Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean Herstories: Getting Started

Information about the exhibit and additional readings

Exhibit page: https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/art-gallery/programming/2024-25/heidi-mckenzie-reclaimed-indo-caribbean-womens-herstories.html

Artist

Heidi McKenzie is a ceramic and installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. Heidi completed her MFA at OCADU in 2014. She is informed by her mixed-race Indo-Trinidadian/Irish-American heritage. Heidi uses ceramics, photography, digital media, and archival image to forefront themes of ancestry, race, migration and colonization, as well as themes of body and healing. Heidi has exhibited internationally in Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, Oceana and the US. The recipient of numerous grants, Heidi has created in Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, Australia, China and Indonesia. Her work has been collected by the ROM, Global Affairs Canada, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, and Surrey Art Museum. Heidi’s installation, Division, was invited to tour in the US alongside works of Ai Wei Wei, Theaster Gates, and Magdolene Odundo (Underneath Everything). Her solo exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories (spring 2023) explores the little-known histories of Indo-Caribbean indentureship through a feminist lens. Heidi was invited to the juried feature exhibition, Common Ground, at the Indian Ceramics Triennale in Delhi, 2024, to present Girmitya HerStories – bringing the Indo-Caribbean diaspora “home.”

Artist's Statement

My studio practice engages issues of identity and belonging. Through abstract portraiture, I capture self, an individual, or a culture. I began incorporating photographic imagery on clay in 2014 to viscerally depict the fragmentation of body, and have moved on to explore image as archive. This body of work speaks to my personal histories through photographic imagery coupled with abstract representation. My work is informed by the everyday lived experience of my mixed heritage. In the 19thcentury, my ancestors traveled from Ireland to Canada and India to the Caribbean in hopes of a better life. In the 1950s, my parents married at a time when interracial marriages were illegal in several American states and extremely uncommon in both Canada and the U.S. I grew up on the East coast of Canada, one of a handful of brown faces in a sea of white, at the corners of “Canadianness.” Holding space and making place for people of color matters. Telling my family’s stories matter.

— Heidi McKenzie, 2022

The Journal of Caribbean history.

The Journal of Caribbean history.
The Journal of Caribbean History (JCH) is a double-blind peer reviewed journal produced by the Departments of History, The University of the West Indies, and published by the University of the West Indies Press.
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JCH is dedicated to the publishing of original, rigorous research papers of a high quality that addresses all aspects of Caribbean history in the mainland territories of North, Central and South America.

Additional Readings: Books

Critical Fabulations

A proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the field's dominant paradigms but also changes the practice of design itself. In Critical Fabulations, Daniela Rosner proposes redefining design as investigative and activist, personal and culturally situated, responsive and responsible. Challenging the field's dominant paradigms and reinterpreting its history, Rosner wants to change the way we historicize the practice, reworking it from the inside. Focusing on the development of computational systems, she takes on powerful narratives of innovation and technology shaped by the professional expertise that has become integral to the field's mounting status within the new industrial economy. To do so, she intervenes in legacies of design, expanding what is considered "design" to include long-silenced narratives of practice, and enhancing existing design methodologies based on these rediscovered inheritances. Drawing on discourses of feminist technoscience, she examines craftwork's contributions to computing innovation--how craftwork becomes hardware manufacturing, and how hardware manufacturing becomes craftwork. She reclaims, for example, NASA's "Little Old Ladies," the women who built information storage for the Apollo missions by weaving wires through magnetized metal rings. Mixing history, theory, personal experience, and case studies, Rosner reweaves fibers of technoscience by slowly reworking the methods and margins of design. She suggests critical fabulations as ways of telling stories that awaken alternative histories, and offers a set of techniques and orientations for fabulating its future. Critical Fabulations shows how design's hidden inheritances open different possibilities for practice.

Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature

This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.

Diaspora Poetics and Homing in South Asian Women's Writing: Beyond Trishanku

This book looks at women writers from the South Asian region who negotiate Home from the vantage point of in-between space-defined through the mythical concept of Trishanku and the frameworks of migration, historical consciousness, colonialism, interracial experiences, fragmented memories, nostalgia, and hyphenated identities.

Diasporic (Dis)locations

Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. The book explores how cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora to determine whether the idea of "cultural continuity", is in fact a postcolonial reality or a fictionalized myth. The Indian women who braved the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic, of the kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters who in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity with equating

Indo-Caribbean Indenture

Indo-Caribbean Indenture investigates the relatively little-studied but growing field of the experiences of East Indians in the Caribbean from their arrival in 1838 to the end of indentureship in 1920. It places the indenture period into a larger socio-economic framework of imperialism, the post-slavery attempt to solve the labour shortage and the gender-relations which overarched the whole transaction in human bodies. By utilizing a new analytical perspective offered by current writers on the subject of the subaltern, the work departs from the usual historical approach and offers a fresh interpretation. The work will be of particular interest to historians, sociologists and social scientists who focus on the Caribbean, migration, ethnicity, gender studies, peasant resistance, labour history and cultural continuity and change.

Articles

Indo-Caribbean Women’s Jewelry: Traditions and Innovations
Written by Joy Mahabir
Published on INDOCARIBCDN.COM
Sunday November 5, 2023
my mother’s grandmother, Maharajiah, traveled across the kala pani from India to Trinidad in 1907. Maharajiah’s father was a child during the 1857 Siege of Cawnpore. Hiding in a boatman’s hut, he observed the orange flames as British soldiers, unrestrained in their revenge for British lives lost during the Siege, burnt villages to the ground. Black ashes covered fields and the Sati Chaura Ghat on the bank of the Ganges. Decades after the Siege, when Maharajiah was born, villagers remained impoverished.
Defining Women Subjects: Photographs in Trinidad (1860s–1960s)
Written by Roshini Kempadoo
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Issue 7, 2013.
This article proposes research methodologies for use in analysing photographs that represent and visualise women subjects of colonial Trinidad. Methodology has been developed on the basis of research undertaken into photographic material of the period in Trinidad from the 1860s to 1960s. The researcher encounters the historical photographs in the present, thus providing insight into the ways in which photographic technologies have visualised Trinidadian women and explores how these practices persist in contemporary visual culture.
Photography emerged as a mode of communication for ‘a developing capitalist world order.'
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No previous economy of visual technologies constituted a world order in the same sense, and it is from within this wider context that we may consider the complex creation, production and circulation of colonial photographs representing the woman figure. Photographic practice at the turn of the twentieth century was a contributive part of the imperial attempt to ‘unify the globe’ and equally became associated with the ‘myth’ of a universality of photographic language (Sekula 1981). Photographic practice contributed to a shift in the continuity of European ideas and thinking about the visualisation of the Other. Colonial photography determined the gendered construction of the colonial woman as subjected to heightened, fetishised, visual scrutiny.
Communal Style: Indo-Caribbean Women's Jewelry
Written by Joy Mahabir
Small Axe, 21:2, 2017
Styles of Indo-Caribbean jewelry created during indentureship have been continually reproduced up to the present. Exploring the demand and desire for these styles, this essay suggests that there is a communal aesthetic underlying the production of the jewelry, influenced by the perception of the jewelry as a commentary on sociohistorical realities and gendered labor practices. Artists working in the diaspora, including British-Guyanese jeweler Vannetta Seecharran, have created experimental pieces that still retain the minimalist and communal aesthetics traditionally associated with Indo-Caribbean jewelry.
Photography and Its Citizens
Ariella Azoulay, Nato Thompson
Aperture, No. 214, Documentary, Expanded, Spring 2014
Nato Thompson interviews Ariella Azoulay, one of the most rigorous commentators on the political dimensions of photography.
The Other Side of Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Landownership, Remittances and Remigration 1838-1920
Written by Roopnarine, Lomarsh
The Journal of Caribbean History; Kingston Vol. 42, Iss. 2, 2008
The following article examines the under-researched side of the Indo-Caribbean indentured experience, that is, the ability of indentured servants to use the indenture system to acquire land and savings as well as to escape caste prejudice in India. The article acknowledges that indentured servitude was an exploitative system which controlled and restricted the time, labour and mobility of indentured workers. Moreover, it does not underestimate or under-rate the powerful nature of the indentured colonial system in executing and maintaining its objectives. Indentured servants worked on the sugar plantations under a barrage of subversive labour laws that protected and profited their capitalist employers.
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The general welfare of East Indian indentured servants was not a great concern to their employers and, as a consequence, there was a perfect divorce between power and responsibility. Nevertheless, it is argued that within the ambit of power and control, some indentured servants benefited from the indenture system. Of the 350,000 who stayed in the Caribbean, the majority were able to acquire savings and a piece of land to start a new life in a new environment that was free from caste prejudice. They were able to recreate and reconstruct lost India in the Caribbean and subsequently lived a fairly comfortable life. And even among the 175,000 or so indentured servants who returned to India, the majority took with them enough savings to buy a piece of land and settle down.1 Some were treated like zemindars (or zamindars: feudal landlords) on their return. Others, however, were not treated so kindly and were driven out from their native villages. This article maintains that there are two sides to the indenture system: negative and positive. Both sides have to be examined in order to have a balanced view of Indo-Caribbean indentured servitude.