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Author Bahadur, Gaiutra, 1975- author.

Title Coolie woman : the odyssey of indenture / Gaiutra Bahadur.

Publication Info. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2014]
©2014

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Bloomfield, Prosser Library - Adult Department  306.362 BAH    Storage
 Burlington Public Library - Adult Department  331.4 BAHADUR    Check Shelf
 Farmington, Main Library - Adult Department  331.4117 BAH    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  331.41 B14    Check Shelf
 Windsor, Main Library - Adult Department  331.4117 BA    Check Shelf
Description xxi, 274 pages, 16 unnumbered pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
Note "Published by arrangement with C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) London"--Title page verso.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-263) and index.
Contents The magician's box -- Ancestral memory -- The women's quarters -- Into dark waters -- Her middle passage -- A new world -- Beautiful woman without a nose -- Gone but not forgotten -- The dream of return -- Every ancestor -- Surviving history.
Summary "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. Now, in Coolie Woman, 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"--Publisher description.
Subject Indentured servants -- Guyana -- History -- 20th century.
Enslaved women -- Guyana -- History -- 20th century.
Women, East Indian -- Guyana -- Social conditions -- 20th century.
East Indian American women -- Social conditions (OCoLC)fst01736030
Indentured servants (OCoLC)fst00968872
Enslaved women (OCoLC)fst01178532
Guyana (OCoLC)fst01208722
Chronological Term 1900-1999
Genre/Form History (OCoLC)fst01411628
Other Editions: Also issued as: Bahadur, Gaiutra, 1975- Coolie woman. London : Hurst, 2013 9781849042772 (OCoLC)825559735
ISBN 9780226034423 (cloth ; alkaline paper)
0226034429 (cloth ; alkaline paper)
9780226211381 (paperback)
022621138X (paperback)
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