[Vasundhara Mathur] So our next panel, Holding Collections: Archiving as Dream Keeping, will feature Tao Leigh Goffe and Eddie Bruce-Jones. Tao and Eddie offer remarks situated at the intersection of environmental, ecological issues and epistemological questions in engaging with the archive. After introducing the conceptual terrain of their own research, Goffe and Bruce-Jones move into a discussion of their joint work, an interdisciplinary digital humanities project that uses the indentureship period as a window for exploring new methodological questions and approaches, the historical analysis of colonialism, and the contemporary theorisation of diaspora and global problems.
[Eddie Bruce-Jones] Thank you Vasundhara, for inviting us to speak with you, and thanks to everyone for coming. I’m going to keep this intro brief because I have 7.5 minutes, and then I’m going to turn it over to my colleague Tao, who’s in New York, who will be giving her presentation from there. We are a double act. We’re both working on indentureship and histories on the archive of indentureship in different ways but we’ve joined together for this project, which is also funded by the AHRC and the National Endowment of the Humanities in the US. So I’m going to begin by doing, basically for me, a bit of a conceptual introduction to why I think it’s important to regard the work in the archive quite imaginatively, especially as the diasporic communities, and especially when looking at the archive of colonialism.
I’ll just briefly say that indentureship is kind of a legal form. It’s a labour form. But what we are looking at in specific is the system of indentureship, mainly the system that followed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Although indentureship didn’t begin then, and there were periods, even just decades before that, that were the predecessors of the indentureship system. In the 1830s up until the 19, about 1920, mostly South Asian and East Asian workers were indentured to work in agricultural settings in the British Empire as a way to fill the labour gap but also as an extension of much of the infrastructure of plantation economies that were introduced during slavery.
There we go. Act one. I’ll start with a quote by Toni Morrison. ‘You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact, it's not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.’ So the archives relevant for British colonial indentureship history are strewn throughout the world in the footprints of exploitative commerce. There are indeed colonial records in London, at the UK National Archives and the British Library. Many of those documents relate to correspondence between the East India Company and later incarnations of colonial administration, responsible for indentureship found in India. I’m focused on India, just because I needed to narrow down indenture. But there are other records at the National Archives in Delhi and the State Archives of West Bengal, again, mostly colonial correspondence. But if you want to see the indentures themselves and get more detail about the lived experience or the lives, at least, some of the experience of those who were indentured, then you’ll need to go to the countries that labourers were sent to, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Saint Kitts, among other places in the British Empire. But also there was indentureship beyond the British Empire. The holdings in these repositories taken together and digitised – I’m talking about from both the UK and India and Hong Kong, and the places people were sent – would offer a detailed overview of the indentured labourers, where they’re from, their circumstances, their religions, social backgrounds and their names. But they’re not digitised for the most part, they’re not in the best state, and despite some effort are still in danger of being lost to decay, accidental damage and the colonial half-life of a semi-abandoned racial capitalist project.
So how does water remember as it tries to get back to itself? And how do we remember ourselves using water as a cue? I’m also inspired by Morrison’s re-memory, quote ‘recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past’, unquote. That’s my starting point for engaging with the idea of the mangrove as method, its water and recollection, recollecting. My work on indentureship has involved mainly sitting and reading and not writing. Much to the chagrin of my academic institutions. In silence in the archives, doing genealogical work to find detail of the banality of the lives that were lived adjacent to those of my own kin, walking streets in unfamiliar places that I had known all my life and familiar ones I’d never been to before. To remember, the process is one of re-memory, piecing together bits of the past and finding remarkable points of clarity in the mundane. I’m going to skip a little bit here.
That’s underwater. It’s hard to see. So I’m also interested in death. It’s easier in the archive to find out how people died than to find out how they lived. Generally when you’re looking at colonial records, you come across a lot of ship records. You come across mortality rates and those charts chart the effectiveness of the colonial system of indentureship. How many people died is also a measure of efficiency. So as much as we want to believe that people cared about keeping the records of people’s death, it was also a very administrative practice. So death is an anchor in the archive of indenture, an organising facet of the way we imagine the past. We imagine something to have ended, been dismembered, decommissioned, undone in a terminal and irreparable way, and relegated to the post of memory. For some, memory is vague, like a spell, but depending on the moment and caught in just the right light, it can be cutlass sharp and heavy as death. Death in the archive’s pages is also a window into the way we might imagine the temporal architecture of our compulsion to engage with past lives. This timescape for those of us living in diaspora, or who may have no way around the mountain of self-perception but to reckon constantly with death, is ecosystemic. For us time is not linear. We enter in different states from within different realms of perception, and we instrumentalise its different forms in ways that reveal questions about our place in it. I’ll just mention, I don't know if anyone’s read Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred’, but ‘Kindred’ was a novel, science fiction, where, a writer, a woman named Dana, living in the US, was literally dragged back into the past to save the lives of her ancestors, including, a white ancestor who had sexually violated her great great great grandmother. And so saving both of them was basically going to keep her alive. And that compulsion, it wasn’t her choice. And she was living in two different times and time was folded.
So part of what it means to be a part of this history and to engage in the archives is to mostly be compelled to find out the detail but also, it’s a matter of the future. So it’s not just relics in an archive, it’s actually the future that people are dealing with, with these memories. And remembering also includes doing something imaginative with what the archive presents. So ‘Maharani’s Misery’ is, so that's my cue to wrap it up, ‘Maharani’s Misery’ is a book written by Verene Shepherd, a Jamaican historian, about a woman’s journey across the sea as she was sent to Guyana and on the boat, there are remnants of what happened to her, but not the full story. So she pieces it together in a speculative history, which is really important for understanding what she regarded and what I think many of us regard as the importance of going beyond the archival record to do something imaginative with the work.
So I’ll just, I’ll leave this for the Q&A. Just to say Tao and my joint digital project partly aims to bring together different disciplines. So musicologists are doing interesting work on this time period, but also lawyers are and, you know, social scientists are, too, so to bring the material together and to structure it around narratives so that people find a window into the specialist material that might otherwise just remain, even if it’s digitised, remain obscure and in the walls of academia, rather than in a set of materials that’s accessible and shows the linkages between them. So that’s part of the idea of a mangrove, to be able to recast the beginnings and endings and the ways in into something different. So happy to talk about that more in the Q&A, and I will pass it over to Tao.
[Tao Leigh Goffe] Hi. It’s really wonderful to be here, although virtually, for this gathering on the archive as gathering place. Thank you, Eddie, for passing the baton to me with that image of the mangrove. So, I guess I’ll continue by lingering on the title of our panel, which references a Langston Hughes poem. So the Harlem Renaissance writer spoke of dreamkeeping in 1926, which is about one hundred years ago. And in doing so, he spoke of protecting the dreams of African Americans from America. And it’s not lost on us that this was the height of white supremacist violence. It’s also not lost on scholars like Eddie Bruce-Jones and I that this coincides with the timeline of racial indenture. The institution was ending, and as Eddie said, it coincided with the regime of racial slavery and over 100,000 people were bound in a temporary state of debt bondage, facing the flagellation of the whip in the plantation context. [Something missing here, perhaps as a result of switching to slideshow, see video] with these shades of unfreedom, when we reckon with the question of the colonial archive.
For our joint transatlantic project funded by the AHRC and the National Endowment for the Humanities, we have set about this question of dreaming together to create a community archive. So I also quote Toni Morrison in order to set the stage to suggest, as she said, ‘we are dreaming all wrong’. She spoke these words as a curator for her show at the Louvre Museum, entitled ‘The Foreigner’s Home’. I would add to her premise that we are archiving all wrong, and I think the reason why is because the metadata of the archive is all wrong. It’s not meant for people like Eddie and I, who are of Asian and African descent, grappling with these histories, and furthermore, the question we ought to be asking is, what is the language that you dream in, and does it keep your dreams safe?
So to answer this, Eddie and I turned to the mangrove, and you may be wondering if you’re not an environmental historian, and Eddie and I are a part of this field of study, what is a mangrove? So it’s a shrub or a tree that grows mainly in coastal saline or brackish water, and it’s found along equatorial climates, so that’s in places like Nigeria, Trinidad, and many of the locations that Eddie just described where indenture took place, in Southeast Asia, hugging the equator. And the mangrove for us gives a kind of new theorisation for the unruly metadata of the British colonial archive and how we navigate it as descendants, and as people who have been told that our archives are not real archives. This was a refrain that I heard throughout my PhD education from ‘capital H’ historians, so it would be great to talk in the Q&A about what real archives are and aren’t. But I turned to the mangrove because it is a home. It is a gathering place for crabs, for shrimp, it’s a fish nursery. You’ll find sharks, juvenile sharks that, nest within the roots of the mangrove as the trees grow above the water along the coastlines of many islands and coastal areas. The mangrove poses for us a model of metadata in the archive of racial indenture in three ways, as salty, thorny and tangled. It allows Eddie and I to grapple with a hidden chapter of racial capitalism, and we sit with the question of why there is a cycle of forgetting, of this institution that took place from 1806 into the 1920s.
To give you a sense of the collaborative transatlantic work that Eddie and I have been doing, we first met in 2017, and our collaboration took us to working with a group of thirty geographers, poets and architects in 2021 for a speculative design atlas. So one of the groups within this group of thirty chose to create a map of South Asia by using the mangrove, so the ecology of the mangrove, as a model of refusal. They refused the term ‘South Asia’ as one that is imposed onto that region of the world by British geography. They refused the term ‘subcontinent’ and looked for other vocabularies. So we have a podcast episode featuring Eddie in which he speaks with these practitioners about the mangrove as a form of refusal. The origins of the word mangrove are a bit deceptive. It may sound to be a kind of hybrid between man and plant and yet the indeterminate etymology brings us to ‘mangue’, which is thought to be the Taíno word, so the indigenous word for a plant, in French it’s called ‘palétuvier’, and furthermore, I wonder, how do we say mangrove in Yoruba, in Hakka, in Bhojpuri? So to answer this question, Eddie and I have constructed a mangrove bibliography that will be part of the website, which is a community archive that we’re launching next year, and the mangrove bibliography leads us to art, archive and ecology, all relevant to those of us in the audience and those of us presenting today.
So with the question of art, archive and ecology, I’m led to the meaning of the mangrove for Maryse Condé, and thinking about the late Guadeloupean writer and her classic text Crossing the Mangrove. There’s much to grapple with in the French Caribbean that parallels what we see in the British Empire regarding the thorniness of colonialism and the ecologies that are left abandoned after empire. We may also think about the mangrove as it’s gestured to in Steve McQueen's ‘Small Axe’ series and the question of descent and protest is palpable in that series, when we think about the Mangrove Cafe. Turning to the world of visual art, Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu also gives us the mangrove and gives us mangrove sisters, in the genealogy of her sculpture ‘In Two Canoe’. So Indian Ocean intimacies, Afro-Asian intimacies, come into play again as we consider the mangrove.
This has led me as much as a scholar and a professor, where I teach Black Studies at Hunter College in New York City, to embark on an art practice that grapples with the colonial archive and when Eddie and I first met, we thought about the indenture contracts that exist written in Hindi and in classical Chinese that are disintegrating in the Caribbean. We thought about how endangered these actual nineteenth-century documents are, turning to dust. But along the journey we have learned not to become the diasporic saviour in the West, to rescue these documents. We have stopped to think about what it would mean to rescue, and art becomes an intervention. So as my part of the project I am looking at the question of maternal health and breastfeeding under the regime of indenture, and in two artworks, one called ‘What Water Logs’ and another called ‘Indebted Literacies’, I’ve remixed documents found at the Trinidad National Archives, to think about the opacity and transparency of these images.
So this is all to say that the digital affords us a way to embrace a multisensory archive, and we really envision the digital mangrove as a gathering place and the mangrove as a protector surrounding the island. But amid ongoing climate crisis, which, as we know, is connected to racial crisis, we have to ask this question for the future, which is who will save the mangroves from us? Thank you.
Eddie Bruce-Jones is Professor of Law and Head of School of Law, Gender and Media at SOAS, University of London. His current work is an interdisciplinary history of British indentureship focused on the route between Kolkata and Kingston.
Tao Leigh Goffe is Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches classes on literary theorv and cultural history. She is the author of ‘Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis’ (2025).