An Analysis of French and English Indo-Caribbean Literary Depictions of Indentured Servitude and Its Associated Neurological Implications

Abstract

The Indo-Caribbean diaspora is largely unstudied in current scientific literature. However, 300,000 Americans and 2,500,000 people worldwide currently make up this demographic. Indo-Caribbeans are descendants of indentured laborers migrating from India to various English and French colonies, including Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, serving as substitutes for slaves when slavery was illegalized in these colonies. The potential connection between the harsh and debilitating lifestyle of these indentured laborers and the disease prevalence in the descendants of this population is largely unexamined. To fully understand the experience of the Indo-Caribbean population, this thesis used numerous Indo-Caribbean novels, including A House for Mr. Biswas, Valmiki’s Daughter, Aurore, and the written history Coolie Woman, to understand the migration process from India to the Caribbean, the daily life as an indentured laborer, and the transition from a laborer to a freed person in the era of decolonization. The characterizations of the protagonists from each of these novels were examined through a social cognitive lens to understand how concepts like dehumanization, intergroup bias, and social defeat manifest in the lived environment. Then, these social cognition concepts were studied through past neuroscientific research to analyze their possible pathological ties to the neurological and/or psychiatric diseases, like substance abuse and depression, to demonstrate the connection between indentured labor and the current prevalence of disease. In addition, this project examines how certain social structures, like race, gender roles, sexuality, and caste, influence the experiences of specific segments of the Indo-Caribbean population, especially in regard to the “marriage plot,” a literary theme or plot structure present in western European early modern and modern literature where marriage is centered around socioeconomic utility. This interdisciplinary study between Indo-Caribbean literature and neuroscience is the first step to attempt to understand how indentured labor may have affected the health of the current generation of Indo-Caribbean people.