Suzanne Persard, American University
March 11, time TBD
Location TBD

In 1838, Columbus’ dream was realized upon the shores of the Caribbean: Indians from the subcontinent set foot in the Americas. Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, an estimated half-a-million Indians were bound into indentured contracts to replace the labor of former slaves across Caribbean colonies including Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana from 1838 until 1917. The arrival of these laborers in the nineteenth century coincided with another phenomenon: the advent of modern photography. This talk examines a vast archive of tourist postcards that represented the presence of indentured Indian laborers in the colonial imagination alongside a lesser-known history of these laborers’ role engaging in anti-colonial protests, plantation strikes and acts of resistance in Jamaica. Persard demonstrates that far from the stereotype of tacit colonial subjects, indentured Indian laborers were engaged in struggles that defied the optics of colonial photography. This talk subsequently considers how we might situate these anti-imperial struggles of “American” revolution from the vantage point of Caribbean history.

Suzanne C. Persard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Culture Studies at American University. As a scholar of indentured labor to the Caribbean, her research is concerned with the intersections of kinship, gender and sexuality within indentured labor archives; visual cultures; and historiography. Her publications include articles in Feminist Review; Journal of West Indian Literature; Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies; and Journal of Indian Indentureship and Its Legacies.