As a braided history of people of Asian and African descent in the nineteenth-century Caribbean, Catherine Peters' book project Laboring Neighbors tells the story of abolition and indenture through the ecologies where indentured Asian migrants and Afro-descendant residents lived, formed kin, and met in the interstices where colonial authority broke down. 

In this talk (drawn from the third chapter of the manuscript), Peters establishes the early events of the village movement, when Afro-Guyanese collectives purchased vast tracts of land after legal emancipation in 1838. Peters traces the earliest estate purchases, particularly in East Coast Demerara, where over ten thousand enslaved women and men had participated in a two-day rebellion in 1823.

Peters argues that Afro-Guyanese collective land purchases represent wider networks of kin who had been organizing their resources and time for decades. She suggests that Afro-Guyanese skill with waterlogged coastal terrain through trenching, fishing, and boating underpinned their self-governance within villages. She describes their witnessing of and extension of mutual aid to indentured South Asian laborers who began to arrive in greater numbers after 1845. She considers how indentured South Asian migrants learned this particular coastal terrain from the example of Black and Indigenous residents. She focuses especially on the backdam—the rear boundary of estates—as a site of exchange and foraging.

Speaker

Catherine (Catie) Peters is an interdisciplinary historian of the Caribbean whose research centers on empire, Black and Asian diasporas, and the environment. She is currently a visiting fellow at KITLV, where she is working on her book project Laboring neighbors: Afro-Asian ecologies in the colonial Caribbean.

Moderator

Francio Guadeloupe is Professor of Public Anthropology of Kingdom Relations at the University of Amsterdam and senior researcher at KITLV. Francio is currently embarking on a study of climate challenges in the (Dutch) Caribbean from a popular culture and cultural heritage perspective. 

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 4 December from 15.30–17.00 PM (CET). 

Image

Image credit: John Carter Brown Library.

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