summer reading notes 1: guano

My habit is to take handwritten notes but I plan on doing a lot of random summer reading so I'll need a better system of being able to find stuff again ages from now. Transcribing onto here. 

Goffe, Tao Leigh, '"Guano in their Destiny": Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture', Amerasia Journal, 45:1 (2019), pp. 27-49. 

• Guano (seagull droppings - mountains of waste) = multimillion dollar industry in mid-C19 (specifically 1845-1880)
• 100,000 Chinese indentured laborers in Peru
• Known as 'white gold' - popular until rise of chemical fertiliser in 1909
• Tusán: Chinese in Peru
• Up to 20% of Peruvians could have Chinese ancestry
• Chinese presence and absence
• Creolisation (Glissant) vs Indigenisation (Wynter): who has claim to stolen land?
• "The mutilation of flesh and (...) the decay of bones as foundational to contending with the enslaved and indentured presence in the Americas" (28)
• Hortense Spillers
• "Theft of the body and volition" (28)
• 'Sedimentation': "Layering of racialised experiences" , "model for imagining histories of relation and transformation in intimate connection to the land." (28)
• Potential for decoloniality and how asians fit into it
• The indentured body is not property (enslaved) but it also can't own property (not fully 'human')  - the Chinese body enters the landscape
• Guano work as refuse (waste) and refusal (not wanting to work)
• Mutiny on ships
• Reading archives and looking for subversion from workers (who are silent in documents)
• *** Tina Campt - black vernacular photography historian ***
• Decontinentalising - no more USA-centric analysis
• Instead: Peru's Chincha Islands
• Centering islands not mainland: archipelagic (remapping, alternative geographies)
• + Caribbean archipelago: 'archipelagical thinking' can help us link these sites of similar histories to account for certain absences (29) - a chain, enmeshed, not comparative
• Blackbirding: kidnapping indigenous Australasians to do guano work, 1860s
• "A relational approach to the colonial archive is critical because it is not an attempt to collapse difference among distinct and specific histories, but rather to understand histories of violence as entangled and conterminous, abutting each other in the strata of the hemisphere" (29)
• "Racial sedimentation is the process by which different ethnic groups become ossified in the bedrock of the hemisphere" (29)
• Race is constructed, fixed through labor
• "Fixed in nature, signifyin an unresolved yet ambivalent state that conforms to neither human nor nonhuman agency." (29)
• Guano ironically most and least valuable
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Jackson (Soledad Brother) - transformation of people into fertiliser as metaphor for racialisation through labor, which in turn fuels capitalism and colonialism
• USA built on their backs - their destiny is guano, on which elites walk and build
• Guano islands are contested - USA Guano Islands Act of 1856 let people annex uninhabited islands for US
• Resulted in 200+ islands claimed
• Chinese laboreres as solution post-emancipation (1854) but also social problem
• Lisa Lowe, Saidiya Hartman: "What (...) are the ethics of reproducing violence or romance in narrating past lives?" (30)
• "The human body is central to this intimate materiality and it is at these material limits that we must be critical of the category of human in the way that Caribbean diasporic intellectuals such as Sylvia Wynter have been." (30)
• Listening for not listening to
• 'Chinese abolitionism' movement began in 1874 when people found out about conditions in Cuba, Peru
• Important distinction between indenture and slavery: "guise of consent" in indenture contract (33)
• False promise of eventual freedom
• Photo of Chinese guano diggers by Alexander Gardner, 1865
• Laborers' bodies barely visible - they are the cliff landscape
• Danger of falling into pits
• Islands = little chance for escape
• Series Rays of Sunlight from South America - romanticisation of unbearable conditions: heat, toxic fumes
• 'Guano art' (c. 1880) - art in a bottle made with different color guanos
• Style of Andrew Clemens sand art C19
• Did CHinese workers make this? Was this a refusal to work?
• Maybe American/Euro sailors, who sometimes waited 8 months for guano to be loaded onto ship (35)
• Guano plot device in 'Dr No' James Bond novel, set on guano island in Jamaica as Dr No's lair
• 'Coolie' as central to different ideas of freedom: in US, it was 'slavery by another name'; in Caribbean, it represented transition towards free labor (38)
• Triangulation of race: Black, white, Asian
• James Bond/UK spies international adventures --> Empire
• Dr No (half Chinese and frustrated by racial identity) has 'Chigroes' as henchmen to oversee workers - understanding of racialised labor divisions in guano
• Anachronism of guano in c20: temporal play
• Discourse about / surrounding guano constantly erase Chinese human labor: focus on birds, nature -- the humans are refuse(d)
• Today, Caribbean islands are offshore banks and "sites of suspicion regarding flows of Chinese currency" (39)
• Anxiety about Chinese takeover of Wall St 'colonisation' of Caribbean
• Indenture ships - chaotic, messy due to inacurrate records of names, misunderstanding of inter-ethnic dynamics etc. Not 'free labor' since this would be much clearer/more efficient with more voluntary behavior from workers
• "Caribbean Chinese surnames are often the hyphenated whole names of the male migrant who first arrived in the Caribbean" (41)
• Defy Euro and Sino conventions - new genealogy
• Jamaica's St Mary and Portland records used 'bodily marks' to identify people which tells stories of violence
• Cramming bodies onto ships to save space - but they need space to breathe: in 1855, 300 Chinese on a ship to Peru died of suffocation (43)
• "Indenture was designed to be distinct legally from enslavement, though it had similar infrastructure, methods, and materials" (43)
• 'Brookes' slave ship diagrams shows bodies but indenture ships don't
• "The ship is a space of racial enclosure, and thus, it is also a violent space of the transfiguration of race" (43)
• Fragments to create an archive to try and imagine the workers ' lives
• "Guano transforms the laborer in to a living dead subjectivity - 'living corpses' - that is the liminality of indenture." (45)