Mother India's Shadow Over El Dorado
Author : Clem Seecharan
Publisher :
Page : 524 pages
File Size : 39,8 MB
Release : 2011
Category : East Indians
ISBN : 9789766376642
Contradictory Indianness
Author : Atreyee Phukan
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 35,16 MB
Release : 2022-07-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1978829124
Book Description
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.
The Legacy of Indian Indenture
Author : Maurits S. Hassankhan
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 31,48 MB
Release : 2016-11-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 135198683X
Book Description
This book is the second publication originating from the conference Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour: Past, present and future, which was organised in June 2013, by the Institute of Graduate Studies and Research (IGSR), Anton de Kom University of Suriname. The articles are grouped in four sections. Section one concentrates on indenture in the Caribbean and the IndianOcean and includes four diverse, but inter-related chapters and contributions. These reveal some newly- emerging, impressive trends in the study of indenture, essentially departing from the over used neo-slave scholarship. Not only are new concepts explored and analysed, but this section also raises unavoidable questions on previously published studies on indenture. Section two shows that there are many areas that need to be re-examined and explored in the study of indenture. The chapters in this section re-examine personal narratives of indentured labourers, the continuous connection between the Caribbean and India as well as education and Christianization of Indians in Trinidad. The result is impressive. The analysis of personal accounts or voices of indentured servants themselves certainly provides an alternative perception to archival information written mostly by the organizers of indenture. Section three in this volume focuses on ethnicity and politics. In segmented societies like Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago institutional politics and political mobilization are mainly ethnically based. In Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana this has led to ethnic and political tensions. These themes are explored in these three articles. Section four addresses health, medicine and spirituality – themes which, until recently, have received little attention. The first article examines the historical impact of colonialism through indentureship, on the health, health alternatives and health preferences of Indo-Trinidadians, from the period between 1845 to the present. The second examines the use of protective talismans by Indian indentured labourers and their descendants. Little or no psychological research has been done on the spiritual world of Indian immigrants, enslaved Africans and their respective descendants, with special reference to the use of talismans.
Multiple Homemaking
Author : Ruben Gowricharn
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 32,17 MB
Release : 2020-11-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1000220044
Book Description
This book develops a theoretical perspective on homemaking as the ethnic condition of Indian diaspora communities. It draws on empirical case studies to elucidate the multiple homemaking practices of two overseas Indian groups and their relations to their homeland, namely the Surinami Hindustanis and the Dutch Hindustanis. In doing so, it provides a new perspective on homemaking that captures ethnogenesis, integration and diasporic bonding at once. As opposed to the extant discourse on homemaking which overlooks institutional and cultural requirements, the author makes a point to scrutinise such concepts as douglarisation, groupism, citizenship, institutions, ethnification, social networks and technology, and transnational flows. Unique and compelling, the book will be highly useful in studies of diaspora, globalisation and transnational migration, multiculturalism, cultural studies, ethnic minority studies, sociology, politics and international relations, and South Asian studies.
Bearing Witness
Author : Doug Munro
Publisher : ANU Press
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 40,20 MB
Release : 2017-07-13
Category : History
ISBN : 1760461229
Book Description
"Brij V. Lal is a singular scholar. His work has spanned disciplines—from history to politics—and genres—from conventional monograph history, to participant history, political commentary, encyclopaedia, biography and faction. Brij is without doubt the most eminent scholar Fiji has ever produced. He also remains the most significant public intellectual of his country, despite having been banned from entering it in 2009. He is also one of the leading Pacific historians of his generation, and an internationally recognised authority on the Indian diaspora. This Festschrift volume celebrates, reflects upon and extends the life and work of this colourful scholar. The essays, whose contributors are drawn from across the globe, do more than review Brij’s work; they also probe his contribution to both scholarly and political life. This book will therefore serve as an invaluable guide for readers from all walks of life seeking to better situate and understand the impact of Brij’s scholarly activism on Fiji and beyond." — Clive Moore, University of Queensland "It is a pleasure to commend this collection of very different essays that celebrate, reflect upon and extend the life and work of a remarkable scholar. Although I have had, at times, a close association with Brij Lal’s life and work, I have learned much from reading this book. It provokes further thought about the course of democracy in Fiji, and the very sorry state and future of Pacific history and the humanities in academia. Here is a timely assertion of the significance and major contribution that courageous scholars such as Brij have made to the study and public awareness of these areas of concern." — Jacqueline Leckie, University of Otago
The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies
Author : Martin Thomas
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 867 pages
File Size : 24,4 MB
Release : 2023-11-02
Category : History
ISBN : 0192636634
Book Description
The lethality of conflicts between insurgent groups and counter-insurgent security forces has risen markedly since the Second World War just as those of conventional, or inter-state wars have declined. For several decades, conflicts within states rather than between them have been the prevalent form of organised political violence worldwide. Recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have fired interest in colonial experiences of rebellion, while current western interventions in sub-Saharan Africa have prompted accusations of 'militarist humanitarianism'. Yet, despite mounting interest in counter-insurgency and empire, comparative investigation of colonial responses to insurrection and civil disorder is sparse. Some scholars have written of a 'golden age of counter-insurgency', which began with Britain's declaration of a Malayan Emergency in 1948 and ended with the withdrawal of US ground troops from Vietnam in 1973. It is with this period, if not with any presumed 'golden age' that this volume is concerned. This Handbook connects ideas about contested decolonization and the insurgencies that inspired it with an analysis of patterns and singularities in the conflicts that precipitated the collapse of overseas empires. It attempts a systematic study of the global effects of organized anti-colonial violence in Asia and Africa. The objective is to reconceptualize late colonial violence in the European overseas empires by exploring its distinctive character and the globalizing processes underpinning it.
Beyond Being Koelies and Kantráki
Author : Margriet Fokken
Publisher : Uitgeverij Verloren
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 33,2 MB
Release : 2018
Category : East Indians
ISBN : 9087047215
Book Description
This book traces the self-positioning of Hindostani people in the face of British and Dutch colonial practices. Originally from India and shipped to the Dutch colony of Suriname after the abolition of slavery, the Hindostani served as contract labourers to keep the plantation system afloat from 1873. Central to the book is the perspective of the Hindostani themselves. We travel alongside the Hindostani from the moment they were recruited and their movement through the depots awaiting shipment, their travel experiences, their arrival in Suriname, relocation to plantations, and their dispersal following the end of their contracts, either as city workers, or farmers. All along, the book poses the question of identification: how did Hindostani make sense of themselves, their fellow Hindostani, and Surinamese society? Stereotyped images make way for insight in lived experience of lower and higher caste, Hindus and Muslims, men and women.
Mother India's Shadow Over El Dorado
Author : Clem Seecharan
Publisher :
Page : 524 pages
File Size : 28,14 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9789766373948
Book Description
"Multiple constructions of India, as homeland, have been central to the shaping of Indo-Guyanese identity. An imagined India part fact, part fantasy has continually woven into the Indo-Guyanese consciousness a rich, elevating perception of self: an antidote to the deflating image of the coolie that lingered when the last Indian indentures were cancelled in 1920. In Mother India s Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity, 1890s-1930s, Clem Seecharan reconstructs the circumstances surrounding the development of Indo-Guyanese nationalism. He assesses the impact of the Golden Age of the Ramayana; the glories of ancient India unearthed by British scholars/administrators (Indologists); and Gandhi s virtual deification in his campaign for India s freedom. An India seen to be in revolt against imperial rule inspired several Indo-Guyanese intellectuals, such as Joseph Ruhomon, Peter Ruhomon and J.I. Ramphal, to popularise an image of Mother India that bolstered Indo-Guyanese self-esteem. Drawing on a range of primary sources, the book presents a comprehensive picture of the many Indias Indo-Guyanese (Hindus, Muslims and Christians) embraced in countering the coolie stain, while seeking to belong in creole society. On the flip side, the consuming El Dorado syndrome in Guyana bred a discernible triumphalism among Indo-Guyanese, manifested in the Colonisation Scheme of the 1920s and the associated ideas of creating an Indian colony or a Greater India in Guyana. This kindled a resilient fear, among African-Guyanese, of Indian economic and political domination which still haunts the country. Seecharan handles these complex issues lucidly and authoritatively. Mother India s Shadow is indispensable in comprehending the smouldering ethnic insecurities of contemporary Guyana. " "
Glimpses of a Global Life
Author : Shridath Ramphal
Publisher : Dundurn
Page : 625 pages
File Size : 22,86 MB
Release : 2014-11-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 145973128X
Book Description
Shridath "Sonny" Ramphal looks back at the fifteen years he spent as the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. He shares glimpses of conflicts, discussions, and characters such as Uganda's tyrant, Idi Amin, and the enlightened spirits of others like Germany's Willy Brandt and Nelson Mandela — all of whom Ramphal encountered in his global life.
Girmitiyas and the Global Indian Diaspora
Author : Ashutosh Kumar
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 44,11 MB
Release : 2024-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1009445286
Book Description
Many Indians journeyed out of India to supplant the loss of slave labour in the former European plantation colonies of Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth century onwards. This book aims to highlight the careers of these migrants who served as vital agents in building the global society of the twenty-first century. It explores the transformative experiences of those who migrated, and the memories of those who did not return after expiration of their contracts but chose instead to stay in their respective host countries. It describes the many challenges they faced — ageing in a society far from home, the loss of their formal Indian identity after Indian independence, their efforts to preserve a sense of community in the post-independence societies of South Africa and the Caribbean, and their adapting to the new political and social realities they faced as minorities in the countries in which their ancestors had adventurously determined to settle and live.
