The kala Pani chronotope and feminist historiographic interventions in Indo-Caribbean women’s literature

In “The Kala Pani Chronotope and Feminist Historiographic Interventions in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature,” I analyze how Indo-Caribbean women writers engage with the nonlinear temporality of the kala pani to produce a collective memory centering the jahaji-bhain. Indo-Caribbean studies has largely favored applying the kala pani’s nonlinearity in analyzing spatio-discursive and sexual transgressions overdetermined by the public/private binary. I, however, emphasize the kala pani’s spatio-temporality of indeterminacy, nonlinearity, and ateleology as a product of and condition for feminist historical revisionism. I coin the term, “kala pani chronotope,” to theorize the interventions in hegemonic temporal ontologies (linear, allochronic, empty, homogenous) by Indo-Caribbean feminist historical revisionism of the kala pani and indenture. The kala pani chronotope is an onto-epistemic structure which facilitates interstitial and liminal subjectivities necessary to produce intergenerational identifications with the jahaji-bhain. Because of the historical revisionism inherent in this act, I frame the temporality of kala pani discourses with Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism. My archive consists of Indo-Caribbean novels, historiography, memoir, and speeches from Trinidad, Guyana, and the United States. I focus on how temporal experimentations in narrative or discourse, especially regarding modernity, enact historical materialist revisionism through the kala pani chronotope. In Chapter 2, I argue that Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last English Plantation parallels the suspended plot of the young protagonist who I theorize as a queered child, with the months prior to the first national vote since Guiana’s suspended constitution. These layered abeyances as well as the oscillating plot make possible Shinebourne’s historical materialist preservation of a radical postcolonial multiracial democracy for the present. Chapter 3 carries forward the theme of disrupting linear narratives diasporic and the post/colonial bildungsroman by analyzing how mental illness facilitates Indo-Caribbean feminist rememories across indenture, the Great Depression, and the 1980s. Traumas from transgressing gender and spatial boundaries are transmitted across generations through silence, and in A Silent Life, Rhyaan Shah uses magical realism to make perceptible the seething complexities through rememories (waking dreams and mental illness). In Chapter 4, I query how the great escape narrative informs the Honorable Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s “return” to India for the PBD and Gaiutra Bahadur’s “returns” to Guyana or India in The Coolie Woman. Both women enact liberal feminism to negotiate competing national modernities. At the same time, they attempt to recuperate the indentured woman, thus producing a temporally folded subject position between having transcended indenture’s injuries and yet also speaking from the time-lag of indenture. Across these chapters, I demonstrate that the nonlinear spatio-temporality of the kala pani, or the kala pani chronotope pervades Indo-Caribbean feminist discourses, and also affirms the dis-, multi-, and heterochronotopic nature of Indo-Caribbean subjectivities.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Jean Yol

Contributors dc:contributor

• Koshy, Susan
• Flynn, Karen
• Basu, Manisha
• Khan, Aisha

• Indo-caribbean Feminism
• Kala Pani
• Chronotope
• Jahaji-bhain

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Jean Yol Lee

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120572

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F120572