Mapping West Indian Orientalism: Race, Gender and Representations of Indentured Coolies in the Nineteenth-Century British West Indies

The european invention of Empire in the Atlantic World cannot be divested from its connections with the historical construction of the "orient as the object of a particular form of colonial power and knowledge."¹ Edward Said's profound argument about Orientalism as a discourse highlights Western constructions of "oriental society" as free of social differentiation (i.e. a theory of despotic/arbitrary power)² , the absence of a tradition of civil rights and a theory of social change (theory of social stagnation), and a theory of sexuality, sensuality, and irrationality.³ While it is important to acknowledge that Orientalist thought persistently constructs the orient (as stagnant, irrational, and backward) in contrast to the occident (changeful, rational, progressive),⁴ Lisa Lowe's distinction between French and British Orientalisms illustrates an uneven matrix of historical/cultural sites that give rise to internal complexities and instabilities in the discursive formation.⁵ Lowe situates this matrix within a deeper debate about the particular ways in which Asians were intimately tied to, yet remain peripheral to, the dominant historiographies of European modernity.⁶ Caribbean Studies scholar Mimi Sheller poses a related question in Consuming the Caribbean: "While Orientalism has been examined by Edward Said as a discourse within Europe about the East, how did it shift from this geographical referent to take on a wider significance as a generic 'regime of difference' in the Caribbean, understood as another 'Indies'?"⁷ According to Sheller, this intertwining between "East and West Indies in the contact zones of European colonization remains unexamined, yet has deeply influenced the formation of Euro-American self-identity."⁸

In the nineteenth century, British Orientalist discourse emerged as a powerful discursive apparatus for re-ordering peoples transported out of the "Orient," yet retained within the boundaries of Empire. Representations of "orientals" as backward, irrational, and possessing immutable or natural qualities that were antagonistic to Western self-conceptions were formulated and re-circulated through a growing British visual and literary tradition moored in a wider project of justifying imperial rule. According to Lowe,⁹ the discursive notions of "India and Indians . . . lay at the core of the British imperial strategy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," especially since post-emancipation systems of indentured labor literally circulated Indians between India and other British colonial territories such as Mauritius, Fiji, and the West Indies. Lowe further observes: " . . . the British representations of India and Indians establish as British the position of narrative agency or subjectivity; the Indian people, landscapes, and images occupy the position of objects brought into focus by the British subject's point of view."¹⁰ As East Indians crossed the boundary of a constructed Old World into the New World, British orientalist discourse was challenged to re-establish racialized boundaries and a sense of distance between the Old World and the New, reifying persistent orientalist tropes, while inverting others to meet the specific demands of re-establishing order in the British West Indies. This adjustment implied that the idea of the East Indian in the West Indies had to be strictly managed and disciplined through a repeating matrix of discursive measures of distancing and approximating to British ideals that might be termed "West Indian Orientalism."

This article traces the systematic deployment and maneuver of Orientalist discourse in the nineteenth-century British West Indies to manage indentured East Indian laborers in the context of slipping colonial authority. I analyze racialized and gendered representations of "coolie" laborers in the literary and visual representations of colonial travel writers to demarcate the significance of Orientalist discourse in the re-invention of colonial hegemony in the post-emancipation West Indies.¹¹ In her readings of the colonial archive, Lowe has observed that ideas related to race, gender, family, and reproduction were central to modern constructions of freedom and humanism. Similarly, this article concentrates on the shifting racialized and gendered relations of labor and culture on the British West Indian plantation within the first fifty years of East Indian indentureship (1838–1888)—a period of experimentation, recalibration, and re-rationalization...