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It Takes the Love of the Living and the Dead: Indo-Fijian Craft as Embodied Knowledge and Anarchism

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Exegesis(200.48 MB)

Date

2024

Authors

Charan, Quishile

Supervisor

Amundsen, Fiona
Tapuni, Nooroa

Item type

Exegesis

Degree name

Doctor of Philosophy

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Volume Title

Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

In this practice-led research project, I seek to develop a decolonial framework of Indo-Fijian anarchism and self-determination at the intersections of craft, cultural knowledge, critical theory, and Girmit history and scholarship. Fiji Girmit (indentured labour) scholarship predominantly revolves around my community’s trauma, pain, and survival, rendered from colonial state- sanctioned “histories” into the archives and re-rendered in academic writing. This process has created ideologies of Indo-Fijians as bodies out of place, and condemned us to being only objects of labour or niche research subjects. A core focus of my project is what it means to move beyond surviving and beyond these histories that condemn us to nothingness, towards a place where we can return to the sites of healing and repair first set out by our ancestors. One of these sites is kahaani/khissa, where our stories of belonging and relationship-building can be told in their full complexity. In this project, I establish a language and framework that looks towards our futurities. This is important as a non-Indigenous ethnic community whose knowledge, histories, and futures are being actively colonised. Self-determination within the Indo-Fijian context begins with the story of seeds lovingly hidden into the folds of head wraps and fabric that my ancestors brought with them on the Girmit ships that took them to the violent plantation system of colonial Fiji. These seeds, brought over for survival, have created a thread from past to present; I now plant and wait for these seeds to bloom, then imprint, dye, embroider, sew, and quilt fabrics with these and other collective memories. Through re-narrating and re-storying our own histories, craft becomes the functional vessel of storytelling, of world-building, resistance, memories, and the cultural knowledge our ancestors have gifted us. This work is significant for how it weaves together a story of futurity, where Indo-Fijians can know that they are these seeds that have grown and fruited relationships beyond colonial inventions around who does and does not get to exist. Just as our ancestors left the boundaries of coloniality though modes of resistance, so too does my community and my craft practice, which spans across generations, cultures, time and space. Revisiting parts of our histories that have been deemed as symbolic of our subjugation, I choose to identify the actions of ancestors as decolonial modes of being such as jahaji, which is reclaimed within the Indo-Fijian context as a cultural framework of whakawhanaungatanga and building futures.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/19536

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Doctoral Theses