Governing Life on the Ocean: Indentured Laborers’ Voyages to the Caribbean and the Colonial Management of Racial Capital

Najnin Islam (Assistant Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Ahmed AboHamad (Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday, April 29, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually
Scholarship on racial capitalism in the Atlantic world, especially the Caribbean has offered robust ways of understanding the relationship between race, labor, and colonialism. Caste became an equally important factor undergirding the division of labor in the British Caribbean after the emancipation of enslaved Africans in the 1830s and the subsequent recruitment of indentured laborers or “coolies” from India. My book examines the constitutive role of race and caste within the project of Indian indentureship, a task that it undertakes through appositional readings of the colonial archive and literary-cultural productions between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In this talk I turn to the oceanic passage of indentured laborers to examine how this site was structured by British perceptions about the racial disposition of Indians and their caste-specific characteristics. Analyzing logbooks and journals kept by captains and doctors on “coolie” ships alongside administrative correspondences and colonial ordinances, I show that the voyages served as testing grounds that at times confirmed racialized discourses about Indians and at other times completely upended such certainties, leading to the production of new racial knowledge.

Najnin Islam is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on post-emancipation labor economies in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean world. Her current book project examines the entangled histories of race and caste in the Anglophone Caribbean during the era of Indian indentureship. Through appositional readings of the historical archive of indentureship and contemporary literary-cultural productions, the book reflects more broadly on the implications of these connected histories for our understanding of racial capitalism in the Atlantic world. Her research has received support through the NEH and other institutional funding. Her work appears in ARIEL, Interventions, Small Axe, Global South Studies, Verge, and more.

Ahmed AboHamad is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he also earned his M.A. in Philosophy and completed graduate certificates in Human Rights and in Intersectional Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (IIREP). Prior to joining UConn, he graduated summa cum laude with honors from Connecticut College, majoring in Biological Sciences and Philosophy. His areas of interest include Political Philosophy, Ethics, the History of Philosophy, and Moral Psychology.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

Unfenceable: Ecofascism, Literary Genre, and Native American Environmental Justice

April Anson (Assistant Professor, English & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

with a response by Kathleen Tonry (English, UConn)

Wednesday, April 1, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Dr. Anson will be discussing her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Unfenceable: Ecofascism, Literary Genre, and Indigenous American Environmental Justice, forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press. Unfenceable traces today’s rise of ecofascist climate rhetoric to a long tradition of American ecofascist storytelling while also unearthing resistance strategies in Indigenous American authors infrequently studied, especially in relation to environmental issues. Anson analyzes 19th C American ecofascist fictions as a literary tradition that clarifies the blood and soil logic uniting stages of settler capitalism. Most importantly, she shows that Native American tribal specificity, sovereignty, and literary production have been and continue to be crucial to environmental concerns. In nineteenth-century America, as in today, Unfencable finds ecofascism lurks in the stories we tell and our individual places within, and responsibility for, systems of oppression. Ultimately, Anson argues that the realities of climate change demand ​reckoning with the politics of literary genre and prioritizing land return.

Dr. April Anson is an assistant professor of English and Social and Critical Inquiry and the 2025-26 Justice, Equity and Repair Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. She is also current co-president of the Association for Literature and the Environment, with Dr. Alex Menrisky. Dr. Anson works in the environmental humanities, American studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies. Her current book project uses literary analysis to trace the historical and ongoing relationship between climate change, white supremacy, and American environmental thought as well as the Indigenous American environmental justice traditions that eclipse those relations. Examples of her public-facing work include “No One is a Virus,” Against the Ecofascist Creep, and “Water Justice and Technology.” Her scholarship has appeared in boundary 2, Resilience, American Quarterly, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and more.

Kathleen Tonry is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her work focuses on the history of the premodern book, and especially on the intertwined transitions in literary and material textual histories that took place over the fifteenth century. She has published on forms of history-writing, the place of leisure, and on the formal tensions evident in writing across the fifteenth century. Her work has won an NEH grant and the Beatrice White prize, and in 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar with Harvard’s Medieval Studies Program. Her current monograph project, Books, Labor, and Time: Experiments and Ambitions in Premodern English Texts, foregrounds the preoccupation with temporality among book readers and makers over the course of the fifteenth century.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.