“Guano in Their Destiny”: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture

Abstract

To the ways fertilizer has been employed as an extended metaphor of racial extraction and mourning in U.S. and British literary thought by Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Jackson, and Ian Fleming, I juxtapose archival traces of racial indenture across the Americas that gesture to the exploitations of the nineteenth-century global guano trade. The phosphate-rich droppings of seabirds, guano is refuse that is embedded with a poetics of refusal. Assembling fragments of ship logs, landscape photographs, novels, and knickknacks to compose a variegated archive, I attend to the contours of colonial historiography and the erosion of Chinese labor from the landscape of the Americas. Using the framework of the archipelagic turn, I focus on how Chinese indenture in the Caribbean and Latin America decontinentalizes the circuits of labor and capital in the Western hemisphere. In the 1860s the ecologies of relation between Asian indenture interlocked with black emancipation in a pivotal moment, fueling the notion of “free-market” capitalism. Examining the remains of the Chinese presence in colonial era contracts, I contend with the materiality of how Chinese bones are literally and figuratively calcified in the Caribbean archipelago and the geology of the Americas in a process of transformation I call racial sedimentation. Through an excremental logic of accretion and accumulation, a mosaic of lives becomes part of the histories and bodies sedimented in the geologies of the hemisphere that critically interrogates the boundary between human and nonhuman, freedom and unfreedom.

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