Andil Gosine’s Cane Portraiture and the aesthetics of indenture

Abstract

Andil Gosine’s participant-driven performance Cane Portraiture aestheticizes the social history of indentured labourers in the Caribbean. The work expands the field of relations surrounding the discourse of ‘coolitude’ – the dissemination of Indian labour during the 19th century – by redressing the ‘coolie odyssey’. By doing so, Gosine suggests that the pathos of displacement produced by the ‘coolie odyssey’ moves through generations of the Caribbean diaspora. In an attempt to define and reconcile this tension, Cane Portraiture attempts to locate a renewed sense of place and of ‘home’. For Gosine, then, the conceptualization of ‘home’ is approached as an embodiment of a person or site that is shared with others.