Women, Gender and the Legacy of Slavery and Indenture

The age of imperialism ushered in a new phenomenon of large-scale organized migration of labourers through the systems of slavery and indenture, which were devised to feed the colonial political-economy. Another feature of such migrations was that it led to the permanent settlement of the uprooted African and Asian labourers in the new lands. These developments, in the long run, intertwined the histories of the ‘ruler’ and the ‘ruled’, the so-called ‘civilized’ and the ‘uncivilized’ along with the people from various continents, thus giving rise to plural societies. The narratives, however, remained dominated by the colonial legacies and frames of reference. Today such historical colonial narratives are being challenged and clarified through multi-disciplinary academic engagements. The authors in this volume take gender as a prominent analytical category and raise new questions and understandings in the way we conceptualize, document and write about gendered migrations in the diaspora.

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Farzana Gounder is a linguist and Deputy Head of School (Research) at IPU New Zealand Tertiary Institute. Her research area is oral nar-ratives of indenture and their role in the collective memory.

Amba Pande is with the Centre for Indo-Pacific Studies, School of Inter national Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research area is the Indian diaspora and international migration.

Kalpana Hiralal is Professor in History in the School of Social Sciences at Howard College, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her PhD dissertation focused on the South Asian Diaspora to Africa in the context of settlement, trade and identity formation.

Maurits S. Hassankhan is a historian and senior lecturer/researcher at the Anton de Kom University, Suriname. He has organized several inter national conferences on slavery and Indentured labour and diaspora.