In this article, I describe Andil Gosine’s artistic archives as ‘watery’ to chart a feminist genealogy of archival practice. I argue that routing interdisciplinary studies of Atlantic and Indian Oceans through the Caribbean provides a transoceanic method to analyse race and sexuality within Indo-Caribbean connections. To that end, I examine the representation of water and waterways in Gosine’s Our Holy Waters, and Mine (2014) to illustrate how relations with water provides a heuristic and representative practice for critiquing afterlives of colonialism and indentureship. I bring together Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology, scholarship on feminist and queer archival practices and ocean studies to read Gosine’s experimental artistic practice as offering ways to rethink oceanic materiality in the context of historical and archival knowledge production.
AdejunmobiM., 2009. Claiming the field: Africa and the space of Indian Ocean literature. Callaloo, 32(4), pp. 1247–1261.
2.
AlaimoS., 2016. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
3.
AlexanderM.J.1994. Not just (any) body can be a citizen: the politics of law, sexuality and postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas. Feminist Review, 48, pp. 5–23.
4.
ArcegaM., cur., 2015. Hydrarchy: Power, Globalization and the Sea. Exhibition at San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery, 21February–19March. San Francisco.
5.
ArondekarA., 2009. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham: Duke University Press.
6.
BahadurG., 2013. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
7.
BahadurG., 2018a. Conjure women and coolie women. Small Axe, 22(2), pp. 244–253.
BahrawiN., 2019. Rindu rustic: Singapore nostalgias in modern Malay prose. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40(4), pp. 504–520.
10.
Benítez-RojoA., 1996. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press.
11.
BraithwaiteK., 1999. ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. New York: We Press.
12.
BurtonA.KaleM.HofmeyrI.AndersonC.LeeC.GreenN.2013. Sea tracks and trails: Indian ocean worlds as method. History Compass, 11(7), pp. 497–502.
13.
CarterM.TorabullyK., 2002. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Anthem Press.
14.
DawsonK., 2018. Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
15.
DeLoughreyE., 1998. Tidalectics: charting the space/time of Caribbean waters. SPAN, 47, pp. 18–38.
16.
DeLoughreyE., 2007. Routes and Roots Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
17.
DeLoughreyE., 2019. Toward a critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. English Language Notes, 57(1), pp. 21–36.
18.
DeLoughreyE., 2020 [2018]. Shipscapes: imagining an ocean of space (37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference). Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 16(2), p. 1.
19.
DeLoughreyE.FloresT.2020. Submerged bodies: the tidalectics of representability and the sea in Caribbean art. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), pp. 132–166.
20.
DesaiG., 2013. Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press.
FloresT. cur., 2017–2018. Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago. Exhibition at Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), 16September2017–28 January2018. Long Beach.
23.
GhisyawanK.N.2015. Queer-(in’) the Caribbean: the Trinidad experience. In TellisA.BalaS. eds. The Global Trajectories of Queerness: Rethinking Same-Sex Politics in the Global South. Leiden: Brill, pp. 161–177.
24.
GilroyP., 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
25.
GlissantÉ., 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
26.
GopinathG., 2005. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian. Durham: Duke University Press.
27.
GosineA., 2011–2013. WARDROBES. Mixed media and performance. Series of art performances first performed at the New York Fashion Institute of Technology. New York.
28.
GosineA., 2012. Ohrni and cutlass. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 6, pp. 1–3.
29.
GosineA., 2013–ongoing. Cane Portraiture: The Descendants. Digital print series.
30.
GosineA., 2014. Our Holy Waters, and Mine. Multimedia installation and performance. Coolitude: An Afternoon of Indo-Caribbean Art and Literature, event at Queens Museum, 29March. New York.
31.
GosineA., 2016. My mother’s baby: wrecking work after indentureship. In G. Hosein and L.
32.
Outar, eds. Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 49–60.
33.
GosineA., 2017a. After indenture. Small Axe, 21(2), pp. 63–67.
34.
GosineA., 2017b. Visual art after indenture: authoethnographic reflections. South Asian Studies, 33(1), pp. 105–112.
35.
GosineA., 2017c. After indenture: three photo stories Roshini Kempadoo; Sharlene Khan; Wendy Nanan. Small Axe, 21(2), pp. 135–150.
36.
GosineA., 2020. rêvenir. Exhibition at Medulla Art Gallery, 30January–21February. Port of Spain.
37.
GuptaP.HofmeyrI.PearsonM.2010. Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press.
38.
HartmanS., 2008. Venus in two acts. Small Axe, 12(2), pp. 1–14.
39.
Hau’ofaE., 2008. We Are the Ocean. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
40.
HofmeyrI., 2007. The Black Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean: forging new paradigms of transnationalism for the Global South—literary and cultural perspectives. Social Dynamics, 33(2), pp. 3–32.
41.
HofmeyrI., 2012. The complicating sea: the Indian Ocean as method. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 32(3), pp. 584–590.
42.
HofmeyrI., 2019. Literary ecologies of the Indian Ocean. English Studies in Africa, 62(1), pp. 1–7.
HoseinG.J.OutarL.2016b. Introduction: interrogating an Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology. In HoseinG.J.OutarL. eds. Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–19.
45.
JueM., 2020. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Durham: Duke University Press.
46.
Kavuri-BauerS., 2017. The art of hydrarchy: Asian American art as maritime critique and utopian gesture. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 3, pp. 241–251.
47.
KhanA., 2004. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations Series. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
48.
KhanA., 2015. Material and immaterial bodies: diaspora studies and the problem of culture, identity, and race. Small Axe, 19(3), pp. 29–49.
49.
KhanA., 2020. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
50.
KingT.L.2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
51.
LionnetF., 2012. Shipwrecks, slavery, and the challenge of global comparison: from fiction to archive in the colonial Indian Ocean. Comparative Literature, 64(4), pp. 446–461.
52.
LoweL., 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press.
53.
MackeyN., 1991. Interview with Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Hambone, 9, pp. 42–49.
54.
MahabirJ.PirbhaiM. eds., 2013. Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature. New York: Routledge.
55.
MehtaB., 2004. Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the “Kala Pani”. Mona: University of the West Indies Press.
56.
MehtaB., 2008. Exilic dispositions and Dougla identity in Laure Moutoussamy’s Passerelle de vie (The Bridge of Life). In RaghuramP.SahooA.K.MaharajB.SanghaD. eds. Tracing an Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage Publications, pp. 428–450.
57.
MohabirN., 2019. Kala pani: aesthetic deathscapes and the flow of water after indenture. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 5(3), pp. 293–314.
58.
MohammedP., 1999. From myth to symbolism: the definitions of Indian femininity and masculinity in post-indentureship Trinidad. In KanhaiR., ed. Matikor: The Politics of Identity for Indo-Caribbean Women. Augustine: University of West Indies, pp. 62–99.
59.
MohammedP., 2002. Gender Negotiations Among Indians in Trinidad 1917–1947. Netherlands: Palgrave.
60.
MohanP., 2008. Jahahin. New Delhi: HarperCollins.
61.
NeimanisA., 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury.
62.
NixonA.V.2015. Troubling queer Caribbeanness: embodiment, gender, and sexuality in Nadia Huggins’s visual art. In D. Scott, E.M. James and N. Cunningham, curs. CQV: Caribbean Queer Visualities. New York: A Small Axe Project, pp. 102–114.
63.
ParsardK., 2016. Cutlass: objects towards a theory of representation. In HoseinG.OutarL. eds. Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 241–260.
64.
PirbhaiM., 2009. Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
65.
PirbhaiM., 2013. Recasting jahaji-bhain: plantation history and the Indo-Caribbean women’s novel in Trinidad, Guyana and Martinique. In MahabirJ.PirbhaiM. eds. Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature. New York: Routledge, pp. 25–47.
66.
PuarJ., 2001. Global circuits: transnational sexualities and Trinidad. Signs, 26(4), pp. 1039–1065.
67.
PuriS., 2004. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
68.
PuriS., 2013. Finding the field: notes on Caribbean cultural criticism, area studies, and the forms of engagement. Small Axe, 17(2), pp. 58–73.
69.
Queer Coolie-tudes, 2019. Film. Directed by M. Mohabeer. Canada: Michelle Mohabeer.
70.
ReckinA., 2003. Tidalectic lectures: Kamau Brathwaite’s prose/poetry as sound-space. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 1(1), article 5.
71.
ReddockR., 1986. Indian women and indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845–1917: freedom denied. Caribbean Quarterly, 32(3/4), pp. 27–49.
72.
ReddockR., 2013 [2007]. Diversity, difference and Caribbean feminism: the challenge of anti-racism. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 1, pp. 1–24.
73.
RicciR., 2021. Telling stories of seas, islands, and ships: a Sri Lankan Malay perspective. Positions, 29(1), 203–224.
74.
RobertsB.StephensM. eds., 2017. Archipelagic American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
75.
SamuelsonM.LaveryC.2019. The oceanic South.English Language Notes, 57(1), pp. 37–50.
76.
ShellerM., 2020. Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.
77.
ShewryT., 2015. Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
