Coolitude

You must add a |reason= parameter to this Cleanup template – replace it with {{Cleanup|February 2007|reason=<Fill reason here>}}, or remove the Cleanup template.

Coolitude is a term referring to the cultural interaction of the Indian or Chinese diaspora, and any migratory episode seen through its variegated aspects.

It is first and foremost engaged in a transcultural process, articulating imaginaries and cultures far from essentialist points of view.

It is better understood when set against History, as it charts a poetics of complexity.

Abolition of slavery

When slavery was abolished in 1834, namely in Mauritius, (though dates may differ in other areas), the settlers and planters of various countries required a cheap working force to continue labour-intensive crops, mining and railway installations. The emacipated slaves had started pressing for high wages and many considered working the land as a stigma of the brutal episode of slavery.

After experimenting with Bretons, Lorrains, Normans, Madagasy, African and Japanese indentured workers, the ruling class finally decided to hire coolies mainly from India and China.

A wave of migrations was to last for almost a century, taking labourers to Mauritius, Réunion, Fiji, Singapore, Malaysia, East and South Africa, the West Indies and Guyana, among other countries affected by the coolie trade, which Hugh Tinker called "a new form of slavery".

These displacements were to have a lasting effect on the demography, languages, politics and cultures of those lands, and entailed profound new definitions on identities.

Therefore, while exploring this first phase of uprooting as enhanced by the crossing of the kala pani (the taboo of crossing the black sea in Hinduism), coolitude focusses on the multiple facets of displacements, violence, hybridity and mosaic visions linked to this form of migration based on a five year contract and initiating wages in the wake of slavery.

From dereliction to Relation

In the turmoil of the post-slavery period, the colonial societies were modelled by the the first phases of creolisation, namely between the Europeans and White owners and mostly Black emancipated groups, namely the mulattoes, who evolved creole language or creolese. But language and literature being modes of social ascension, the mixed segments of the population and the emancipated had no choice but to resort to the most prestigious languages of the former masters to express their repressed selves.

Therefore, many variegated forms of cultural spheres became existent in food and religion, for instance, though it was mainly the Catholic religion which was enforced on the uprooted African. It was mostly a binary relation, reminding one of the Hegelian master/slave dialectics. However, a form of creole thought and cultural resistance were to be observed in this competition for recognition, as delienated in the novels of Maryse Conde, Raphael Confiant in the French West Indies, and of Marcel Cabon or Loys Masson in Mauritius. In this environment, a new comer arrived.

The coolie was the third term of the relation, and as such, complicated the creolisation process.

Therefore, he/she suffered from exclusion and were to be engaged in a forced or ambiguous relation, because the former slaves considered him/her as an "ally of the master', as he/she came to work for wages that were inferior to the demands of the emancipated. As for the masters, the indentured was no more than an object fitting in their vast taylorized economy boosting mass consumption in Europe, engaged in the industrialisation period.

Even though some spaces of intercultural relations were initiated, the coolie felt marginalised.

Thus, many descents of the indentured clung to the notion of indianity, referring to the lost original country, India, which they retrieved as they could. With the passsage of time, however, those groups started to think of a mosaic form of identity, sometimes torn between two or more cultures religions and languages.

As a result, in many countries, indianity was no longer relevant to account for this type of in-betweenness, as indianity referred primarily to a nationality and the reality was far more complex in the host countries.

Many descents of indentured have started to think of themselves as Fidjians, Mauritians, Martinicans, while keeping references from India, experimenting new forms of diversity.

From poetry to poetics

A concept was needed to fill the gap as far as this complex identity was concerned, instilling an aesthetics and an imaginary in keeping with contemporary researches on multiculturalism and transculturalism, among other postcolonial and postmodern theories.

The term was devised in Cale d'étoiles-Coolitude (Azalées Editions, La Réunion, 1992) by Francophone poet Khal Torabully, to chart the coolie's voyage, giving a mosaic twist to this recollection, and insisting on the centrality of the sea voyage, which goes beyond the taboo of the kala pani, forbidding of the sea voyage in Hinduism.

Coined from the word coolie and in lexical analogy with the neologism négritude, coolitude diverges from the latter in many vital fields .

Indeed, Torabully worked on a non-essentialist poetics, enlarging the coolie's experience to a vision expressing the meeting of languages and cultures, much in keeping with a neobaroque, postmodern and poststructuralist construction and Derridian deconstructions.

This concept describes the present relationships in various fields wherein the Indias (or mosaic India) are related to other human spaces, through cinema, literature, fashion or other activities.

As such, the poetics of coolitude represents the development of a Humanism of Diversity in the wake of the coolie trade and is relevant in current intercultural researches.

A vision of the world with ahimsa and non-violent philosophy

Coolitude is also used in France and in many countries as a "cool attitude', to denote an aesthetic relation fraught with non-violence, which echoes one of the potentialities of the term. Indeed, it relates to anon-violent attitude at the core of Torabully's poetics, in keeping with the ahimsa of Gandhi, which is a way of showing respect to the most derelict members of a society, to the pariah of History, to any harijan or dalit without the voice of his/her presence. By giving a voice to the indentured, irrespective of creed colour and race, coolitude offers a vision of human relations which confronts the intricacies and challenges of identity and alterity

Coolitude thus charts an open, diverse and peaceful attitude to otherness. Besides the tasks of retrieval propounded by this concept, this concept exposes the desire of building a dialogue between the descents of slaves, of indentured and other social components who have too often been cut off from this humane necessity. As such, it is instrumental in fostering greater understanding of human migrations in contemporary societies where cultures and imaginaries meet in the wake of globalisation.

This poetics is symbolised in the coral imaginary or identity.

Reference

Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (with Marina Carter, Anthem Press, London, 2002) ISBN 1843310031

External links

Article in Unesco Courier :

[1]

Transoceanic echoes: coolitude... an abstract :

[[2]]

Coolitude by Anthem press : [[3]]

[(fr) Biographie][4]

Créolité, Coolitude, Créolisation: Les imaginaires de la relation.

[[5]]

Présentation de la thèse de Véronique Bragard :

[6]

Article sur la coolitude en anglais : [7]