Following on our 2016 anthology to trace a genealogy of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought, this collection thinks across global geographies to understand forms of individual and collective feminist mobilizing that have emerged from communities irrevocably shaped by the system of Indian indentureship and its movement of bodies, politics, and knowledge.We are driven by an interest in local specificities in feminist
movements in and across places such as South and East Africa, Suriname, Mauritius, Réunion, Fiji, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Jamaica, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Peru and more, and their North American and European diasporas.
We aim to trace similarities and dis/connections among feminist organizing in these varied landscapes. We pose these questions in the context of neoliberalism, challenges to justice and sovereignty, policing of borders, and the reinforcing of patriarchal and ethnonationalist definitions of belonging. The loosening and recreating of ties of belonging initiated by indentureship and its legacies have long challenged such restrictive understandings. Forms of feminism bred by common experiences of labour and capitalist exploitation have also been undoing patriarchal and class controls and conjuring new possibilities for transformational alliances.
For us, post-indentureship is not limited to landscape, generation, or purity of origins, but is a capacious space for relationality, multi-faceted identity, and channeling of varied ancestral knowledges into revolutionary praxis. We see post-indentureship land and seascapes as ones in which hierarchies and colonial divide and rule practices are challenged in ways that are instructive for current global conditions. In tracing post-indentureship strands of feminism, we call attention to feminism’s power to build solidarities and hand down forms of cultural and political resistance. We are interested in how indenture legacies are critically and generatively taken up and experienced by all those, across ethnicity, living in the wake of this
system and whose feminisms, which may not be Indo-centric, situate legacies of colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, African enslavement, and Indian indenture as co-constituted.
How have such post-indenture feminisms been shaped by complex understandings of global labor movements and solidarities? How do they both call upon and trouble notions of home and belonging in their efforts to achieve gender justice, greater landscapes of equity, and recognition for their unique inheritances and offerings to global and local feminist projects? What kinds of unique challenges to climate change, heteronormativity, and global capitalism do these specific contexts provoke and imagine? What are some of the online connections and networks via which these indentureship sites speak to each other?
We encourage analysis and reflection that draws on “cosmologies, artifacts, archetypes, myths, and symbols, engagements with embodiment, popular cultural expressions, the sacred and sexual, and intellectual traditions and concepts” (Hosein and Outar 2016, 2). We welcome research and reflections on feminist consciousness, everyday praxes, art, writing, online organizing, and formation of activist or creative collectives and movements. We welcome contributions from artists, activists, writers, scholars, poets, and others thinking through indentureship’s impact on feminist organizing, and conceptualizations of individual,
intersectional, multi-generational, and collective action in and across post-indenture sites. We invite thinking about transnational and transoceanic alliance building, and cross-ethnic and cross-class solidarities, in these efforts.
As we seek to explore how transoceanic feminist consciousness, praxes, arts, and activisms are shaped by legacies of Indian indenture, we invite submissions that consider:
- Mothering, grandmothering, tanties, and community care
- Contributions of men and intersections with masculinities
- Histories of gender and sexual diversity and community
- Generational and familial practices, and intergenerational relationships
- Religion and spirituality
- Sustenance, healing, and the botanical
- Culture, creativity, literature, popular culture, visuality, and the arts
- Activism, social movements, and political organizing
- Public writing and scholarship
- Cross-ethnic, Afro-Asian, and other solidarities
- Resistance to dispossession, colonization, and extractivism
- Sexuality, desire, and pleasure
- Archives, absence, and abundance
- Madness and mental health
- Migration, belonging, and borderlands
- Cyber-activism, social media, and digital networks
- Intersections of climate, gender, economic and sexual rights and justice, and legal reforms
- Transnational and transoceanic collaboration
Submissions can be in the form of scholarship, non-scholarly reflective essays, interviews, short fiction, poems, photography and painting, and photo essays. We welcome scholarly essays and interviews of 7000 words (including references); fiction, nonfiction, photoessays and creative reflections of 2000 to 5000 words; and submissions of poetry which include 2 to 3 poems.
Submission Deadlines and Symposium Dates:
- May 30, 2026: Abstracts due
- October 30, 2026: Full Essays Submitted
- November 19 – 20, 2026
- Post-Indenture Feminisms Symposium (Online)
- February 2027: Submission of Full Manuscript
For more information, please email both
Gabrielle Hosein: gabrielle.hosein@sta.uwi.edu
and Lisa Outar: leoutar@gmail.com
Post-Indenture Feminisms: Mapping Consciousness, Challenge, and Change, Eds. Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar. Call for Submissions: Published January 2026
Post-Indenture Feminisms_Call for Submissions_PubJ_260203_091306