Oceanic entanglements : race, gender, and fantasies of freedom in narratives of Indian indentured labor

Oceanic Entanglements: Race, Gender, and Fantasies of Freedom in Narratives of Indian Indentured Labor examines literary representations of Indian indentured labor alongside the colonial archive. My dissertation proposes that indentured labor in the British Empire—a colonial labor apparatus designed to replace slave labor in the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, among other sugar colonies—is a critical site to examine the fault lines of post-abolition colonial narratives of liberalism. Making use of a theoretical framework that I call “oceanic entanglements,” which seeks out the often-obscured relationships and interdependencies between colonial systems or ideologies, my project unearths how the British Empire manufactured indenture as a voluntary labor force in order to proliferate post-abolitionist narratives of freedom, even as such narratives were predicated on indentured laborers’ unfree conditions. In order to frame indenture as voluntary and therefore fulfilling a fantasy of freedom, I further contend, colonial ideology needed to invent the indentured laborer as a modern liberal subject who has access to choices, and has the ability to consent to indenture. Oceanic Entanglements suggests that the figure of the indentured woman becomes an important site upon which colonial discourse fabricated consent on the level of plantation labor and sexual labor. To explore the workings of the British Empire in generating fantasies of freedom, I read contemporary fiction that reimagines indenture, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and David Dabydeen’s The Counting House, alongside colonial reports that document Caribbean indentured labor conditions and chronicle debates around the West Indian labor question in the post-abolition moment. The project reads these materials through the “entanglement” between slavery and indenture as two interdependent colonial labor regimes. In addition to examining the colonial production of narratives of freedom, I suggest that this entanglement can help generate interracial solidarities in the postcolonial Caribbean. If the beginnings of indenture prove to be a crucial moment of examination, so does the end of indenture. My project uses Ryhaan Shah’s novel Weaving Waters alongside Indian nationalist political rhetoric around indentured labor in early twentieth-century India to argue that anti-indenture campaigns and the consolidation of Indian nationalist identity are entangled. Through my exploration of entanglements, this dissertation enriches the fields of postcolonial, South Asian, and critical race studies.