Robinson, Olivia, 'Travelling Ayahs of the 19th and 20th centuries: global networks and mobilisation of agency', History Workshop Journal, 86 (2018), pp. 44-66.
- Thousands of ayahs, amahs 1890s-1930s arrived in UK
- Either permanently employed or hired just for sea voyage
- Challenging idea of ayah as passive - had agency
- Ayahs neither passengers nor crew - peripheral, Othered position
- "Intimate frontiers of empire" (44) - Ann Laura Stoler on domestic as sociocultural space where race was negotiated and crucial role of servants in colony
- 3 sites of empire: colony - at sea - metropole
- India, Ceylon, HK, Sg, Malaya, China treaty ports
- Brit women moving to colonies to marry Brit men (from late 1850s) -- otherwise they would marry locals (dangerous)
- 1869 Suez Canal made eastbound trips easier
- In India, domestic service was male-dominated until 1930. Idea of childcare as 'woman's job' was imposed by British women -- created new employment sector for local women
- Childcare = most important role, proximity with mistress
- Infants only - older children with British nurse or sent back to UK
- Being 'part of family' also reinforced loyalty
- Infantilising colonial natives - Brit mistresses (memsahib) must treat native servants like children
- But dilemma of ayah raising white children
- Need constant surveillance / policing of servants
- Thus both central and peripheral
- On ship, ayah couldn't travel First Class with family and white servant - relegated to mixed-gender deck (worst ticket)
- No bed: ayah needed to bring own mattress and overall seregation from family despite doing all the childcare
- 1920s got better but formalised distance - eg own toilets
- No names on passenger list - just 'Ayah', literally belonging to employers
- Ayah's Home, London existed for many years before being taken over by Ldn City Mission (evangelists) - excl. for non-white nannies
- Only sources are Brit managers - racialised, infantilising
- Idea of 'family unit' with superintendent and wife as 'parents'
- Commercial and expensive (paid for by employer wife)
- Ayahs needed character references and could be expelled for misbehavior - not 'charity'
- 12 instances of ayahs unable to return home - India Office denied responsibility, sent them to Ayah's Home to sort it out (find a new family)
- Resemblance to New Poor Law - out of sight, out of mind
- Overall Ayah never allowed to stay in the UK
- Overly victimising narrative - Ayahs found ways to capitalise on situation
- Many Ayahs specifically worked only on ships - hired out by agencies
- Much skill needed: able to serve and travel
- Some went to Australia, Americas etc - "sophisticated recruitment infrastructure" (54), much demand
- Also private ads: mistresses wanting Ayahs or trying to get new family for current Ayah
- Traveling ayahs were diverse whereas local (non-travelling) ayahs were sweeper caste and married to family's sweeper
- Many widows
- Very high wages compared to regular ayahs - very valued, kept considerable savings
- Could negotiate or demand/set own payment
- Regularly went to UK - not 'lost'
- Sometimes sole adult carer of kids
- Not afraid to lodge complaints with authorities
- Ayah's Home stay seen as inevitable downtime between jobs - some did extra work (textiles, selling items between UK and colony)
- Home segreg. by ethnicity but they mingled socially: games, sharing food
Guridy, Frank Andre, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapell Hill, 2010)
Introduction
- Juan René Betancourt: anti-racist activist in Cuba since 1940s
- Castro liberates Cuba 1959: Betancourt participated in new gov's anti discrimination efforts- but clashed and exiled
- Critiqued gov's treatment of Afro-Cubans in 'Castro & the Cuban N-gro' (1961) - appealing to Af-Ams
- Af-Cub and Af-Am exchange history based on shared 'colored'/diasporic identity
- Black, upwardly mobile elite non-state
- Cuba's geog. proximity = unique
- Affected by Cold War - new idea of 'Third World' and 'wretched of the earth' liberation struggles who "framed their demands within the dominant discourse of nationalism" which "overshadowed forms of solidarity that were not driven by the precepts of nat'ism" (2)
- Cuban Rev's explicit identification with African struggles = legitimacy of nation
- Rise of new Af-Cub/Am network (1959-60) initiated by Cub gov to get Af-Am support: incl Amiri Baraka
- Castro visits Harlem, Malcolm X in 1960
- Guridy examines pre-Castro network (mainly first half of C20)
- Diaspora identification did not contradict nationalism
- "We have yet to fully investigate how transnational modes of belonging are created and maintained" (4)
- Segregation and imperialism impelled Black people to develop alternative networks - material benefit eg education, political support
- 'Routes' not 'roots' (slavery) which doesn't necessarily centralise African continental homeland
- James Clifford
- Not 'Black internationalism', not simple but v. varied
- Diaspora in practice
- Af-Cub patriots/nat'ists looked to Booker T Washington's Tuskegee Institute as role model
- Diaspora-making process: translations and misunderstandings
- 'US-Caribbean world': trade networks C18 --> war of 1898 when US started intervening more
- Linked northeastern US cities to southern US & Carib
- Increased tourism in 1910s-30s, corporate transport/travel (steamships)
- Armed intervention and US cultural spread (protestantism, consumerism) incl. Panama Canal
- Cuba prominent due to size and proximity = appeal to US
- Range of social actors with diff. interests in US presence
- Black people were main laborers, incl. inter-island migration
- Happening alongside US 'great migration' which included Anglophone Carib.
- Garveyism would be born here
- US presence in Cuba shaped/encouraged construction of nat'l identity and of race
- "Cross-fertilisation" (10)
- Cuba had a KKK from 1920s+
- Recreation and leisure segreg. in Cuba - under-studied
- Af-Cubs made own communities - 'sociedades de color' eg Club Atenas - elite
- Diaspora felt they were more civilised than Africans and wanted to 'uplift' Black race - esp Af-Ams (imperialism)
- Garvey's UNIA (Universal N-gro Improvement Association) vibrant performance culture
- Cuba had most UNIA divisions outside USA
- Harlem Ren <----> Afrocubanismo: artists taking up ethnic forms /motifs
- Black tourism 1930s - 50s to Cuba - adapting to racial exclusion in leisure industry
Goffe, Tao Leigh, 'Intimate Occupations: The Afterlife of the "Coolie"', Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, 22:1 (2014), pp. 53-61.
- 2 conemp novels: The Pagoda by P Powell (1998), The Book of Salt by M Truong (2003) - queering the colonial archive, giving voice
- The 'undocumented' means "to be rendered an 'impossible subject'" (Mae Ngai, 2004) - illegality, foreignness
- Silence of coolies in the archive - eg intimacy, interiority
- Despite coolies pre-occupying/figuring in Euro colonial imaginary of C19
- The origin of word 'coolie' is uncertain - like the coolie himself
- Gujarati worker caste 'koli'?
- Portuguese 'cule' - laborer in India?
- Mandarin 'ku li' bitter strength?
- Unskilled, inscrutable, desexualised (male)
- Coolies supposed to return after contract but in Carib they were 'buffer race' between white/Black post-slavery so encouraged to settle
- Women brought over to form families
- Usually derogative - reclaimed
- H. T. Tsing And China has hands: a Chinese coolie odyssey (1937)
- David Dabydeen Coolie Odyssey (1988)
- Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman (2013)
- Khal Torabully - 'coolitude' (2002) - answer to 'negritude'
- Coolie as active agent
- Lisa Lowe The intimacies of 4 continents (2006)
- Lisa Yun The coolie speaks (Cuba) (2010)
- Denise Helly A Hidden history of the Chinese in Cuba (1997)
- Chinese coolies subverted, protested, escaped -not passive
- Chinese gov ended 'coolie' trade, 1874
- Moon-Ho Jung Coolies and Cane (2006)
- Richard Jean So dissertation 'Coolie democracy 1925-1955' (2009)
- Fiction intervenes in colonial records
- Queering as "a term for betraying what ought to remain concealed" (55)
- Butler's analysis of N. Larsen Passing: "'queering' works as the exposure within language - an exposure that disrupts the repressive surface of language - of both sexuality and race" (Q55)
- The Pagoda: cross-dressing/trans shopkeeper Lowe in late C19 Jamaica - if there were women coolies, would they have been recorded?
- Book of Salt - Viet cook, Binh, works for Gertrude Stein in Paris and is gay
- Both concern afterlife of coolie experience although are not actually coolies (plantation labor)
- David Eng (2008): we shouldn't see historical ethnic texts as correcting/remedying - Truong's historical misnaming/playfulness shows it doesn't matter whether or not the story actually happened/is based in truth.
- Both chars have sexual relationships with Black ppl - kinship in marginalisation, a connection not founded with white ppl
- "In The Pagoda and The Book of Salt, the 'coolie' does not just speak, the 'coolie' screams (...) This scream straddles the boundary between pleasure and pain" (56)
- 3 'intimate occupations':
- 'Unskilled' laborer identity: marginal, yet crucial to the economy - esp as both handle food (store owner and cook)
- Colonial settings pre-US occupation: 1890s British Jamaica, 1930s French Vietnam
- Occupying space in colonial archive
- --> "Refusing to assimilate to fixed constructions of race, gender, and sexuality" (57)
- They actually have much skill and power and control in their jobs
- 'Chiney' groceries in Jamaica: social space; known to extend credit more generously
- Yet marginalised due to class, race, sexuality
- Not rewriting the past: "meditate on teh production of history and the role of power" (59)
- In the end, Binh and Lowe are freed from their occupations
Liu, Lydia H., R. E. Karl, and D. Ko (eds.), The Birth of Chinese feminism: essential texts in transnational theory (New York, 2013) unfinished
Introduction
- 'The Women's Bell' (1903), Jin Tianhe (male) - seen as first Chinese feminist manifesto, very popular and influential
- He-Yin Zhen (anarcho-feminist, founder of Natural Justice journal) critiqued male feminists in 1907-8 as "pursuit of self-distinction in the name of women's liberation" (Q2)
- Modelling themselves on Wn/modern societies
- "As far as Jin Tianhe was concerned, women's emancipation was part of a larger project of enlightenment and national self-strengthening, coded either 'male' or 'patriarchal'" (7)
- 'Modern woman' in Shanghai ads = progress
- Tianyi/Nat Justice pub by Society for the Restoration of Women's Rights, Tokyo
- Featured first Chinese trans. of Communist Manifesto! (1908)
- For HYZ: feminism "was the beginning and outcome of a total social revolution that would abolish the state and private property to bring about true social equality" (7) and anticapitalist
- Plurality and contradictions of Chinese feminisms
- Defies East/West binary
- HYZ's analysis was totalising: everything is connected
- 'Woman' as "transhistorical global category (...) constituted through scholarship, ritual, law, and social and labor practices over time" (9)
- "History is formed by a continuously reproduced injustice in the manner of what the Annales school of French historians would come to call the longue durée" (9)
- Woman = "product of historical social relations" (10)
- Political ontology
- Analytical category of Nannü (男女) - a framework to understand this totality/structure and always-gendered life (more comprehensive than the word 'gender')
- Shengji / livelihood - more than 'class'
- Nannü is single concept: both noun and adjective, which "lies at the foundation of all patriarchal abstractions and markings of distinction." (11) - hard to translate
- HYZ's own moment was porous for language : influences from Jp and W, pioneering new vernacular
- "Far more productive is to tease out the theoretical resonances in the spaces opened up between nannü and 'gender' or any such categories in contemp. feminist theories, which have always passed back and forth through a multiplicity of mod. langs." (12)
- "Her critique demonstrates that the normative function of nannü is not only to create 'gendered' identities (which it also does) but also to introduce primary distinctions through socioeconomic abstractions such as the external and the internal, or to such cosmic abstractions as yang and yin" (14)
- No biological view of sexual differnce, unlike in Europe. So there was no need for HYZ to oppose this on the sex/gender differention aspect, like Europeans had to.
- Critique from "within -- and against -- the indig. Confucian tradition, especially its theories of human nature" (15)
Ripped, torn, and cut: pop, politics, and punk fanzines from 1976, ed. Subcultures Network (Manchester, 2018). Unfinished
Introduction: adventures in reality, why (punk) fanzines matter - M. Worley, K. Gildart, A. Gough-Yates, S. Lincoln, B. Osgerby, L Robinson, J Street, P Webb
- UK's first self-defined punk fanzine: Sniffin' Glue by Mark Perry, 1976
- Fanzines as "residues of youthful agency" (2)
- Cut and paste imagery, Xeroxed/Roneo-stencilled, sold for low cost at gigs, schools, record shops
- Increasingly political and experimental - eg Lucy Whitman JOLT (1977)
- Help map shifts from 1976-77 punk 'moment' to 1980s culture
- Shows punk in provinces and outside London - diverse
- Nancy Fraser, 'subaltern counterpublic' - alternate, oppositional
- Teal Triggs Fanzines (2010); Stephen Duncombe Notes from the Underground: Zines and the politics of alt. culture (2008)
- History of zines:
- 1930s sci-fi, US and Uk
- Expanded across cultural spheres
- Punk zines' visual language essential to aesthetic
- Riot grrrl material @ Fales library, NY
- Zines in BL, V&A, Manchester District Music Archive, Bristol Arch Records
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