Indentured Identities

Resistance and accommodation in plantation-era Fiji

Author
Farzana Gounder | International Pacific College
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027226556 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027282163 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00
 
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The book explores the historical dimension of Indian indenture from within the lived experience of laborers, who emigrated to Fiji from colonial India a century ago. As these laborers are no longer alive, one could argue that the experience of indenture is no longer accessible, if there had not been recordings of the laborers’ life narratives. It is seven of these audio recordings, made for public broadcast, which form the data for a fine-grained language-analysis to unearth the life-world of indenture. Through the merging of Labov’s high-point analysis with Bamberg’s positioning analysis, the book focuses on the situated discursive performativity of identities, and draws attention to the complex and at times conflicting positions within the life narratives. Sorting through those positions resulted in the ultimate challenge to the essentially homogenizing current master narrative discourse on who can be classified as an indentured laborer, and what signifies as an indenture experience.
[Studies in Narrative, 15] 2011.  xvii, 345 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“The strength of the book is in its elaborate articulation of its analytical framework, coupled with Gounder’s admirably self-conscious awareness of her own positionings. The reader is provided with theoretically sound justification for the choice of analytical tools, and thus is also provided with a range of options when doing his or her own linguistic/narrative analysis in the future. Likewise, Gounder’s
exposition of the merging of otherwise disparate analytical processes is equally sound, while remaining remarkably lucid.”
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Belisle, Donica
2024. Is Cane Sugar “Canadian”? The Disavowal of Global Lives and Lands within Canadian Sugar Marketing. Global Food History 10:1  pp. 68 ff. DOI logo
Benton, Gregor
2022. Recruitment. In Chinese Indentured Labour in the Dutch East Indies, 1880–1942 [Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series, ],  pp. 169 ff. DOI logo
Gounder, Farzana
2020. Gender Performativity in Subaltern Life Stories: Changing Discourses of Indentured Women as Mothers and Labourers. In Indentured and Post-Indentured Experiences of Women in the Indian Diaspora,  pp. 21 ff. DOI logo
Lal, Brij V.
2015. Avatars of Fiji’s Girmit narrative. In Narrative and Identity Construction in the Pacific Islands [Studies in Narrative, 21],  pp. 177 ff. DOI logo
Lal, Brij V.
2019. Levelling Wind: Remembering Fiji, DOI logo
Paviour-Smith, Martin
2015. We’ve never seen a cyclone like this. In Narrative and Identity Construction in the Pacific Islands [Studies in Narrative, 21],  pp. 37 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2011037697 | Marc record