“Coolie” Diaspora

Two groundbreaking works on the history of indentured labor and the Asian diaspora in the Caribbean came into conversation with one another on Wednesday, November 13, 2013.

In Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Gaiutra Bahadur traces the story of her great-grandmother, who in 1903 journeyed from India to Guyana and, through the excavation of countless colonial archives, reveals the complex lives of a quarter of a million other “coolie women” like her. Kathleen López‘s Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) explores the transition of the Chinese from indentured to free migrants and the formation of transnational communities.

Sukhdev Sandhu (Department of Social & Cultural Analysis) moderated.

 

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