Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
Volume 2, Issue 2, December 2022
Produced and distributed by
Open Access
The Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies is published Open Access. This means you’ll be able to read all our articles for free on JSTOR.
The journal is a bi-annual peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Pluto Journals in partnership with the Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and Its Legacies (ameenagafoorinstitute.org). The journal is a unique and unprecedented academic space where the study of indentureship, as a distinct form of unfree labour, can be analysed in all its forms. No such journal currently exists anywhere in the world, despite the critical importance of the system of indenture to world history.
Through publishing Open Access, important research will reach a wider audience including those who traditionally can’t access academic content through a paywall. This means the work of our authors will be accessed by students and researchers from institutions who don’t have access to large library budgets. It will also reach people outside of academia and will be more readily available to members of the public, civil society organisations, and policy makers.
Copyright
The Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies is committed to Open Access for academic work. This permits any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and to use them for any other lawful purpose. All the articles published in this journal are free to access immediately from the date of publication. We do not charge any fees for any reader to download articles for their own scholarly use.
This journal is published under the Creative Commons License CC BY 4.0. This license allows users, scholars and readers, to read the content or any part of the content without charges. This license allows scholars to download and use the contents for educational purposes. This license does not allow the content or any part of the content to be used for commercial purposes.
Publisher contact
For any queries concerning subscriptions, advertising and permissions, contact: info@123456plutojournals.com
Print subscriptions
Print subscriptions of the journal are available through Marston Book Services.
For ordering information, please contact:
Email: subscriptions@123456marston.co.uk
By post:
Subscriptions Dept
Marston Book Service
Eastern Avenue
Milton Park
Abingdon
Oxfordshire
OX14 4SB
UK
Tel: +44 (0)1235 465574
Contents
List of contributors vi
Introduction
1. Amar Wahab 1
Introduction: Queer trajectories of gender and sex/uality
Articles
2. Preity Kumar 6
Reclaiming power: Women loving women and intimate partner violence in Guyana
3. Dominique Stewart 33
Krishna kee bansi bhajay: Body politics in the Indo-Jamaican folk performance of Nachania
Review essay
4. Michael Mitchell 81
Offspring of a virgin’s womb: Up to monkey business in Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace
Interviews
5. Jason Jones and Amar Wahab 105
The LGBT activism of Jason Jones
6. Jane Miller, OBE, and Amar Wahab 128
Thinking LGBT human rights in Guyana: A conversation with the British High Commissioner to the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, Jane Miller, OBE
Book reviews
7. Maria del Pilar Kaladeen 142
Arunima Datta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History Of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 254 pp.
8. Michael Mitchell 144
Vinod Busjeet, Silent Winds, Dry Seas (New York: Doubleday, 2021), 288 pp.
Research spotlight
9. Amar Wahab 149
Trans-oceanic erotics: Sexing indentureship
Submission guidelines 158
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
Jason Jones is an LGBTQ+ human rights defender originally from Trinidad and Tobago who has lived and worked in Britain for over 30 years. He refers to himself as being ‘Tringlish’, Queer and as a person of colour. His activism in LGBTQ+ human rights spans four decades, beginning as a student newly arrived in London and marching in the anti-Section 28 protests of 1988. He then returned to Trinidad in 1992 and was the cofounder of the first LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in the Southern Caribbean, ‘The Lambda Group’, and he also founded ‘I Am One’ in Trinidad in 2012. In 1996, after being homophobically abused by his family and dragged through the Trinidad and Tobago press for performing drag publicly, he returned to London and was on the board of the Stonewall Immigration Group (now known as Rainbow Migration), which won the right of abode in the UK for the overseas partner of an LGBT+ UK citizen. He and his then partner, also from Trinidad, were one of 40 test cases at the Home Office which brought about this landmark win for British LGBTQ+ people, which was the first pro-LGBTQ+ legislation in the UK post decriminalization in 1967. He has therefore assisted changing the laws of two countries for LGBTQ+ people, the only activist in history ever to do so. On April 12, 2018, he won a landmark legal challenge at the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago which decriminalized adult consensual same-sex intimacy. This win guarantees freedom for 100,000+ Caribbean LGBTQ+ people and was also cited twice in the decriminalization victory in India in 2018. His historic case will be heard at the Privy Council in London to answer an appeal of his victory from the Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago. This will be the first time in history that the Privy Council will hear an LGBTQ+ decriminalization case and his victory there will assist the decriminalization of over 50 million people in at least ten other countries across two continents. Jason Jones was awarded the Attitude Magazine Pride Award 2018. He was nominated for the Pink News Campaigner of the Year 2018. He was nominated for the National Diversity Awards as Positive Role Model Award for LGBT 2018. In 2019 he was the recipient of the inaugural Gay Star News Founders Award alongside such luminaries as Sandi Toksvig and Wayne Sleep.
Maria del Pilar Kaladeen is an associate fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She is the co-editor of We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture (University of London Press, 2018), which is the first international anthology on the system of indenture in the British Empire. Her latest book, The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain’s Caribbean Empire (Pluto Press, 2021), is an anthology of writing by Indian-Caribbean descendants of the Windrush Generation.
Preity Kumar holds a PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies from York University, Toronto, Canada. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Her work examines women loving women’s relationships, violence and LGBTQ rights in Guyana and the broader Caribbean. Dr Kumar is also a co-founder of Lotus, a non-profit organization in Toronto, ON, that works with Indo-Caribbean women on gender-based violence and poverty.
Jane Miller, OBE, was appointed British High Commissioner to Guyana, Ambassador to CARICOM and non-resident Ambassador to Suriname in July 2021. Jane has worked for the UK government since 1994 in various capacities in London and served overseas in Tanzania, Nigeria, Zambia and South Africa. Her career began in the health sector and moved into management and leadership roles 15 years ago. Most of Jane’s career has been leading development programmes across Africa, and she was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) from Her Majesty the Queen for her services to Africa in the New Year’s Honours of 2014. She is known for her passion for human rights – including issues of gender, mental health, disability, youth, LGBT and work to end Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Michael Mitchell is an honorary visiting professor at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick, and lecturer in English at the University of Paderborn, Germany. He spent many years teaching English at secondary schools in Germany. In addition to publishing a range of school textbooks for Germany, he is the author of Hidden Mutualities: Faustian Themes from Gnostic Origins to the Postcolonial, introductions to the Peepal Tree editions of Wilson Harris novels and numerous articles on postcolonial literature, particularly the Caribbean and Wilson Harris.
Dominique Stewart is a former 2019–2021 interreligious research fellow with the Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies, at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, USA.
Amar Wahab is 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.