Archival Shapeshifting: On the Muddy Paths of Transcendence between Nation-States

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 1923, on a sugar plantation in British Guiana, 23-year-old overseer Leslie H.C. Phillips witnessed an elaborate ritual performed by hundreds of indentured laborers from southern India. The event propitiated the goddess Kali in variable shapes and forms. If the “Kali-Mai Puja” was mysterious and in need of interpretation, so was Phillips himself. Born in the Guyanese capital, Georgetown, he would write a recollection of the puja three decades later at his home in Vancouver, Canada. Here I reconsider Phillip’s account as refracted through his own ontological shifts in identity and bodily form during the migration process from the Caribbean to North America. Such shapeshifting is performed in immigration documents: arriving in New York City (1923), Phillips declared himself “African.” When crossing the Niagara border into Canada (1928), he was “Scotch.” These transformations trouble lingering assumptions, even in the postcolonial literature, of any sharp opposition between Western and non-Western selves.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow