenship, sexuality, and embodiment. The way that Mimi Sheller puts the literatures on embodiment and citizenship into dialogue is impressive and important. After reading her analysis of these two bodies of scholarship, I will never again be able to think about one without considering the other. Citizenship from Below is a very distinguished book, one which will be widely read and discussed."—Diana Paton, co-editor of Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing
“Citizenship from Below is a sophisticated, challenging, and ambitious book…. Sheller’s book is a masterful demonstration of the multidirectional, complicated, and ongoing process by which citizenship is constructed, appropriated, defined, and inhabited.… This book will be important and illuminating reading for historians of the Caribbean, of sex and gender, of citizenship, broadly conceived. It is indispensible reading for scholars interested in the fraught process of citizenship after slave emancipation, in particular.”
(Naomi J. Andrews Itinerario)
“Sheller joins this conversation on sexuality and social justice, with Citizenship from Below, which will be a useful tool in such dialogues—as well as in the hands of those ‘from below.’”
(A. Lynn Bolles Women's Review of Books)
“[A] grounded, yet expansive contribution to the study of sexuality, citizenship and post-slavery societies.”
(Kate Houlden Anthurium)
"[A]n extremely forceful and timely argument. . . . For Sheller, the exercise of sexual agency, while it may not necessarily transform the institutions through which inequalities have historically been structured, 'may enable some forms of maneuver, negotiation, and exchange' (p. 260). It is by training this lens on nineteenth-century Jamaica and Haiti that Sheller most profoundly complexifies traditional political histories of slavery, freedom, and citizenship. I believe this theoretical reframing is the most critical contribution of Citizenship from Below."
(Deborah A. Thomas New West Indian Guide)
"A ground-breaking interdisciplinary achievement and contribution to the theory of freedom."
(Aija Lulle Anthropological Notebooks)
HERSKOVITS, Melville Jean, prof, anthropology; b. Bellefontaine, O., Sept. ro, 1895; s. Herman and Henrietta (Hart) H.; Ph. B. U. of Chicago, 1920; A. M., Columbia, 1921, Ph. D., 1923; m. Frances S. Shapiro, July 12, 1924-, 1 dau. Jean Frances. Fellow in anthropology, Board of Biol. Sciences, Nat. Research Council, 1923-26; lecturer in anthropology. Columbia, 1924-27, Howard U., 1925; asst. prof. anthropology, Northwestern U. 1921-30, asso. prof., 1931-35, prof. since 1935-, director Program of African Studies since 1951, honorary professor anthropology, Fac. de Filosofía, Bahia, Brazil; Guggenheim Memorial fellow, 1937-38; field research in Dutch Guiana, 1928-29, W. Africa, 1931, Haiti, 1934 Trinidad, 1939 Brazil, 1941-42, Sub-Saharan, Africa, 1953, 57; visiting prof. grad sch. U. I11., 1948-49. Chmn. com. on African anthropol.; chairman com. on international relations in anthropology, div. anthropology and psychology, National Research Council, 1942-50-, chmn. com. Negro studies, Am. Council Learned Socs., 1939-50. Mem. permanent council, Internat. Anthrop. Congress-, v. p., member exec. com. Internat. Union Anthropol. and Ethnol. Scis. Decorated officer Order of Honor and Merit, Haiti, officer order of Orange-Nassau, The Netherlands, Honorary fellow Royal Netherlands Geog. Assn. Royal Anthrop. Inst; fellow National Academy of Sciences, A.A.A.S. (vice president 1934), Soc. Research Child Development, Am. Anthrop. Assn. (pres. Central sect. 1939, exec. bd. 1947-, editor of The American Anthropologist, 1949-52); African Studies Association president 1957-58); member Am. Assn. Phys. Anthropologists, Am. Folklore Soc. (pres. 1945), Société des Africanistes de Paris, International African Institute (exec. council), Council on Foreign Relations, Club: University (Evanston, Illinois). Author: The American Negro, A Study in Racial Crossing, 1928; Anthropometry of the American Negro, 1930; Outline of Dahomean Religious Belief (with Frances S. Herskovits). 1933; Rebel Destiny, Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana (with same), 1934; Suriname Folklore (with same) 1936; Life in a Haitian Valley, 1937; Dahomey, 1938; Acculturation, 1938; The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples, 1940-, The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941; Trinidad Village (with Frances S. Herskovits), 1947; Man and His Works, 1948; Economic Anthropology, 1952-, Franz Boos, The Science of Man in the Making, 1953) Cultural Anthropology, 1955; Dahomean Narrative, a Cross Cultural Analysis (with Frances S. Herskovits), 1958. Homer 810 Clinton PL, Evanston, I11.
This paper analyzes gender earnings gaps in Barbados and Jamaica, using a matching comparisons approach. In both countries, as in most of the Caribbean region, females’ educational achievement is higher than that of males. Nonetheless, males’ earnings surpass those of their female peers. Depending on the set of control characteristics, males’ earnings surpass those of females by between 14 and 27 percent of average females’ wages in Barbados, and between 8 and 17 percent of average females’ wages in Jamaica. In the former, the highest earnings gaps are found among low-income workers. Results from both countries confirm a finding that has been recurrent with this matching approach: the complete elimination of gender occupational segregation in labor markets would increase rather than reduce gender earnings gaps. The evidence is mixed regarding segregation by economic sectors. Occupational experience, in the case of Barbados, and job tenure, in the case of Jamaica, help to explain existing gender earnings gaps.
‘Douglarise de Nation’: Politicized Intimacies and the Literary Dougla. University of Pennsylvania Penn Humanities Forum on Virtuality
- Kaneesha Parsard
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
- Saidiya V Hartman
- SV Hartman
Women in the Ramayana Tradition in Trinidad In Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women
- Sherry Singh
- Ann
Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the “Kala Pani
- Brinda J Mehta
Andil Gosine’s Wardrobes: The Premiere of Cutlass. ARC Magazine
- Stephanie Nazywalskyj
Burying the Myth: Indian Women in the Sugar Cane Industry in Trinidad
- Theresa Rajack-Talley
- Ann
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
- Hazel V Carby
- HV Carby
The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain
- Thomas C Holt
- TC Holt
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
- Gaiutra Bahadur
- G Bahadur
Women in the Ramayana Tradition in Trinidad
- Sherry Singh
- Ann
- SA Singh
Dougla. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage
- Richard Allsopp