"From the Edges: Afterlives of Chinese Indenture in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda"

This article continues my interest in the question of how cultural creative workers take up the issue of formal archives and their violences. Specifically, I read Patricia Powell’s novel The Pagoda as both exploration and artefact of the afterlife of Chinese indenture in Jamaica. I take the fictionalized letter that frames a novel about the Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean during the period of Indenture as a launching off point to explore how Caribbean diasporic novels allude to, function as, and create artefacts of Indenture, enabling the writer to signify the haunting of Indenture in individual and collective memory. The essay, which is part of my book project, argues that Powell’s novel explores and articulates (in) the silences found in ‘official’ narratives and histories, and takes readers into the edges, into the afterlives of Chinese indenture in Jamaica.