My Mother’s Baby: Wrecking Work After Indentureship

Abstract

Taking up his Baby album as a text created by his mother, the author considers various strategies she engaged in negotiating tensions of patriarchy, ethnocentrism and nationalism. Characterizing her interventions as “wrecking work,” the author argues for characterization of his mother’s representations as illustrative of Indo-Caribbean feminist practice. Her “interruption” of dominant narratives, he argues, is a heritage of indentureship’s “wrecking work” and potentially informs future social justice–seeking advocacy projects.