FORTHCOMING 2024

Karahee from the Cane Fields: Writing from the Coolie Diaspora

 Mānoa Journal 2024

Karahee from the Cane Fields: Writing from the Coolie Diaspora brings together the litera- ture of the global South Asian Labor Diaspora and explores how writers live with the legacy of indentured identity. During the history of indenture from the 1830s to the 1920s, a different kind of racialized bondage replaced the transatlantic slave trade and branded the servants of Em- pire as Coolie. The word Coolie comes from the dehumanization of people under Imperial rule, which turned Coolies into the product of what Aimé Césaire called thingification.

During this period, the British displaced Indians–some by their own volition and others by force–from the ports of Calcutta and Madras to the settlements and colonies in Fiji, Mauritius, Re- union, South Africa, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname. From and out of these plantation communities of survival and resilience, the writers in Karahee from the Cane Fields explore their ancestral ties to land and indenture, and question what the inheritance of the cane field is, what the cane-sap residue marking the descendants of this system of indenture.

Here emerging and well-known voices from the Coolie Labor Diaspora gather in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translation, song, and graphic verse. Instead of the often written about concern for origins and cultural holdovers from ancestral India, the writers assembled in this karahee, this mehfil of flavors, ask: What now?