Oceanic Intimacies

In this essay, I explore what intimacies might be revealed if we trace oceanic entanglements created by eighteenth-century maritime routes and journeys in historical and contemporary imaginative reconstructions of such histories. I respond to Lisa Lowe’s proposal to use “intimacies as a heuristic,” and to decentre the European notion of “the human” constructed by colonial epistemologies. To do so, I offer two counter-histories, embedded in and through different waters, which challenge imperial two-dimensional epistemologies. “Porous Intimacies” discusses the seafaring part of Sheikh I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet (1765), one of the first travelogues written by an Indian about Europe. “Immersive Intimacies” analyzes David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1995), which imaginatively reconstructs the middle passage of captured Africans on British slave ships bound for the Caribbean. Rethinking former historical accounts within and outside colonial and liberal frameworks, I analyze new intimacies through oceanic connections.

Imperatives, Impossibilities, and Intimacies in the Imperial Archive: Chinese Men and Women of Colour in Early Nineteenth-Century Trinidad

In this article, I elaborate on Lisa Lowe’s “intimacies as method” by examining the case of 198 Chinese men conscripted to Trinidad in 1806. I argue that tracing Chinese migration to the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century demonstrates that the British empire began to imagine new hierarchies of unfreedom for people of Asian and African descent before the abolition of chattel slavery. British imperial actors hoped that Chinese men would assume a mediating function between white planters and the extant population of colour in Trinidad. This vision was predicated on the assumption that the migrants would partner with women of colour to form heterosexual intimacies while also refraining from other forms of socio-political contact with Afro-Trinidadians. Lowe’s intimacies as method guides my navigation of the imperial archive and, in particular, compels me to think relationally about differentially colonized and racialized sub jects in early nineteenth-century Trinidad, both as they were positioned in the colony and as they refused these stereotypes, brokering their own transactions and collaborations.