“Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: Intimacies, Proximities, Relationalities” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 56 (7) 219-231
This essay engages a key thematic of Gaiutra Bahadur’s —racialized, gendered and sexualized violence in the making of the “coolie” woman in British Guiana. Through literary nonfiction, Bahadur offers a rigorous and imaginative methodological approach that reveals and challenges the epistemic violence of the official archive. Her analysis incisively attends to the relationships between empire, intimacy, and violence without sacrificing attention to either the devastating effects for women or the multiple ways Indian women refused to be defined only in terms set by violence. Finally, while Bahadur engages infrastructures of colonial violence that positioned the “coolie” as not a slave, this essay offers a cautionary note about reproducing archival investments in irreconcilable difference. It extends Bahadur’s own approach to revisit some of the intimate encounters between Africans and Indians presented in the text to suggest other readings of ordinary proximities beyond violence.
Alissa Trotz is a Professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Women & Gender Studies and the Department of Caribbean Studies. Her work explores transnational feminism; social movements; political violence; history, memory and archives; and transnational migration and diaspora.
Other publications from this author include:
- The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings by Andaiye (2020)
- Unmasking the State: Politics, Society and Economy in Guyana 1992-2015 (2019)
- “Engaging the Diasporas: An Alternative Paradigm from the Caribbean” in New Rules for Global Justice: Structural Redistribution in the Global Economy (2016)
- Gender, Ethnicity and Place: Women and Identity in Guyana (2014)