This chapter argues that through narrating the specific experiences of enslaved women and their freedom practices, from alternative kinship practices and strategic sexual relationships to knowledge of the slave economy and its reproductive logic, The History of Mary Prince imagines future freedoms while critiquing white inhumanity and the place of enslaved women within slavery’s rape culture. The chapter examines how enslaved women created and held onto kinship; how they used their sexuality to navigate their confinement and challenge ownership over their bodies; how Prince critiques white supremacy and its practices, including rape culture and the inability of white people to have sympathy for the enslaved; and how Prince imagined future freedoms, such as moving back to Antigua as a free woman, and freedom for all enslaved people. Through this analysis the chapter argues that Prince’s narrative challenges the silence of the colonial archive and allows us to see enslaved women beyond the violence they faced.

This chapter analyzes how Prince’s text underscores her disabilities and illnesses resulting from the physical, emotional, and psychological abuse she encountered and the labor she performed in both enslaved and free legal situations across geopolitical locations. Her memoir also moves between past and present tenses, active and passive voices. Through these literary techniques, she emphasizes disability and mobility as hardship as well as means of acquiring agency within the legal and everyday restrictions and demands people in power in the Caribbean and Britain placed on her in daily life. Prince’s intervention in the slave narrative genre as the first-known woman-authored autobiography in the genre widens interpretative terrain about Black enslavement and freedom, as she draws our attention to her physicality, disability, movement, and agency as a woman.

A poet celebrated for his syncretism, Shelley’s sense of fluidity arguably extends to his understanding of sex and sexuality, as he wrote during a time of peak flexibility and transition in thinking about gender-sex. Reading Erasmus Darwin’s descriptions of variously sexed plants, Ovid’s tales of shapeshifting, and William Lawrence’s intertwinement of sexed and racialised bodies, Shelley, the great poet of relation, comes to see the body as materially shifting, porous, and relational. Reading passages from A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love alongside the figure of nonbinary, intersex creation in ‘The Witch of Atlas’, Asia’s transformation into the posthuman ‘lamp of light’, and the nonhuman ‘shape all light’ in ‘The Triumph of Life’, this essay suggests Shelley began to understand polymorphous sexuality connected to sexed bodies of shapeshifting, mutable morphology.

Chapter 4 is grounded in an old Parsi house in the port city of Bharuch. The chapter argues that old Parsi houses, complicate Parsi colonial histories that became normative sources of Parsi belonging and emphasized the boundary of religious identity. The chapter draws on participant observation in Bharuch, Urdu and Gujarati histories of the port that feature the old house, and colonial administrative reports from the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai, to provide a plural account of belonging that weaves Parsi domesticity into larger frames of the political and economic history of the region. The chapter argues that an old house on a hill offers a historiographical location from where archives that are separated in the postcolonial present can be drawn together to show plural pasts. Nationalist accounts erase these layered pasts and assert a singular Hindu present. In contrast, old homes archive multiple histories that we can access by engaging with the built space of ports once involved in Indian Ocean capitalism.

This chapter explores the merchant houses of the port city of Rander, which were built by families involved in major colonial enterprises from cotton to shipping, to sugar and oil production, across an Indian Ocean geography from Durban to Rangoon. The continued attachment of these families to the old port, despite their residence in places across the Indian Ocean, suggests the significance of domestic space to wider colonial economic markets, ideas of family, and historic belonging in Gujarat. The chapter centers themes of travel, work, friendship, loss, celebration, and dwelling, as well as the impact of the 1857 rebellion and Muslim reformist movements on the built space of the port. The chapter also engages with contemporary merchant families and their relationships to their homes as sites of Indian Ocean pasts. In exploring the port’s homes and the itineraries that they orient, the chapter presents a nuanced interpretation of how the past is inhabited by port residents and the histories preserved through their efforts.

Scholarly understanding of these topics has evolved rapidly over recent decades, yet there is still much we don’t know about the complex ways that climate change interacts with migration decisions. In this final chapter, we discuss a number of emerging issues and future research needs including: gendered dimensions of migration in the context of future climate change, how climate-related migration affects Indigenous populations and cultural heritage, the interplay between climate-related migration and human health, the impacts of climate-related migration on receiving communities, identification of critical thresholds in climate-migration connections, and unforeseeable climate-migration outcomes.

Just as Song of Solomon and Down These Mean Streets inspired Junot Díaz to become a writer, Youngblood (1954), a novel by the radical African American author John Oliver Killens, inspired Piri Thomas to write Down These Mean Streets (1967). What does Thomas’s personal relationship with Killens reveal about the intertextual relationship between DTMS and Youngblood? What can we learn from reading DTMS as a coming-of-age memoir rather than as a coming-of-age novel? What can be gained by reading DTMS from a child-centered perspective? Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s concept of literary ancestry, Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, Gerard Genette’s definition of intertextuality, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of signifying, I argue that the shared themes of racial, sexual, and gendered trauma intertextually bind the homosocial coming-of-age narratives in DTMS and Youngblood. I examine how the coming-of-age narratives in each of these texts explore the entanglement of homosocial camaraderie and ethnic, racial, and sexual identity formation. In critically explicating these themes, this chapter expands Latino American and African American literary history and reveals new insights about the intertextual genealogy of influence between DTMS and Youngblood.

Setting sail from Gujarat across the western Indian Ocean, Chapter 2 disembarks on Mauritius, an island of sugar plantations located between South Asia, Africa, and Australia. At the heart of the chapter is Bel Ombre, a sugar plantation owned by a Gujarati merchant from the port city of Rander and the site of his residence in the late nineteenth century. In Gujarat, old merchant homes erase the wider oceanic context of plantation capitalism, slavery, and indentured labor. An emphasis on family itineraries displaces economic profits and proscribed intimacies. To track these points of contact in the late nineteenth century, the chapter analyzes colonial records of plantation ownership in the notarial records in autopsies, letters of helps, and other documents from the Protector of Immigrations records in the Mauritius National Archive in order to understand the broader context of racial capitalism that shaped life in Gujarat’s ports. The chapter argues that plantations – paradigmatic sites of colonial capital – were intimately connected to Gujarat’s havelis. In doing so it provides a critical understanding of family and belonging beyond the endogamous merchant family.

Chapter 3 opens with the haveli of Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783–1859) in the Gujarati city of Navsari to explore entanglements of home spaces, local libraries, and histories related to the Parsis. Turning from the colonial archive to the vernacular library and reading room, the chapter examines the nexus between the homes of Parsi capitalists who migrated to Bombay, merchant-sponsored libraries, and Parsi histories authored in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These texts (community histories, genealogies, and city histories) were occupied by questions of place, settlement, and community. The chapter argues that the late eighteenth-century relocation of Parsis down the Indian Ocean coastline from old Gujarati ports to British colonial Bombay was a key dimension of this literature. The publication of these texts, the new views of gendered belonging they hold within them, and the creation of libraries in old ports indicate the archival energy generated by colonial capitalism. The chapter places Parsi vernacular historical production within a broader context of colonial thinking on race and gender.

The introduction situates the old merchant homes of Gujarat between the Indian Ocean region and South Asia. Setting the stage for the rest of the book, the introduction demonstrates that havelis were embedded within British free-trade capitalism across the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though havelis were framed as domestic and private sites outside of the colonial economy, they were linked to slavery and indentured labor, plantation agriculture, and the mass production of commodities. The rich and unsettled grounds of Gujarat’s havelis reveal that the dislocations of colonial capitalism impacted merchant communities’ sense of place and belonging. While Indian Ocean histories of capitalism have placed an inordinate emphasis on paper records, this book argues that old houses suggest that space was not the background of capital’s history but a primary site of its articulation. Drawing the spaces of homes into relation with a range of textual colonial and vernacular archives, this book challenges our static ideas of belonging and argues for reimagining Gujarat through Muslim and Parsi mercantile communities, their itineraries, and their histories.