CROLAC Public Lecture: The Things We Carried

When: Thursday, May 15, 2025, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Where: BLOC Cinema, ArtsOne Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4PA

IHSS Visiting Fellow Professor Gaiutra Bahadur's (Rutgers University) lecture about South Asian indentured workers to the West Indies, and their descendants' journey from Guyana to the USA, organised by the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CRoLAC) 

This talk maps two migrations and the two radically distinct archives used to document these trajectories, one of indentured plantation workers from South Asia to the West Indies, another of their descendants from Guyana to the United States. Gaiutra Bahadur, the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, reflects on methods that evolved from reimagining the Colonial Office paper trail to creating her own archive of material memory, fashioned from oral histories, ephemera and traces of things indenture's descendants carried to America. In both archives, she finds women crossing borders and pushing boundaries, and new notions of kinship and resistance.

About the Speaker

Gaiutra Bahadur is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize. She's a critic, essayist, and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among other publications. Her work has been selected for Best American Essays 2024, and she has won literary residencies at MacDowell and the Bellagio Centre in Italy. Born in Guyana and raised there and in the United States, she teaches writing, literature and journalism as an associate professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

All are welcome but please register via Book now on Eventbrite

The lecture is organised by the HSS Research Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CRoLAC) and supported by the IHSS Visiting Fellowship Scheme