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My dissertation project, Stories Women Carry: Labor and Reproductive Imaginaries of South Asia and the Caribbean, assembles contemporary fiction and nonfiction, alongside archival documents to focus on the history of labor, specifically indentured servitude, in South Asia and the Caribbean after Emancipation and its enduring resonances and afterlives in diasporic formations. It examines contemporary literary representations of women’s experiences of indentureship and plantation labor, as resistant to archival accounts of their subjectification. I contend that paying attention to the ways that the figure of the coolie- woman was produced by colonial discourses of race, caste and sexuality, not only shows how contestations over reproduction and reproductive capacities served as sites for innovating resistance tactics while experiencing indentureship, but also, unveils the enduring resonances and afterlives of colonial regimes in contemporary patterns of labor and migration. Drawing from feminist subaltern histories and Black Diaspora studies, I engage with silences and absences in the colonial archive by bringing them into conversation appositionally with contemporary fiction and non-fiction that re-imagines histories of indentureship and colonialism. Thus, by focusing on how fiction and nonfiction chafes against historical accounts, I examine contemporary Anglophone literature about labor, race and caste in Trinidad, Guyana and India alongside memoirs, biographies, journals and government reports from British colonial archives. Currently revising this project into a book manuscript.

(Art by Nalini Malani, Gamepieces, 2016. MoMA, NY)

This research has been supported by: UMass Pre-dissertation Fellowship, Graduate School Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, English Department Dissertation Fellowship, Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute and the Five College Women Studies Research Center Fellowship.

Publications