Pirbhai uses the critical paradigm of 'indenture history' to examine the local literary and cultural histories that have influenced and shaped the development of novel-length fiction by writers of the South Asian diaspora in national contexts as diverse as Mauritius, South Africa, Guyana, and Fiji.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Anglophone literature depicting the British Imperial system of indentured labor in the Caribbean. Through an examination of intimate relationships within indenture narratives, this text traces the seductive hierarchies of empire – the oppressive ideologies of gender, ethnicity, and class that developed under imperialism and indenture and that continue to impact the Caribbean today. It demonstrates that British colonizers, Indian and Chinese laborers, and formerly enslaved Africans negotiated struggles for political and economic power through the performance of masculinity and the control of migrant women, and that even those authors who critique empire often reinforce patriarchy as they do so. Further, it identifies a common thread within the work of those authors who resist the hierarchies of empire: a poetics of kinship, or, a focus on the importance of building familial ties across generations and across classifications of people.

Indian indentured emigration is among the most notable social phenomena of modern history, which sent over one million men and women to tropical sugar colonies in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. Indenture began in the 1830s and lasted till 1920; a period which finds little or no mention either in history textbooks or in literature. This book takes a closer look at some of the important narratives on indenture and evaluates them in order to highlight the experience of the indentured people across the plantation colonies in Fiji and in the Caribbean. The story of indenture is the story of betrayal, of trauma and of resistance. It is also a narrative of resilience, assimilation and acculturation. This book offers an in-depth literary study to reveal that there exists a language of indenture, one that permeates all the texts written on the subject. The texts speak to, and for each other, thereby revealing the indenture experience to the reader.

As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.

This book describes the processes of migration and settlement of indentured Indian women and tries to map their struggles, challenges and agencies. It highlights the fact that even though indentured women faced various kinds of violence and abuse owing to the authoritarian and patriarchal setup of the plantations, over a period of time, they managed to turn the adverse circumstances to their advantage. They struggled to emerge as productive workforces and empowered themselves through acquiring education and skill, and negotiating new spaces and identities for themselves. At the same time, they also raised families in often inhospitable circumstances, passing on to their descendants, a strong foundation to build successful lives for themselves.The book discusses indentured women from a multidisciplinary perspective and adopts multiple methodologies, including primary and secondary sources, personal narrations, pictorial representations and theoretical discussions. It also provides an overview of the current discourses and the changing paradigms of the studies on Indian indentured women. Further, it presents a detailed, region-wise description of indentured women migrants. The regions covered in this book are Asia- Pacific (countries covered are Fiji, Burma and Nepal); Africa (countries covered are South Africa, Mauritius and Reunion Island); and the Caribbean (countries covered are Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago). In addition, one full section of the book is devoted to the theoretical frameworks that touch upon gender performativity, normative misogyny, Bahadur's Coolie Women, literary representations and resistance movements. It is intended for academics and researches in the field of diaspora/migration/transnational studies, history, sociology, literature, women/gender studies, as well as policymakers and general readers interested in the personal experiences of women and migrants.

An Indian Bengali by birth, Amitav Ghosh has established himself as a major voice in what is often called world literature, addressing issues such as the post-colonial and neo-colonial predicaments, the plight of the subalterns, the origin of globalisation and capitalism, and lately ecology and migration. The volume is therefore divided according to the four domains that lie at the heart of Ghosh’s writing practice: anthropology, epistemology, ethics and space. In this volume, a number of scholars from all over the world have come together to shed new light on the works and poetics of Amitav Ghosh according to the epistemic frameworks that form the bedrock of his fiction. Contributors: Safoora Arbab, Carlotta Beretta, Lucio De Capitani, Asis De, Lenka Filipova, Letizia Garofalo, Swapna Gopinath, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Sabine Lauret-Taft, Carol Leon, Kuldeep Mathur, Fiona Moolla, Sambit Panigrahi, Madhsumita Pati, Murari Prasad, Luca Raimondi, Pabitra Kumar Rana, Ilaria Rigoli, Sneharika Roy, John Thieme, Alessandro Vescovi.

This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.

The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature offers a comprehensive survey of an increasingly important field. It demonstrates the influence of the “age of migration” on literature and showcases the role of literature in shaping socio-political debates and creating knowledge about the migratory trajectories, lives, and experiences that have shaped the post-1989 world. The contributors examine a broad range of literary texts and critical approaches that cover the spectrum between voluntary and forced migration. In doing so, they reflect the shift in recent years from the author-centric study of migrant writing to a more inclusive conception of migration literature. The book contains sections on key terms and critical approaches in the field; important genres of migration literature; a range of forms and trajectories of migration, with a particular focus on the global South; and on migration literature’s relevance in social contexts outside the academy. Its range of scholarly voices on literature from different geographical contexts and in different languages is central to its call for and contribution to a pluriversal turn in literary migration studies in future scholarship. This Companion will be of particular interest to scholars working on contemporary migration literature, and it also offers an introduction to new students and scholars from other fields. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses that underpin East African Asian literature, it opens up and reflects upon issues of alienation, modernity, migration, diaspora, memory and nationalism.

The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery reveals the way recent scholarship in the field of slavery studies has taken a more expansive turn, in terms of both the geographical and the temporal. These new studies perform area studies-driven analyses of the representation of slavery from national or regional literary traditions that are not always considered by scholars of slavery and explore the diverse range of unfreedoms depicted therein. Literary scholars of China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa provide original scholarly arguments about some of the most trenchant themes that arise in the literatures of slavery – authentication and legitimation, ethnic formation and globalization, displacement, exile, and alienation, representation and metaphorization, and resistance and liberation. This Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery is designed to highlight the shifting terrain in literary studies of slavery and collectively challenge the reductive notion of what constitutes slavery and its representation.