List of contributors vi
Introduction
1. Amar Wahab 1
Introduction: Queering indentureship
Articles
2. Suzanne C. Persard 15
Archives in drag: Performing nachaniya towards a queer theory of indenture
3. Naveen Minai 37
Sensuous movements: Beauty, power and memory in Jordache Ellapen’s Queering the Archive (2018)
4. Ryan Persadie 59
Tanty feminisms: The aesthetics of auntyhood, #Coolieween and the erotics of post-indenture
Photo essay
5. Jordache A. Ellapen 98
Brown femininities and the queer erotics of indentureship
Interview
6. Michelle Mohabeer and Amar Wahab 125
Queer Coolie-tudes: ‘A living archive, an oblique poetics’: A conversation with filmmaker and lecturer, Dr. Michelle Mohabeer
Book review
7. Keith McNeal 151
Andil Gosine, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 178 pp.
Poems
8. Amílcar Sanatan 158
Coolie belle
Mitera
Festival light
Submission guidelines 161
Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
EDITORS
Amar Wahab, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, David Dabydeen
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Eve Kanram, Lynne Macedo
AMEENA GAFOOR INSTITUTE ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD
Grace Aneiza Ali (New York University)
Gaiutra Bahadur (Rutgers University)
Eddie Bruce-Jones (Birbeck College, London University)
Ajay Chhabra (Actor and Artistic Director)
Richard Fung (OCAD University)
Rajrani Gobin (Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius)
Andil Gosine (York University Toronto)
Betty Govinden (Alumna, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal)
Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington)
Aliyah Khan (University of Michigan )
Brij Lal (Professor Emeritus, The Australian National University)
Shivanjani Lal (Artist)
Anne-Marie Lee-Loy (Ryerson University)
Kathleen López (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)
Paloma Martin (University of Guyana)
Heidi Safia Mirza (Professor Emeritus UCL, Institute of Education, University of London)
Judith Misrahi-Barak (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
Michael Mitchell (University of Warwick and University of Paderborn)
Nalini Mohabir (Concordia University)
Patricia Mohammed (Professor Emerita University of the West Indies)
Satendra Nandan (Professor Emeritus University of Canberra)
Ken Ramchand (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies)
Tina K. Ramnarine (Royal Holloway University of London)
Lomarsh Roopnarine (Jackson State University)
Brinsley Samaroo (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies)
Verene Shepherd (Professor Emerita, University of the West Indies)
Nur Sobers-Khan (British Library)
Janet Steel (Commonwealth International)
Stephanos Stephanides (Professor Emeritus, University of Cyprus)
Alissa Trotz (University of Toronto)
Mark Tumbridge (University of Guyana)
Athol Williams (University of Cape Town)
Lisa Yun (State University of New York)
Contributors
Jordache Ellapen, a native from South Africa, is assistant professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media at the University of Toronto, Canada. Ellapen is currently the inaugural 2021–2022 Martha LA. McCain Faculty Research Fellow in the Queer and Trans Research Lab (Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto). He has published extensively in several journals, including Journal of African Cultural Studies, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Feminist Studies and Feminist Formations. He is the co-editor of a special issue of Black Camera: An International Journal of Film, titled ‘Perspectives on South African Cinema’ (2018), and the anthology, we remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination (2012).
Keith McNeal is senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies – St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago, and associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston, USA. He is an anthropologist with specialization in Caribbean ethnology and Atlantic cultural history, and a long-term focus on Trinidad and Tobago. His first book – Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean: African and Hindu Popular Religions in Trinidad & Tobago (2011, 2nd ed. 2015) – is a comparative historical ethnography of African and Hindu traditions of trance performance and spirit mediumship in the southern Caribbean, as well as the postcolonial politics of race, religion, diaspora, nationalism and multiculturalism. He has also reconstructed the history of Indo-Trinidadian mortuary ritual and postcolonial revitalization of pyreside cremation, the subject of his first documentary film project, Cremating the Body Politic. He is currently completing a book on men, sexuality, queer globalization and the politics of citizenship in Trinidad and Tobago, entitled Queering the Citizen: Dispatches from Trinidad and Tobago, in relation to which he has conducted research in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and published several papers on queer and trans refugeeism and the political economy of Caribbean asylum-seeking in Europe. He is also working on a third book project on Trinbagonian Hinduism, The Lotus in the Oil Drum: Anthropocene Hinduism in a Caribbean Petrostate. His research, teaching and activist interests have been moving steadily in the direction of climate change and the Anthropocene in the Caribbean.
Naveen Minai is an assistant professor (limited term) at the Mark S. Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her work centres interdisciplinary analyses of Asian sexuality and masculinity in transnational popular cultures. Her work is in conversation with Global Asia studies, Asian Diasporic cultural studies, postcolonial studies, migration studies and queer masculinity studies. Dr. Minai holds a PhD in gender and sexuality studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught in Pakistan from 2015 to 2019. She was the visiting scholar 2019–2020 in Sexuality Studies at York University, has been a research/teaching fellow at Sciences Po, Paris (2018), and the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory at the University of Toronto (2019). She presented her work on brownness as analytic at the Modern Languages Association Conference in 2021, and her work on digital butch of colour fashion and South Asian female masculinity is forthcoming in Feminist Theory (2022) and the Journal of Autoethnography (2022) respectively.
Michelle Mohabeer is a Caribbean-Canadian multi-award-winning filmmaker, artist-scholar, teacher and writer. Her films have exhibited at over 320 festivals and galleries globally, been written about in books and journals, and purchased by prominent university libraries across North America. Her recent feature documentary, Queer Coolie-tudes, has won numerous awards and is still screening at global festivals. One of her short films is featured in the upcoming, ‘No Master Territories Feminist World Making and the Moving Image’, HKW Gallery Berlin/Germany, curated by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, June 19–August 28, 2022, with an accompanying book by MIT Press. She is the contributing editor of a collection in progress, Reframing the Nation: Diasporic Racialized, Indigenous and Queer BIPOC independent women filmmakers in Canada. She teaches at York University, Canada.
Website: https://michellemohabeer.com/
Ryan Persadie is an artist, educator and writer based in Toronto, Canada. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Women and Gender Studies and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. He also carries an MA in Ethnomusicology and Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto. His aesthetic and scholarly work interrogates the relationships and entanglements between queer Indo-Caribbean diasporas, Caribbean feminisms, Afro-Asian intimacies and legacies of indenture. His current dissertation project, in particular, takes up questions of how aesthetics, performance, embodiment and popular culture operate as critical feminist archives for erotic self-making and place-making practices for queer and trans Indo-Caribbean communities between and across Toronto and New York City. He also works with and organizes with multiple community groups, including the Caribbean Equality Project and Queeribbean Toronto. Outside of academia, he also works as a drag artist where he goes by the stage name of Tifa Wine.
Suzanne C. Persard is assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Florida, USA. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research engages with historical archives, post-indenture visual culture, and theories of gender and sexuality within Indian indentureship. Her articles have been published in the Feminist Review, Journal of West Indian Literature and the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Amílcar Sanatan is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at The University of the West Indies – St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago. His poetry and essays have appeared in Caribbean and international literary magazines. In 2020, his creative non-fiction was shortlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Achong Prize for Caribbean Writers. Sanatan has performed spoken word poetry and coordinated open mics in Trinidad and Tobago for over a decade.
Amar Wahab is associate professor of Gender and Sexuality in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, Canada. He has taught in the areas of critical sexuality studies, critical studies in masculinity, critical race studies, introductory and advanced sociological theory and Caribbean cultural studies. His research interests include sexual citizenship in liberal and postcolonial nation-state formations (mainly related to the Caribbean and Canada), race and queer transnational politics, critiques of queer liberalism, and queer studies of indentureship in the Caribbean. His current creative research project is entitled ‘Trans-Oceanic Erotics: A Queer Coolie Odyssey’.
Dedication
This issue is dedicated to the pioneering scholarship of Professor Brij V Lal.