Indentured History in Lore: Theorizing the Communal Discourse Archive

ABSTRACT

This article theorizes the discursive endeavors of indentured communities to archive history, through comparing Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). Set in fictional labor colonies in the Americas, the two antirealist narratives show how collective literary form reveals the persistent ways in which historical knowledge is recorded and circulated. Drawing on Rey Chow’s scholarship, the article contends that the assemblages of discourses and acts of lore-making manifested in both novels gesture to the alternative modes of recounting the untold histories of indentureship. I conceptualize the communal archive through three key frameworks: movement, network, and imagination. The disciplinary forces of the indenture system are theorized in movement, a term that explicates the workers’ liminal positions in the colony. Network captures each community’s dynamism, multiplicity, and cacophony. By paying attention to the gossip culture, I examine how gossip as discourse network redefines the unruly acts of collaboration among the indentured. Finally, my analysis identifies imagination as a conceptual agent that gives form to the rebellious network and promises its continuation. The polyphonic and motley communal archive offers a new method of engaging with diasporic literary texts that serve as alternative historical accounts for the footnoted and silenced.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In her 2011 PMLA article, Susan Koshy introduces the notion of “exorbitant citizens” to refer to those whose citizenship remains “eccentric, erratic, or irregular because they fall outside hegemonic cultural narratives of membership or are denied the full right of citizens” (597). Rendered peripheral to the “cultural-national genealogies” (597), the concept of exorbitant citizenry and their transnational or translocal affiliations gesture to the ruptured identities and “varied forms of minority becoming” (608) from which indentured labor communities are also inseparable.

2. Here, I echo Rey Chow’s earlier work, The Age of the World Target (2006), where the emphasis on knowledge production that traces “the broken lines, shapes, and patterns that may have become occluded” is made. Chow envisions an “archaeological network” of discontinuous and differentiated “knowledge items” (WT 81) as an alternate mode of organizing, mapping, and producing historical knowledge against “epistemic targeting of the world” (WT 39).

3. As Yun explicates, the contrast between Chinese and Indian coolie systems mainly comes from the differences in “imperial agendas, systems of migration,” as well as “cultural and local politics”: “Major differences arose in routes and destinations, labor conditions, transport economics, ‘contract’ constructions and administrations, and gender ratios” (8).

4. In her research, Munasinghe reveals how creating the national discourse that renders Indo-Trinidadian community’s national belonging “legitimate” has meant “changing the symbolics of nation itself” (2).

5. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is deeply tied to the emergence of network as a popular theoretical concept.

6. In Network Aesthetics (2016), Jagoda examines the network form and theorizes its aesthetic, somatic, and affective significance in contemporary social world. Defining “network imaginary” as “the complex of material infrastructures and metaphorical figures that inform our experience” (3), Jagoda looks at the presence of network forms in media and routine practices, identifying these interconnected structures with “openness, flexibility, extensibility, complexity, internal asymmetry,” and recognizing the “interdependence of individual parts” (8).

7. For Mignolo, macronarratives “from the perspective of coloniality” are that which signal “a radical departure” from existing global projects and demand “a different logic”: “Without such macronarratives told from the historical experiences of multiple local histories (the histories of modernity/ coloniality), it would be impossible to break the dead end against which modern epistemology and the reconfiguration of the social sciences and the humanities … have framed hegemonic forms of knowledge” (22).

8. Mehta argues that Chandin’s crimes against his daughters are free from public condemnation because he is “protected by a culture of silence that surrounds domestic violence in Indo-Caribbean communities, wherein women are socialized into accepting their own victimization and into seeing themselves as sexual prey” (72).

9. Vernacular history-making is an oral-history centered methodology that the historian Monica Muñoz Martinez introduces and practices in her book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (2018).

10. In Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (2019), Ruiz explores the notion of endurance to explicate Puerto Ricanness, which can be succinctly seen as a continuous enactment of “permanent endurance practices to cultivate an existence under colonial time” (2).

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Bonnie Yonbom Chung

Bonnie Yonbom Chung is a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research explores polylingualism in anglophone novels. She is currently working on a comparative project that traces sonic network and movement in Asian diasporic and Caribbean writing.