Queering Jahaji: An Indo-Caribbean Genealogy of Speculative Erotics Pubblico

Abstract

On July 11, 1904, an indentured Indian woman lay among plantain trees in Guyana, nearly decapitated by her ex who followed her to work. On December 5, 2016, an Indo-Guyanese woman lay on a sidewalk in Queens, New York, nearly decapitated by her ex who followed her to work. My dissertation traces this intimacy between violence and queer kinship among indentured Indian women on sugarcane plantations (1838-1917) in the Caribbean. Reading colonial-era postcards from Trinidad and Tobago, lesbian film, drag queen performances and gender justice activism, I introduce a theory of speculative erotics to argue that queer kinship among these indentured Indian women or jahaji figures has endured as unarchived sites of survival amidst horrific gender-based violence, from the nineteenth-century sugarcane plantation to the sidewalks of present-day New York City.  

Nearly two million Indians were trafficked throughout the British, French and Dutch empires from 1838-1917 to replace slave labor on plantations; yet these unrecorded bodies remain on the margins of South Asian history. Aboard ships transporting Indians from the port of Calcutta to ports throughout the Caribbean, Indians – nearly always separated from their biological families – referred to each other as jahaji bhai (ship brother) and jahaji bahen (ship sister). My dissertation upsets these heterosexual identifiers of kinship by considering queer intimacy from the site of the plantation to lesbian film, drag performance and gender justice activism. I document this underrepresented history by tracing an intergenerational legacy of violence against women on the site of these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sugarcane plantations in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana to present-day murders of Indo-Caribbean women. I conduct a Foucauldian genealogy of the figure of the indentured Indian woman (jahaji) to argue that within this history, queer kinship has remained an unarchived site of survival within this intergenerational legacy of violence. Amidst sodomy between indentured Indian men, polyandrous women and cheating “wives,” I argue that queer kinship – rather than the nuclear family – functioned as a site of survival for indentured descendants. 

Table of Contents

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………… 1

 

Chapter 1 – Queering Jahaji: Visualizing Same-Sex Kinship………..…….. 40

 

Chapter 2 – Indentured Sex Life: Becoming Wives…………………….…..… 66

 

Chapter 3 – Coconut/Cane & Cutlass:

Queer Visuality in the Indo-Caribbean Lesbian Archive………………..….  95

 

Chapter 4 – Jahaji in Drag: Coolie, Queens……………………….…….……... 116

Coda – Jahajee Sisters: A Personal Prehistory ………………….....……….… 142

 

Bibliography

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	South Asian Studies Caribbean Studies GLBT Studies
Parola chiave	Indo-Caribbean Queer archives Indian Indentureship
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Dr. Lynne Huffer, Emory University
Committee Members	Dr. Valerie Loichot, Emory University Dr. Sean Meighoo, Emory University

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