This one-day workshop aims to complicate how we write labour into South Asian diaspora history, and the South Asian diaspora into global labour history. Throughout the 19th and 20th century, the majority of the South Asian diaspora were "labouring poor", prominent in plantations, factories, oilfields, docks, ships, households and brothels throughout Southeast Asia, Eastern and Southern Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the Americas, at the forefront of new unions and strikes, and integral to new subaltern articulations of solidarity, internationalist socialism, and anti-colonial nationalism. The diverse histories of these diasporic communities in place have been in dialogue with more contemporary transnational flows of South Asian labour, generating new dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and forging solidarities across borders.

Traditional sources of information in the archives comprise of written and photographic records originating through company trade, empire projects and nation-building exercises. They are documentary traces left behind by rich, western-educated upper-class men and women— bureaucrats, company officials, merchants, missionaries, soldiers and mercenaries among others. Contrarily, intergenerational memory, oral history and cultural traditions are ways in which subaltern histories are often preserved and transmitted. There are also traces of internationalist solidarities and anti-colonial organising in the archives of different left movements and trade unions. This workshop is, therefore, particularly interested in exploring South Asian diasporic labour history at the intersection of movements and memory.

Movement in the title has been used in two senses. One, it signals the various histories of mobility, migration and displacement of South Asian diasporic labour. Two, it acknowledges the workers’ struggles and resistances that emerged as a result of these movements across lands and water. Integrating new spaces, perspectives, time periods and approaches, this workshop aims to bring together the latest research on how South Asian workers across the world articulated solidarity and resistance through - and against - divergent registers of solidarity, gender, racial hierarchy, and exclusionary nationalism. Also foregrounded are the following questions: How does migration shape cultural and political memory, and consequently the diaspora’s relationship to place, both with the land left behind and the one that holds their future? How was/is memory mobilized to spark movements in diasporic communities?

Highlights:

Keynote (10 am - 11:30 am)

"Amra noi eka: Songs of pride and resistance in migrant music in Italy" (Amra noi eka is the Bangla version of "We Shall Overcome")

By Alessandro Portelli, Professor Emeritus, University of Rome “La Sapienza” and founder & chairman of Circolo Gianni Bosio

Book Discussion (3:45 pm - 5:00 pm)

Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers: Class, Race, and Maritime Capitalism in the Early Twentieth Century

by Ravi Ahuja, Professor of Modern Indian History, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

The workshop is co-funded by Global History Research Cluster, Lord Kelvin and Adam Smith Fellowship and GLEW (Glasgow Labour, Employment and Work)

Workshop co-organisers: David Featherstone, Henry Dee, Piyusha Chatterjee and Diarmaid Kelliher

Please register here

First published: 11 April 2025

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