Indentured Identities

Resistance and accommodation in plantation-era Fiji

Farzana Gounder | International Pacific College

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027226556 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027282163 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

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:

https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.15

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | pp. xi–xii

Shards of memories | pp. xiii–xiv

List of figures, maps, pictures, tables | pp. xv–xvi

Gloss | pp. xvii–xviii

Chapter 1. Getting acquainted with the Girmityas | pp. 1–20

Chapter 2. Gabriel Aiyappa’s Girmit | pp. 21–36

Chapter 3. Behind the scenes of Girmit Gāthā | pp. 37–46

Chapter 4. Transposing the oral into written | pp. 47–66

Chapter 5. Ram Rattan Mishar’s life narrative construction | pp. 67–96

Chapter 6. Ram Rattan Mishar’s identity and agency reconstructions | pp. 97–116

Restorying Girmit | pp. 117–118

Chapter 7. Guldhari Maharaj | pp. 119–132

Chapter 8. Ram Sundar Maharaj | pp. 133–148

Chapter 9. Jasoda Ramdin | pp. 149–182

Chapter 10. Ram Dulhari | pp. 183–210

Chapter 11. Ghori Gosai Part 1 | pp. 211–274

Chapter 12. Ghori Gosai Part 2 | pp. 275–298

Chapter 13. Constructing ‘I’ through the life narrative | pp. 299–314

Chapter 14. Conclusions and beginnings | pp. 315–324

Index | pp. 341–346

“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.”

T. Ruanni F. Tupas, National Institute of Education Singapore, in Journal of Sociolinguistics 17-2 (2013) pag. 264-266.

Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

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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.

Benton, Gregor

2022. Recruitment. In Chinese Indentured Labour in the Dutch East Indies, 1880–1942 [Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series, ], ► pp. 169 ff.

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.

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.

Lal, Brij V.

2019. Levelling Wind: Remembering Fiji,

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.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 july 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.

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