Chinese and Indian Migration to the Caribbean: A conversation with David Dabydeen

​This event features prize-winning author David Dabydeen, who will speak with literary researcher Weibing Ni about his latest novel, Sweet Li Jie (2024). This conversation focuses on issues of migration, gender and the intertwined histories of indentureship and slavery, asking the questions: what interracial bonds are possible in postcolonial landscapes? How can poetics give agency to marginalised subjects?

​Masterfully interweaving the histories of China, Guyana and India with the experiences of Chinese, Indian and African diasporas in late-19th-century Guyana, Sweet Li Jie tells the story of Jia Yun, a Chinese textile merchant who flees his homeland in the face of social upheavals and foreign imperialist intrusion. Arriving in post-emancipation British Guyana, still scarred by its long experience of slavery, Jia Yun encounters Chinese and Indian indentured workers now substituting for the loss of slave labour in Demerara’s sugar cane fields. Jia Yun’s recollection of his time with these Afro- and Indo-Guyanese people is interspersed with other characters’ accounts of their own experiences during times of social instability in China and poverty in India.

​The richness of the novel’s cultural contacts is unique for Dabydeen’s postcolonial storytelling. The novel describes the interactions between Indian and Chinese indentured workers, Chinese businessmen, Caribbean indigenous peoples and freedmen of African descent. With his artistic skill, Dabydeen reimagines the past to account for the historical silences surrounding the quotidian lives of the dispossessed, salvaging the voices, bonds and affects erased in official archives. In so doing, his novel points to hopeful ways in which the Caribbean space can serve as an example of cultural hybridity and cross-ethic communities.