Books > History > American history
|
Buy Now
Coolie Woman (Paperback)
Loot Price: R815
Discovery Miles 8 150
|
|
Coolie Woman (Paperback)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
In 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. In Coolie Woman--shortlisted for the 2014
Orwell Prize--her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a
journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and
trawling through countless colonial archives, 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 either runaways, widows, or
outcasts. Many of them 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 one's
roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and
opportunity.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.