This book focuses on subjugated indentured Indian women, who are constantly faced with race, gender, caste, and class oppression and inequality on overseas European-owned plantations, but who are also armed with latent links to the women’s abolition movements in the homeland. Also examining their post-indenture life, it employs a paradigm of male-dominated Indian women in India at the margins of an enduringly patriarchal society, a persisting backdrop to the huge 19th century post-slavery movement of the agricultural indentured workforce drawn largely from India. This book depicts the antithetical and contradictory explanations for the indentured Indian women’s cries, degradation and dehumanization and how the politics of change and control impacted their social organization and its legacy. The book owes its origins to the 2017 centennial commemorative event celebrating 100 years of the abolition of the indenture system of Indian labor that victimized and dehumanized Indians from 1834 through 1917.

Deploying the provocative idea of the ‘subaltern citizen’, this book raises fundamental questions about subalternity and difference, dominance and subordination, in India and the United States. In contrast to other writings on subordinated and marginalized people, the essays presented here devote deliberate attention to diverse locations of subalternity: in the conditions and histories of slaves, dalits, peasants, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, schoolteachers, women of noble lineage; in the Third World and the First; in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times. With contributions from a diverse group of distinguished scholars, the anthology explores issues of gender and sexuality, migration, race, caste and class, education and law, culture and politics. The very juxtaposition of different bodies of scholarship serves to challenge common perceptions of inherited histories – claims to American and Indian ‘exceptionalism’ – and promotes a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the modern world, but of particularities and facets of our different histories and societal conditions that are assumed as being well understood, and hence often taken for granted. Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories will be essential reading for scholars of colonial, postcolonial and subaltern studies, American studies, US and South Asian social science and history.

This fascinating book uses biographical fragments to shed new light on colonial life and convictism in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's "worlding" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn. Since its publication, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak's work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak's essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates "Can the Subaltern Speak?" within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself considers her essay's past interpretations and future incarnations and the questions and histories that remain secreted in the original and revised versions of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" both of which are reprinted in this book.

Acknowledgments p. ix Introduction Rosalind C. Morris p. 1 Part 1 Text "Can the Subaltern Speak?" revised edition, from the "History" chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak p. 21 Part 2 Contexts and Trajectories Reflections on "Can the Subaltern Speak?": Subaltern Studies After Spivak Partha Chatterjee p. 81 Postcolonial Studies: Now That's History Ritu Birla p. 87 The Ethical Affirmation of Human Rights: Gayatri Spivak's Intervention Drucilla Cornell p. 100 Part 3 Speaking of (Not) Hearing Death and the Subaltern Rajeswari Sunder Rajan p. 117 Between Speaking and Dying: Some Imperatives in the Emergence of the Subaltern in the Context of U.S. Slavery Abdul Janmohamed p. 139 Subalterns at War: First World War Colonial Forces and the Politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission Michèle Barrett p. 156 Part 4 Contemporaneities and Possible Futures: (Not) Speaking and Hearing Biopower and the New International Division of Reproductive Labor Pheng Cheah p. 179 Moving from Subalternity: Indigenous Women in Guatemala and Mexico Jean Franco p. 213 Part 5 In Response In Response: Looking Back, Looking Forward Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak p. 227 Appendix: Can the Subaltern Speak? From Marxism and the Interpretation of History Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak p. 237 Bibliography p. 293 Contributors p. 309 Index p. 313.

Contentious Traditions analyzes the debate on sati, or widow burning, in colonial India. Though the prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key step forward for women's emancipation in modern India, Lata Mani argues that the women who were burned were marginal to the debate and that the controversy was over definitions of Hindu tradition, the place of ritual in religious worship, the civilizing missions of colonialism and evangelism, and the proper role of the colonial state. Mani radically revises colonialist as well as nationalist historiography on the social reform of women's status in the colonial period and clarifies the complex and contradictory character of missionary writings on India. The history of widow burning is one of paradox. While the chief players in the debate argued over the religious basis of sati and the fine points of scriptural interpretation, the testimonials of women at the funeral pyres consistently addressed the material hardships and societal expectations attached to widowhood. And although historiography has traditionally emphasized the colonial horror of sati, a fascinated ambivalence toward the practice suffused official discussions. The debate normalized the violence of sati and supported the misconception that it was a voluntary act of wifely devotion. Mani brilliantly illustrates how situated feminism and discourse analysis compel a rewriting of history, thus destabilizing the ways we are accustomed to look at women and men, at "tradition," custom, and modernity.