Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item UNHOMELY STIRRINGS: REPRESENTATIONS OF INDENTURESHIP IN INDO-CARIBBEAN LITERATURE FROM 1960 TO THE PRESENT(2014) Baksh, Anita; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the ways in which East Indian Caribbean (Indo-Caribbean) writers negotiate history, identity, and belonging. Nineteenth-century government officials and plantation owners described Indian indentureship (1838-1917) in the British West Indies as a contractual system of employment implemented after abolition and as a civilizing mechanism aimed at reforming heathen laborers. Challenging these accounts, historians have shown that the system was a new mode of exploitation. Colonial administrators used coercive tactics to control workers and implemented strategic laws to confine Indians to the plantation. These policies constructed Indians as foreigners and interlopers in colonial society, perceptions that have significantly impacted the formation of Indo-Caribbean subjectivities and Indo-Caribbean claims to postcolonial citizenship in the region. Reading both canonical and lesser known texts, my project argues that Indo-Caribbean writers frequently engage with indentureship as a means to come to terms with this history of oppression and as a way to contest their elision in Anglophone Caribbean culture more widely. Drawing on postcolonial theory, I examine works published from 1960 to the present by authors from Guyana and Trinidad, countries where Indians constitute a significant portion of the population. My analysis begins in the 1960s because it was at this time that literary and political debates began to focus on decolonization and on defining a culture distinct from Britain. Given that Indian indentures were unable to record their own experiences, their perspectives are largely omitted from the Caribbean historiography. Moreover, as Indians moved off the plantation and gained socio-economic mobility, they often viewed indenture as a shameful part of their heritage that was best forgotten. By examining V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, Peter Kempadoo's Guyana Boy, Harold Ladoo's No Pain Like This Body, Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, the novels of Shani Mootoo, and the poetry of Rajkumari Singh, Rooplall Monar, and Mahadai Das, "Unhomely Stirrings" traces the processes by which indenture has been subjected to willful acts of forgetting within Indo-Caribbean communities and in larger national histories. These texts engage the ways in which the legacy of indentureship continues to shape the contemporary lives and identities of Indo-Caribbean people at home and in the diaspora.Item "Dear Little Living Arguments": Orphans and Other Poor Children, Their Families and Orphanages, Baltimore and Liverpool, 1840-1910(2009) Wilson, Marcy Kay; Gullickson, Gay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Orphanages in the United States and England cared for thousands of children between the early decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These institutions were central to local provisions for the poor during a time period in which state and government poor relief remained limited. Though a small group of studies have focused on American orphan asylums and even fewer works have evaluated English orphanages, no effort has of yet been made to engage in a comparative analysis of the institutions that cared for so many children in both countries. Through analysis of Protestant orphan asylum registers, correspondence, committee minutes, and annual reports, this dissertation investigates the local provisions made for poor children in Baltimore, Maryland and Liverpool, England, between 1840 and 1910, examines the socio-economic realities of the families these children came from, the ways in which poor children in both cities were affected by the needs of their families and the aid available to them, and the similarities and differences that existed between these orphanages and their residents. This dissertation argues that there were significant differences between orphanage inhabitants in both cities when it came to parental survival and to who children ended up with after their residence in these institutions, but that the orphanages were remarkably alike, providing the poor children in their care with similar educational, religious and vocational training that the middle-class reformers who ran these institutions understood as gender and class appropriate. This study reveals a prolonged commitment on the part of orphanage administrators in both cities to the use of indenture as a dismissal method, and suggests as well the existence of a shared trans-Atlantic understanding of poor children and their labor when it came to these asylum officials.