In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor
practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a
sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and
circulation of tea. "A Time for Tea" reveals how the female
tea-pluckers seen in advertisements--picturesque women in
mist-shrouded fields--came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in
India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from
terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor
practices enforced by the patronage system.
Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn
and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who
labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions.
In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, "A Time
for Tea" demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of
travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women
workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of
local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the
privileges and paradoxes of her own "decolonization" as a Third
World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended
reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in
the plantation's villages. It explores the overlapping processes by
which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked
patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes
of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the
discussion.
"A Time for Tea" will appeal to anthropologists and historians,
South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism,
postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international
feminism.
Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope
Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.
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