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Recent scholarship across postcolonial, settler colonial, and critical Indigenous studies has interrogated the ascription of a settler identity to racialized communities whose own presence on Indigenous land may have been the result of the violent processes of colonialism. Simultaneously, this body of work has attended to how even these communities can replicate settler modes of belonging that marginalize Indigenous Peoples. In the postcolonial Caribbean, a discourse of labor and land ownership arguably consolidated Indo- and Afro-Creole belonging in such a way. This article examines literary fiction's role in imagining other ways of belonging for East Indians in Guyana. It illuminates how Cyril Dabydeen's Dark Swirl (1988) circumvents the framework of labor, land ownership, and enclosure to articulate a mode of belonging that unfolds by engaging with Indigenous histories and epistemologies. The resultant rearrangement of the East Indian characters' understanding of the land they inhabit is key to the novel's articulation of creole belonging. Dark Swirl thus intervenes in scholarship on creolization in the Caribbean that has often either ignored East Indians or reproduced the discourse of Indigenous disappearance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discourse of care undergirded colonial political rationality during the era of Indian indenture-ship in the Caribbean. In this essay the voyage of the Salsette from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1858 serves as an entry point into a broader conversation on the repeated archival invocation of care toward coolies during their passage to the plantation colonies. Care, which is synonymous with neither affect nor benevolence, refers to a series of techniques aimed at managing bodies traded for profit. Analyzing the apparatuses through which care for indentured servants was administered, the essay illuminates the racialized and caste-based knowledge systems that were mobilized to "make live" the reserve of potential labor force aboard. Concomitantly, it reads the colonial archive for moments in which indentured servants register their presence through their responses to being or refusal to be cared for and considers the stakes of such refusal for the colonial capitalist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]