Maharani's Misery

Maharani's Misery
Author: Verene Shepherd
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9789766401214

Following the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, a concerted effort was made to replace enslaved labour with indentured Indian labour. This is the story of one Indian woman's tragic experience in trying to immigrate to the Caribbean in the 19th century.

Moving Home

Moving Home
Author: Sandra Gunning
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2021-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478021853

In Moving Home, Sandra Gunning examines nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. Gunning draws on the writing of missionaries, abolitionists, entrepreneurs, and explorers whose work challenges the assumptions that travel writing is primarily associated with leisure or scientific research. For instance, Yoruba ex-slave turned Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a role in the Christianization of colonial Nigeria. Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a formerly enslaved girl "gifted" to Queen Victoria, traveled the African colonies as the wife of a prominent colonial figure and under the protection of her benefactress. Alongside Nancy Gardiner Prince, Martin R. Delany, Robert Campbell, and others, these writers used their mobility as African diasporic and colonial subjects to explore the Atlantic world and beyond while they negotiated the complex intersections between nation and empire. Rather than categorizing them as merely precursors of Pan-Africanist traditions, Gunning traces their successes and frustrations to capture a sense of the historical and geographical specificities that shaped their careers.

Glimpses of a Global Life

Glimpses of a Global Life
Author: Shridath Ramphal
Publisher: Dundurn
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2014-11-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 145973128X

Shridath "Sonny" Ramphal looks back at the fifteen years he spent as the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. He shares glimpses of conflicts, discussions, and characters such as Uganda's tyrant, Idi Amin, and the enlightened spirits of others like Germany's Willy Brandt and Nelson Mandela — all of whom Ramphal encountered in his global life.

Creole in the Archive

Creole in the Archive
Author: Roshini Kempadoo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-10-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783482222

Explores creole discourse to re-conceptualize archive that is contemporaneous and centralizes the presence and imagery of the Caribbean figure.

Gendering the African Diaspora

Gendering the African Diaspora
Author: Judith Ann-Marie Byfield
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2010
Genre: African diaspora
ISBN: 0253354161

"This volume builds on and extends current discussions of the construction of gendered identities and the networks through which men and women engage diaspora. It considers the movement of people and ideas between the Caribbean and the Nigerian hinterland. The contributions examine Africa in the Caribbean imaginary, the way in which gender ideologies inform Caribbean men's and women's theoretical or real-life engagement with the continent, and the interactions and experiences of Caribbean travelers in Africa and Europe. The contributions are linked as well through empire, discussing different parts of the British Empire and allowing for the comparative examination of colonial policies and practices."--Back cover.

Beyond Being Koelies and Kantráki

Beyond Being Koelies and Kantráki
Author: Margriet Fokken
Publisher: Uitgeverij Verloren
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2018
Genre: East Indians
ISBN: 9087047215

This book traces the self-positioning of Hindostani people in the face of British and Dutch colonial practices. Originally from India and shipped to the Dutch colony of Suriname after the abolition of slavery, the Hindostani served as contract labourers to keep the plantation system afloat from 1873. Central to the book is the perspective of the Hindostani themselves. We travel alongside the Hindostani from the moment they were recruited and their movement through the depots awaiting shipment, their travel experiences, their arrival in Suriname, relocation to plantations, and their dispersal following the end of their contracts, either as city workers, or farmers. All along, the book poses the question of identification: how did Hindostani make sense of themselves, their fellow Hindostani, and Surinamese society? Stereotyped images make way for insight in lived experience of lower and higher caste, Hindus and Muslims, men and women.

Coolies of the Empire

Coolies of the Empire
Author: Ashutosh Kumar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108225691

This book studies Indian overseas labour migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which involved millions of Indians traversing the globe in the age of empire, subsequent to the abolition of slavery in 1833. This migration led to the presence of Indians and their culture being felt all over the world. This study delves deep into the lives of these indentured workers from India who called themselves girmitiyas; it is a narrative of their experiences in India and in the sugar colonies abroad. It foregrounds the alternative world view of the girmitiyas, and their socio-cultural and religious life in the colonies. In this book, the author has developed highly original insights into the experience of colonial indentured migrant labour, describing the ways in which migrants managed to survive and even flourish within the interstices of the indentured labour system and how considerably the experience of migration changed over time.

Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature

Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature
Author: Alison Donnell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2007-05-07
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1134505868

A historiography of Caribbean literary history and criticism, the author explores different critical approaches and textual peepholes to re-examine the way twentieth-century Caribbean literature in English may be read and understood.

Anglophone Literature of Caribbean Indenture

Anglophone Literature of Caribbean Indenture
Author: Alison Klein
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2018-09-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319990551

This book is the first comprehensive study of Anglophone literature depicting the British Imperial system of indentured labor in the Caribbean. Through an examination of intimate relationships within indenture narratives, this text traces the seductive hierarchies of empire – the oppressive ideologies of gender, ethnicity, and class that developed under imperialism and indenture and that continue to impact the Caribbean today. It demonstrates that British colonizers, Indian and Chinese laborers, and formerly enslaved Africans negotiated struggles for political and economic power through the performance of masculinity and the control of migrant women, and that even those authors who critique empire often reinforce patriarchy as they do so. Further, it identifies a common thread within the work of those authors who resist the hierarchies of empire: a poetics of kinship, or, a focus on the importance of building familial ties across generations and across classifications of people.