Cutlass: Objects Toward a Theory of Representation

Abstract

This chapter traces the cutlass, a plantation tool that Indian men sometimes used to harm their partners, across contemporary Indo-Caribbean feminist writing and arts. It thinks across black feminist and Indo-Caribbean feminist thought in order to offer a materialist history of “wife murders” in the post-emancipation period. In Coolie Woman , Gaiutra Bahadur reproduces the spectacular violence in the colonial archive by recounting “wife murders” in stark detail. In contrast, Andil Gosine’s metal brooch “Cutlass” revises the colonial narrative of “wife murders” as Gosine invokes his grandmother’s domestic work with the cutlass. Through these readings, this chapter poses a dougla feminist theory of representation, which understands Indian women’s desires and sex work in the context of African wage labor and Indian indentureship.

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