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In the first published account of the massive U.S. covert intervention in British Guiana between 1953 and 1969, Stephen G. Rabe uncovers a Cold War story of imperialism, gender bias, and racism. When the South American colony now known as Guyana was due to gain independence from Britain in the 1960s, U.S. officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations feared it would become a communist nation under the leadership of Cheddi Jagan, a Marxist who was very popular among the South Asian (mostly Indian) majority. Although to this day the CIA refuses to confirm or deny involvement, Rabe presents evidence that CIA funding, through a program run by the AFL-CIO, helped foment the labor unrest, race riots, and general chaos that led to Jagan's replacement in 1964. The political leader preferred by the United States, Forbes Burnham, went on to lead a twenty-year dictatorship in which he persecuted the majority Indian population. Considering race, gender, religion, and ethnicity along with traditional approaches to diplomatic history, Rabe's analysis of this Cold War tragedy serves as a needed corrective to interpretations that depict the Cold War as an unsullied U.S. triumph.
Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas brings together 15 archaeological case studies that offer new perspectives on colonial period interactions in the Caribbean and surrounding areas through a specific focus on material culture and indigenous agency.
These selected documents reveal the reaction and responses of the Amerindians to European values.
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
Clem Seecharan has written a useful documentary history of Bechu, the first Indian to testify before the Royal Commission in 1897. Now who was this Bechu? He was, in Seecharan's words, "an indefatigable gadfly," who in letters to the local press revealed the conditions of Indian indentureship: poor wages, sexual exploitation of women by overseers and managers, and the virtual impossibility for Indians to obtain justice because of the collusion between colonial authorities and the planters. This knowledge we owe to economic historian Alan Adamson who "discovered" Bechu in the 1960s. Yet the man himself remained somewhat of a mystery, something Bechu himself seems to have cultivated. Seecharan has now filled a number of lacunae in our understanding with this two-part volume. The first section focuses on Bechu and the British Guianese environment in the late nineteenth century, while the second part includes letters and memoranda by Bechu (and reactions to them by local opponents).
"Multiple constructions of India, as homeland, have been central to the shaping of Indo-Guyanese identity. An imagined India part fact, part fantasy has continually woven into the Indo-Guyanese consciousness a rich, elevating perception of self: an antidote to the deflating image of the coolie that lingered when the last Indian indentures were cancelled in 1920. In Mother India s Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity, 1890s-1930s, Clem Seecharan reconstructs the circumstances surrounding the development of Indo-Guyanese nationalism. He assesses the impact of the Golden Age of the Ramayana; the glories of ancient India unearthed by British scholars/administrators (Indologists); and Gandhi s virtual deification in his campaign for India s freedom. An India seen to be in revolt against imperial rule inspired several Indo-Guyanese intellectuals, such as Joseph Ruhomon, Peter Ruhomon and J.I. Ramphal, to popularise an image of Mother India that bolstered Indo-Guyanese self-esteem. Drawing on a range of primary sources, the book presents a comprehensive picture of the many Indias Indo-Guyanese (Hindus, Muslims and Christians) embraced in countering the coolie stain, while seeking to belong in creole society. On the flip side, the consuming El Dorado syndrome in Guyana bred a discernible triumphalism among Indo-Guyanese, manifested in the Colonisation Scheme of the 1920s and the associated ideas of creating an Indian colony or a Greater India in Guyana. This kindled a resilient fear, among African-Guyanese, of Indian economic and political domination which still haunts the country. Seecharan handles these complex issues lucidly and authoritatively. Mother India s Shadow is indispensable in comprehending the smouldering ethnic insecurities of contemporary Guyana. " "