Acknowledgements; List of Tables; List of Figures and Diagrams; Introduction; 1. Coolie Women in the Empire's Rubber Garden: Historical and Contextual Background; 2. 'Tapping' Resources: (Re) Figuring the Labour of Coolie Women on Estates; 3. Managing 'Partnerships': Domesticity and Entrepreneurial Endeavours; 4. Negotiating Intimacies and Moralities: Enticements, Desertions, Violence and Gendered Trials; 5. Becoming 'Ranis': Coolie Women as Rani Jhansi Regiment Recruits in WWII; Conclusion; Epilogue; Glossary; Notes and References; Bibliography; Index.
Critically examines the agency and history of long-silenced coolie women and their role in colonial economy and transnational movements.
Arunima Datta is Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of North Texas. She is the author of the multiple award-winning book Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (2021), which received the Sara A. Whaley Award from the National Women's Studies Association, the Gita Chaudhuri Award from the Western Association of Women Historians and the Stansky Award from the North American Conference of British Studies. Her earlier work on the history of travelling ayahs in Britain has also won the Carol Gold Award. Her recent book, Waiting on Empire: History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (2023) was recently published by Oxford University Press. She serves as an associate editor of Gender & History, Britain and the World, and as the Associate Review Editor of the American Historical Review. Her works have appeared in several scholarly journals, public history journals and magazines, and on BBC4.
'In this landmark study, Arunima Datta takes aim at decades of
historiographical refusal to see and hear the situational agency of
coolie women in colonial Malaysia. Drawing on a remarkable
combination of archival evidence and oral histories, she makes an
irrefutable case for recognizing coolie women's work as the key to
plantation economies and by extension, to the history of
colonialism written at large. Fleeting Agencies is world history
from below at its principled best. It's also a model of
anti-imperial, feminist transnational labour and migration history,
and a handbook for how to decolonize archives upon which
exclusionary histories have been built as well. This is a must-read
for anyone interested in the gendered history of radicalized
capital wherever it has taken root.' Antoinette Burton, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
'More than victims of planters, colonial authorities, and their own
men, Indian coolie women in Malaya emerge from this finely grained
and sophisticated history as depot wives, rights-bearing labourers,
entrepreneurial householders, absconding lovers, and armed
resisters of British, Japanese, and elite rule. Arunima Datta finds
situational agency in their everyday lives with broad implications
for the gendering of global labour migration, colonialism, and
politics of work and intimacy.' Eileen Boris, University of
California Santa Barbara
'Fleeting Agencies is a major contribution to the history of global
migration. With creativity and nuance, Arunima Datta recovers from
archival fragments the experiences of Indian women workers on the
plantations of colonial Malaya. This book will be widely admired
across fields – and admired as much for its methodological
sophistication as for its moving and engaging narrative.' Sunil
Amrith, Yale University
'… This book is a strong intervention in a field of research that
has received little attention, and importantly, no investment, for
decades. That field is women's social history in Malaya and
Malaysia … Datta has broken new ground by centring the stories of
workers who were doubly marginalised, on racial as well as gender
grounds.' Amrita Malhi, History Australia
'Datta has authored a wonderful and necessary book. Happily, we
have a new and critical historical voice in Malaysian studies, if
not in postcolonial historiography more broadly. Fleeting Agencies
is a must-read for Malaysianists and scholars of colonial power
relations, ethnicity and gender studies.' Andrew Willford, Journal
of Social Issues in Southeast Asia
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