Comparative Indenture

This seminar draws on the global history of Asian indentured labor to explore the theory and method of “comparative indenture.” Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, European imperial governments, newly independent colonies like Peru, and private enterprises contracted workers from China and India and sent them to far-flung colonies from Cuba to Mauritius, Brazil to French Indochina, Trinidad to Natal. Asian indentured workers, commonly known as “coolies,” were seen as a source of “free” cheap labor that could circumvent Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade but could nonetheless maintain lucrative plantation economies during an age of emancipation. How might putting the two coolie trades in conversation—out of India and out of China, state-run and private—yield new insights into the study of empire, liberalism, and racial capitalism from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries? How might a world-systems analysis of a global “coolie” system foster insights into a literary world-system comprised of abolitionist texts, first-person accounts by indentured workers, historical fictions, and other narratives of indenture across the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone literary worlds? How might the method of comparative indenture allow us to put into conversation, for instance, Edward Jenkins’ 1871 The Coolie, His Rights and Wrongs; Antonio Chuffat Latour’s 1927’s Apunte Histórico de los Chinos en Cuba; Patricia Powell’s 1998 novel The Pagoda; Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s 2009 novel The True History of Paradise; and contemporary Francophone and Anglophone kala pani narratives such as Nathacha Appanah’s 2002 novel Les Rochers de Poudre d’Or and Shevlyn Mottai’s 2022 novel Across the Kala Pani? In other words, how might this method encourage critical analysis across historical-archival materials and literary productions on indenture? And how might comparing South Asian and East Asian indenture across the Americas, Africa, and Asia through both literary and archival texts illuminate the role that Asian labor migration has played in the development of global capitalism?