Post-Indentureship Feminisms

Second, we argue that this collection is at the forefront oftheorizing what we are calling post-indentureship feminisms, meaning feminist consciousness, theorizing and activism that traces its genealogy through indentureship and post-indentureship experience rather than through an Indian subcontinental diaspora framework. In dislodging India from being central in the considerations of the forms that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought and praxis have taken, we therefore call for greater attention to the ways that feminist desires call upon and articulate post-indenture culture and cosmologies, which connect seemingly disparate sites such as Fiji, Mauritius, south Africa, sri Lanka, and the Caribbean in ways that the concept of Indian diaspora does not. Thus, we propose that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought exemplifies the development of a significant intellectual tradition, which has evolved within the specific conditions of post-indentureship and post-slavery societies and is inextricably intertwined in cross-ethnic solidarities and relationality. It offers a conceptual terrain that those working on feminist thought in other post-indentureship societies can look to as they seek their own alternatives to both south Asian and Western feminist traditions and establish what transoceanic feminisms look like and share. Here we follow the work Lisa Outar is doing in her chapter linking Indo- Caribbean and Indo-Mauritian feminist writing and include within our terrain the scholarship and creative work that Indian women are doing within the wider geography of indentureship in order to note parallels, identify different navigational choices, and establish solidarities.

This overarching post-indentureship framework and noting of both parallels and differences within it holds particular relevance even within the Caribbean where indentureship experiences differed based on which country was the colonial master (as in the variations between the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean contexts). It also provides a conceptual toolbox in our contemporary moment as new waves of subcontinental Indians settle in the region and we and they seek new modes of self-understanding and knowledge production. Finally, post-indentureship feminism offers a theoretical anchor for understanding the contexts for epistemological production and circulation in the spaces of the second or third diasporas of Indo-Caribbeans, as they find themselves in immigrant contexts where their visible Indianness yokes them to subcontinental groupings even as they strive to find the historical and conceptual language to describe their unique specificities as products of indentureship.