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Author: Gaiutra Bahadur
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604338X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
Author: Gaiutra Bahadur
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604338X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Get Book Here
Book Description
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
Author: Yin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0142500550
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 42
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Book Description
Shek marvels at the new world as he and his brother, Little Wong, arrive in California. Along with hundreds of other workers, the brothers are going to build a great railroad across the West. They plan to save enough money so that their mother and little brothers can join them in America. But as days grow into months, they endure many hardships-exhausting work, discrimination, and treacherous avalanches. Inspired by actual events, this story reveals the harsh truth about life for the Chinese railroad workers in 1865, while celebrating their perseverance and bravery.
Author: Radhika Singha
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197566901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
Though largely invisible in histories of the First World War, over??550,000 men in the ranks of the Indian army were non-combatants. From the porters, stevedores and construction workers in the Coolie Corps to those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha recovers the story of this unacknowledged service. The labor regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in interregional arenas bent to the demands of global war. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to 'non-martial' caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers' need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials. The Coolie's Great War views that global conflict through the lens of Indian labor, constructing a distinct geography of the war--from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India's frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.
Author: Mulk Raj Anand
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780140186802
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Coolie portrays the picaresque adventures of Munoo, a young boy forced to leave his hill village to fend for himself and discover the world. His journey takes him far from home to towns and cities, to Bombay and Simla, sweating as servant, factory-worker and rickshaw driver. It is a fight for survival that illuminates, with raw immediacy, the grim fate of the masses in pre-Partition India.
Author: Moon-Ho Jung
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801882814
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Publisher Description
Author: Edward Jenkins
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chinese
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
Author: Elliott Young
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469613409
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
In this sweeping work, Elliott Young traces the pivotal century of Chinese migration to the Americas, beginning with the 1840s at the start of the "coolie" trade and ending during World War II. The Chinese came as laborers, streaming across borders legally and illegally and working jobs few others wanted, from constructing railroads in California to harvesting sugar cane in Cuba. Though nations were built in part from their labor, Young argues that they were the first group of migrants to bear the stigma of being "alien." Being neither black nor white and existing outside of the nineteenth century Western norms of sexuality and gender, the Chinese were viewed as permanent outsiders, culturally and legally. It was their presence that hastened the creation of immigration bureaucracies charged with capture, imprisonment, and deportation. This book is the first transnational history of Chinese migration to the Americas. By focusing on the fluidity and complexity of border crossings throughout the Western Hemisphere, Young shows us how Chinese migrants constructed alternative communities and identities through these transnational pathways.
Author: Nitin Varma
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110461285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.
Author: Lisa Yun
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592135838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Introducing radical counter-visions of race and slavery, and probing the legal and philosophical questions raised by indenture, The Coolie Speaks offers the first critical reading of a massive testimony case from Cuba in 1874. From this case, Yun traces the emergence of a "coolie narrative" that forms a counterpart to the "slave narrative." The written and oral testimonies of nearly 3,000 Chinese laborers in Cuba, who toiled alongside African slaves, offer a rare glimpse into the nature of bondage and the tortuous transition to freedom. Trapped in one of the last standing systems of slavery in the Americas, the Chinese described their hopes and struggles, and their unrelenting quest for freedom. Yun argues that the testimonies from this case suggest radical critiques of the "contract" institution, the basis for free modern society. The example of Cuba, she suggests, constitutes the early experiment and forerunner of new contract slavery, in which the contract itself, taken to its extreme, was wielded as a most potent form of enslavement and complicity. Yun further considers the communal biography of a next-generation Afro-Chinese Cuban author and raises timely theoretical questions regarding race, diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization.
Author: Arnold J. Meagher
Publisher: Arnold J Meagher
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
The Coolie Trade The phenomenon of indentured labor, which followed upon the abolition of slavery, spread throughout the Western world in the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century, appearing in such far-flung places as Mauritius, South Africa, Latin America, Australia, Malaya, and the Fiji Islands. Indentured labor, i.e., labor contracted under penal sanctions, was essentially a compulsory system of labor, which in practice differed little from slavery. Unlike slaves, indentured workers were supposed to receive a monthly wage, and their term of service, at least in principle, was for a fixed period of from five to eight years; but these provisions were not always adhered to, and in all other respects, indentured workers were no better off than the slaves they replaced. The widespread appearance of indentured labor is not adequately accounted for by either of the two major schools of thought in the controversy over the downfall of slavery. If the primary motivations for the abolition of slavery were humanitarian, then why did humanitarians look the other way when slave owners resorted to another form of forced labor in the system of indenture? If, on the other hand, the abolition of slavery was an economic consequence of the rise of industrialism and capitalism, as Eric Williams in his Capitalism and Slavery would have us believe, then why did the same factors, which rejected forced African labor, so easily accept forced Chinese and Indian labor? Did the principles of humanitarianism not also extend to the peoples of Asia? Or did some latent racism preclude "Asiatics" (as Chinese and Indians were called), or at least preclude them from being defended with the same vigor as Africans? Or, lulled into a false sense of security and accomplishment, were humanitarians taken in by the trappings of indenture the written contract, the monthly wage, and the limitation on the period of service? The latter could be an out for the humanitarian interpretation of the abolition movement, but what of the economic determinism of the Williams school? Indenture's camouflage might possibly have fooled the humanitarians, but the same could not be said of the economic forces of determinism. Perhaps the economic factors, like the humanitarian principles, did not have universal validity, but only applied to African slavery? The question must then be raised that perhaps indentured labor was an economically viable alternative both to slave and wage labor, at least in some areas of the world? And as such, was indenture a conscious hardnosed compromise between the proponents of slavery and the abolitionists? Else, how explain the fact that England, who led the fight against slavery and whose statesmen condemned slavery as the very antithesis of progress, also led the way in sanctioning indentured labor? It is the purpose of this work to present a comprehensive study of Chinese indentured labor in Latin America. In an attempt to place the coming of over 250,000 Chinese indentured laborers to the Caribbean and South America from 1847 to 1874 in some kind of historical perspective, this study traces the gradual rise and acceptance of the indentured system of labor in the Western world following upon the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. Conditions both in China and in Latin America, which triggered and sustained a flow of Chinese labor for over a quarter of a century, are examined. The transoceanic passages of the Chinese laborers is chronicled. Finally, the experience of Chinese indentured labor in the Caribbean and South America is explored. This work relies heavily upon (1) the correspondence of consuls and diplomats on the China coast and in Latin America contained in the archives of the British Public Record Office and in the British Parliamentary Papers; (2) the China coast newspapers of the nineteenth century, both English and Portuguese, including the official weekly publications of the Hong Kong and M
