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Cargo Hold of Stars is an ode to the forgotten voyage of a forgotten people. Khal Torabully gives voice to the millions of indentured men and women, mostly from India and China, who were brought to Mauritius between 1849 and 1923. Many were transported overseas to other European colonies. Kept in close quarters in the ship's cargo hold, many died. Most never returned home. With Cargo Hold of Stars, Torabully introduces the concept of 'Coolitude' in a way that echoes Aimé Césaire's term 'Negritude, ' imbuing the term with dignity and pride, as well as a strong and resilient cultural identity and language. Stating that ordinary language was not equipped to bring to life the diverse voices of...
A deconstruction of the stereotypical depictions of the coolie in the British Empire.
This work offers a close reading of literary works in French and in English by women writers whose ancestors originally came to the Caribbean or across the Indian Ocean as indentured labourers.
The spirit of the poetic flowering of the 1960s is encapsulated in this comprehensive anthology. The collection gives voice to some fifty poets from Kenya, Uganda and Zambia, writing in English. The diversity of the interests and styles of the individual poets is illustrated: a blend of the gentle lyricism that is a feature of East African writing. All the major poets are included, and many not so well known. Amongst the best known are Jared Angira, Jonathan Kariara, Joseph Kariuki, Taban Lo Liyong, Okot p'Bitek, and David Rubadiri - one of the editors.
Essays, research, and art projects that formulate a Tidalectic worldview, addressing our most threatened ecosystem: the oceans. The oceans cover two-thirds of the planet, shaping human history and culture, home to countless species. Yet we, as mostly land-dwelling humans, often fail to grasp the importance of these vast bodies of water. Climate change destabilizes notions of land-based embeddedness, collapses tropes of time and space, and turns our future more oceanic. Tidalectics imagines an oceanic worldview, with essays, research, and artists' projects that present a different way of engaging with our hydrosphere. Unbound by land-based modes of thinking and living, the essays and research...
Parallel to the abolition of Atlantic slavery, new forms of indentured labour stilled global capitalism's need for cheap, disposable labour. The famous 'coolie trade' - mainly Asian labourers transferred to French and British islands in the Indian Ocean, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, as well as to Portuguese colonies in Africa - was one of the largest migration movements in global history. Indentured contract workers are perhaps the most revealing example of bonded labour in the grey area between the poles of chattel slavery and 'free' wage labour. This interdisciplinary volume addresses historically and regionally specific cases of bonded labour relations from the 18th century to sponsorship systems in the Arab Gulf States today.
A New York Times Notable Book A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.
Legendary Port of the Maritime Silk Routes: Zayton (Quanzhou)is a book of Asian premodern maritime history from global perspectives. The book is targeted at learners and students of China study in the field of literature relating to the knowledge of premodern maritime history and cultural exchange among South Fujian in coastal China, the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and beyond connected with Maritime Silk Trade Routes. The maritime paradigm is therefore central to the understanding of the transcultural character of this legendary port and its enlightenment to the win-win cooperative solution to the bottleneck of globalization.
This volume explores the intersections of diaspora and gender within the diasporic and Indian imagination. It investigates the ways in which race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality intersect with concepts of home, belonging, displacement and the reinvention of the nation and of self. Positioning itself as a companion to Kala Pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th century Migrations from India’s Perspective (Routledge, 2021), the present book examines whether indentureship and diasporic locations marginalised women and men or empowered them; how negotiations or resistances have been determined by race, class, caste, or ethnicity; how traditional standards of Indianness and gender relations have ...
Ottmar Ette’s TransArea proceeds from the thesis that globalization is not a recent phenomenon, but rather, a process of long duration that may be divided into four main phases of accelerated globalization. These phases connect our present, across the world’s widely divergent modern eras, to the period of early modern history. Ette demonstrates how the literatures of the world make possible a tangible perception of that which constitutes Life, both of our planet and on our planet, which may only be understood through the application of multiple logics. There is no substitute for the knowledge of literature: it is the knowledge of life, from life. This English translation will be of great...