The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves of Cuba (review)

The Coolie Speaks is a remarkable interdisciplinary text that explores the historical, literary, and philosophical implications of Chinese indentured labor in nineteenth-century Cuba. Lisa Yun offers an exceptional analysis of the 1876 Cuba Commission Report, a compilation of hundreds of coolie testimonies gathered during an investigation into their mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of Cuban sugar planters. She argues that the testimonies, depositions, and petitions associated with the Commission Report evidence the articulation of coolie subjectivity as well as the emergence of a distinct literary and historical form she terms the coolie narrative. In doing so, she extends those arguments which simplistically cast Chinese indentured workers as racial anomalies located in between Cuba’s Black-white racial binary or as laborers who mediated the transition from a slave to free economy in Cuba.

The written and oral testimonies of Chinese workers – as acts of resistance, critique, and narrative – form the basis of the book’s analysis. Yun analyzes the detailed and often tragic accounts of coolie indentured laborers who worked in tension with African slaves and under oppressive conditions on Cuban plantations. She identifies not only how workers challenged, rebelled, and conspired against planter authority, but also how the act of testifying enabled them to articulate their historical voice, record family affiliations, construct collective memory, and communicate across linguistic, national, social, and class divisions. Her close examination of coolies’ responses reveals the fascinating ethnic and class heterogeneity of the workers themselves, disrupting modernist assumptions of a universal, homogenized coolie subject. Attuned to the multiple conditions that structured the state-sanctioned Commission interviews, Yun unravels the political, economic, and social contexts through which the testimonies were secured, transcribed, and produced. By laying bare the politics and ideologies that delimited the interviews, Yun offers a generative analysis of coolie subjectivity as both critical and symptomatic of the racial, social, and economic contradictions of modern liberalism.

With primary sources that include testimonies, political tracts, travelers’ accounts, legislation, and historical writings, Yun reveals how Chinese indentured workers embodied the contradiction between the promise of free contract labor and the brutal reality of everyday life on sugar plantations. Centering the experiences of Chinese laborers in her analysis, she investigates the modern contract as a mechanism that actively enabled conditions of slavery rather than disabling it. Her careful reading of coolie testimonies makes apparent “the disingenuous representation of freedom as contract and the actual practice of slavery via the contract” (139). Widely considered a legal instrument of free agency and agreement, the modern contract functioned as a disciplining mechanism for Chinese workers whose hopes and bodies were ensnared in the promises of an always deferred liberation.

One of the book’s most important contributions is its identification of a coolie narrative. Like the African slave autobiography and narrative, the coolie narrative has “the quality of being transpirational – to make known what was suppressed or secret, to exhale, to leak out what had transpired” (56). It is also characterized by “featured verse, literary allusions, historical references, cultural metaphors, and repeated tropes of witnessing, veracity, and resistance” that together expose the colonial economies, racial formations, and modernist contradictions that marked colonial Cuba (56). As such, the coolie narrative provides a generative historical and literary tool for cultural and social analysis.

Yun closes her detailed reading of coolie narratives with an unprecedented exploration of the life and writings of Antonio Chuffat Latour. Chuffat was a second-generation Afro-Chinese author who wrote Apunte histórico de los chinos en Cuba, a social history of the Chinese in Cuba during the dynamic period of abolition and independence. Yun credits Chuffat’s 1927 book as the earliest text to frame the Chinese experience in Cuba as a subaltern history intimately linked to the history of African slavery on the island. It also anticipated the work of subsequent scholars with its impressive portrayal of Chinese ethnic organizations, class formation, transnational politics, cultural groups, and diaspora. Like her treatment of the coolie narrative, Yun understands Chuffat’s...