Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture

By:

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The IndependentIn 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool.Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
Copyright:
2014

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
320 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780226043388
Related ISBNs:
9780226034423
Publisher:
The University of Chicago Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Gaiutra Bahadur
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Social Studies, Politics and Government
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

No Rating Yet