The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba

by Lisa Yun

Overview

The Coolie Speaks focuses on Chinese laborers who worked side by side with African slaves in Cuba and   wrote of their experiences of new bondage. Examining these narratives of resistance,  the book  reconceptualizes diasporic representations and histories to offer transformative re-examinations of "Chinese," "African," and "Latino" in mutually imbricated contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592135813
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2007
Series:	Asian American History & Cultu
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lisa Yun is Associate Professor of English and Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Challenges of a Transnational History xv

Chapter 1 Historical Context of Coolie Traffic to the Americas 1

The Narrative of Transition 1

The Early Experiments 5

Chinese and Indian Coolie Labor 7

Chinese Coolies and "Tea with Sugar" 11

Coolies on Ships and the Passage 14

Coolies on American Ships 21

Coolies on Land 28

Chapter 2 The Coolie Testimonies 36

The Commission Investigation 37

Methodological Challenges of Reading Testimonies 49

Coolie Testimonies and African Slave Narratives 54

Who Were the Coolies? 60

Chapter 3 The Petitions 72

The Witness Petition 80

The Verse Petition 87

The Argument Petition 105

Philosophical Prelude 106

Chasing Freedom 111

Slaves of the Market 133

The Paper Chase Petition 137

Chapter 4 The Depositions 143

Race, Resistance, and Spectacular Subordination 146

The Peculiar Fatality of Color 157

Struggle Before Solidarity 163

The Cost of Domination 173

Chapter 5 An Afro-Chinese Author and the Next Generation 183

The Subversive and the Translator 187

The Motley Tongue 196

Liberation, Solidarity, and "Socio-political Adultery" 209

Coolies and Californians 215

Conclusion: Old and New Maps of Coolies 229

Addendum: Selected Petitions 243

Sources 261

Notes 277

Editorial Reviews

The individual testimonies…are stunning in their particularity and personality. Some use Chinese historic and poetic allusions in sophisticated ways, some are quite simple, and all are anguishing….[T]he author is to be commended.”—Library Journal

“[L]ittle critical attention has been paid to one of the most important testimonials in Latin American history: The Cuba Commission Report. Lisa Yun’s timely and well-written book is undoubtedly the most complete study to date on this jewel for the study of race relations, labor migration, and the international division of labor. Her outstanding analysis of the testimonial is complemented with other testimonies related to the so-called coolie trade in Cuba. In this sense, the book rescues from oblivion the abuses committed against southern Chinese indentured laborers… The Coolie Speaks is of interest not only for Chinese diaspora studies but also for Latin American, Caribbean, and Pan-African studies and literary criticism. This book is bound to become a seminal work for the study of the Chinese presence in the Americas.”
—The Colonial Latin American Historical Review

"The book begins with an impressive contextualization of the movement of coolie labor across the Pacific, by far the most detailed analysis at hand. The core of Yun’s book, however, is an examination of the coolie testimonies themselves.... This is a major addition to our understanding of the subjectivity of subaltern peoples and of the power relations in which subaltern texts are embedded. It should be obligatory reading for historians working in many fields—Latin American and Caribbean history, most obviously, but also the politics of testimonial production in general."
—The American Historical Review

"[Yun] has opened up a horrific oyster shell embedded in the reefs of the slave trade.... Yet the power and striking originality of The Coolie Speaks lies less in its message than in its harsh but elegant dialectic of recovery and storytelling.... The Coolie Speaks is a breakthrough of scholarship. It provides a new map not just of the Atlantic slave trade, Chinese diaspora, and modern capitalism, but of scholarly means to articulate the words, places, and stories that tumble outward from the violent and fractured history of modernity. Like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Coolie Speaks seems to find a root language to remember and memorialize human suffering and agency, while teaching us again as scholars and citizens of the world to listen carefully to the cries, whispers, and exhortations of the past."
— Callaloo

From the Publisher