Disorienting Archives: Feminist Histories of Indian Ocean Capitalism

Abstract: This essay takes Sara Ahmed's insights on disorientation to the Indian Ocean arena, a geography extending across Africa, Asia, and Australia, linked together by a vast water body and networks of British colonial capitalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essay reviews three recent books, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya by Arunima Datta, and Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal by Poulomi Saha. These books embrace experiences of disorientation as a vital feminist method for engaging with archives of colonial capitalism across the Indian Ocean and evincing other collective attempts at world-making in its midst. The historical archives Khatun, Datta, and Saha contend with are shaped by and reflect a particular nineteenth century context: a racial division of labor that persisted after the abolition of slavery in 1834, and which organized hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and caste across circuits of Indian Ocean capitalism. Khatun, Datta, and Saha's readings, the essay argues, suggest two aspects of the value of disorientation in feminist approaches to the past. First, as an adjective, disorienting archives name the vexing and shared scholarly experiences of gendered, racial, and caste erasures, over representations, and presences during research across the Indian Ocean region. Second, as a verb, the term names a radical archival practice of intentionally disrupting the normative "lines" that orient hierarchies of race, gender, and caste in official colonial archives, thus making room for other orientations to the past.