The botanical afterlife of indenture

Mehndi as imaginative visual archive

Bibliographic Data

ID7315673
AuthorsGabrielle Jamela Hosein (0000-0001-5588-5342, University of the West Indies, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume4
Issue1
Publication date2024-06-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Indentureship and its Legacies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2634-1999 • E-ISSN: 2634-2006
PublisherPluto Journals (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.13169/jofstudindentleg.4.1.0059
OpenAlexW4400116115
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited24

This article presents artwork from the project, ‘The botanical afterlife of indenture: Mehndi as imaginative visual archive’, which memorializes the legacy of Indian indenture by recording the flora brought by indentured workers as they exist in the midst of contemporary social life and in the region’s landscape. In the project, mehndi works as a decolonializing and embodied, post-indenture feminist aesthetic praxis and a method for contributing to a new world visual archive. Indo-Caribbean imaginative visual archives can challenge gendered and racialized exclusions in colonial and creole visual representations, and can instead image indenture and post-indenture histories in ways that are accessible, inclusive, consensual and popular; connecting all in the Caribbean and its diaspora to the afterlife of indenture. The article reflects on the images produced, how they echo biographical and fictional writing, and how they critically engage with the orientalising lens of colonial-era photography. In presenting these original designs of a botanical imaginary, the project aims to transform mehndi in post-indenture sites so that art forms which are both traditional and contemporary can be seen as post-plantation techniques for making memory-work an act of beauty. Inspired by his scholarship and encouragement, the project is dedicated to beloved Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo

Aesthetics · Afterlife · Art · Geography · Literature · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Latin American and Latino Studies

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