In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, European imperial governments and private enterprises contracted with workers from China and India under the terms of indenture and sent them to far-flung colonies from Cuba to Mauritius, Brazil to French Indochina, Trinidad to Natal. These empires and even newly independent colonies like Peru had settled on Asian indentured workers, commonly known as "coolies," as an alternative source of cheap labor that could circumvent Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade but could nonetheless maintain lucrative plantation economies during the global age of emancipation. Asian indentured labor is thus often understood in the context of the transition from chattel slavery to so-called “free labor” (given indenture's reliance on the contract), as "free labor" became the predominate labor form shoring up the global capitalist economy.

The comparisons to slavery call into question whether the literary, philosophical, and archival forms of representing indenture are necessarily similar to those of slavery. Would Saidiya Hartman’s powerful method of critical fabulation, for example, apply to those indentured laborers’ lives lost to history? What modes of narrating, representing, or figuring indenture arose in archives, state and imperial policies, and literature? The goal of this proposed panel, “Forms of Indenture,” is to explore the figuration of nineteenth and twentieth-century global Asian indentured labor in the literature, policy, journalism, and archival documents from the period. The panel will engage a comparative framework to explore South and East Asian indentured labor in the Caribbean and South Africa, with special attention to questions of how indenture is represented in fiction, nonfiction, and in the contracts of indenture themselves.

Following the pivotal work of scholars like Lisa Yun, whose monograph, The Coolie Speaks, explores the literary and rhetorical significance of archival texts of the coolie trade out of China, this panel takes up literary analyses of the records of Asian indenture in order to explore questions of labor, gender, and racial form. Other scholars like historians Moon-ho Jung and Evelyn Hu-Dehart have paid particular attention to the fraught status of indenture with respect to the question of freedom—whether indenture, given its use of contracts, constituted “free” labor and “free” immigration in contradistinction to enslaved labor and forced migration, despite the fact that coolies in the Americas often worked under the same brutal conditions as the enslaved. Given indenture’s status as not quite free but not quite slavery, what forms and figurations does this status engender in the literature and archives of indenture? Scholars are only beginning to ask questions of literary form in relation to Asian indenture, which is often understood and assessed predominately through a historical lens. This panel seeks to bring together scholars who are thinking rigorously about and through questions of literary form in relation to Asian indentured labor.

The panel begins with Anna Thomas’s reading of the nonfiction reporting and novel writing of the nineteenth-century imperial apologist and reformer Edward Jenkins. Exploring the role of sentiment in shaping the early literature on indenture in British Guiana, Thomas' paper suggests that generic conventions shared across novelistic and nonfiction writing produce “novel nonfiction forms” evident in the imperial archive, the colonial report, and the sentimental novel in the nineteenth century.

Next, the panel turns to Rebecca Liu’s analysis of the figuration of the Chinese coolie on the “corporate image” stamped on the contracts of indenture to Cuba. Through visual analysis of the corporate image in tandem with historical and literary readings of the narrative of transition from slavery to free labor invoked in policy reports and opinion pieces of the period, Liu's paper suggests that this oft-cited transition must be read literarily—as a fiction of progressive liberalism that invokes a narrative of movement toward freedom (free labor and free immigration) to sustain the claim that Asian indenture is not slavery.

The panel concludes with Swarnika Ahuja’s presentation on Shevlyn Mottai’s novel, Across the Kala Pani, a fictionalized account of the author’s female ancestors’ experiences of indenture from India to South Africa. Ahuja's paper explores how caste, gender, ethnicity and class identities intersect to shape indentured women’s experiences. Through particular attention to the fictionalization of familial histories, Ahuja’s reading of the novel analyzes the multiple frames and contexts through which a literary mode of understanding can reclaim an otherwise lost gendered, embodied experience of indenture.

Breakdown of allotted time:

Introduction: 8 min (5 min introduction to the session by the organizer; 3 min reading bios)

Speakers: 15 min each (total: 45 min)

Discussion: 22 min

Total: 75 min