Circuits of Wonder: South Asian Performers and the Global Politics of Racialized Labour

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Description of Research Project

This project aims to examine the global history of South Asian ‘wonder workers’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A rather porous group, ranging from acrobats, conjurors, jugglers, to those recruited to be displayed as part of racist ethnological exhibits, South Asian ‘wonder workers’ formed a visible and often contentious part of the urban landscape across Europe, the British Empire, and the Americas in this period. Entertainment and spectacle of this kind was sustained by skilled racialized labour aiming to produce wonderment, while simultaneously riven with conflicts over wages and the everyday regulation of work.

Metropolitan orientalist fascination with Asian exotica as well as a growing interest in the occult and the uncanny had led to the emergence of new markets for exotic entertainment and exhibitions. Many of these performers belonged to caste groups historically engaged in popular entertainment—as magicians, snake charmers, tumblers, jugglers and the like—in the Indian subcontinent. Predominantly nomadic, these caste groups had variously been categorized as ‘vagrant’ or ‘criminal’ by the British colonial state from the mid 19th century onwards—criminalisation that profoundly transformed their livelihoods and their access to resources. The emergent global circuits of performance, thus, offered new, though insecure and exploitative, prospects of employment for South Asian entertainers. European entrepreneurs assembled troupes of entertainers from across South Asia, often with the help of Indian intermediaries, for the purpose of staging performances, exhibitions and spectacles abroad. While Indian labour migration to other British colonies was regulated, if not actively encouraged, by the colonial state, performers, entertainers and artistes posed a distinct problem--they could not be categorized as ‘manual workers’, which was the preferred category of emigrating Indians and perhaps, more importantly, they breached the global colour line by moving from South Asia to the metropole. Their presence in the metropole proved to be particularly problematic for the imperial authorities as they were often abandoned by their European managers and came to form part of a racialized, occasionally destitute and vagrant urban underclass.

This project explores the politics of cultural representation and objectification to which South Asian performers were subject, situating the histories of this little-known group of subaltern South Asian ‘wonder workers’ within wider histories of imperialism and global labour migration. It has three central goals: first, to map the social worlds of mobile South Asian entertainers and examine how they negotiated and resisted the dehumanizing conditions of their working lives; second, to analyse the labour and the attendant conflicts involved in the production of wonderment and awe; and third, to consider the multiple and contradictory ways in which race, class, caste and gender shaped the constitution of colonial power.

The project will culminate in a series of journal articles, including one tentatively planned for submission to The Journal of Global History.

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Undergraduate Student Responsibilities

The undergraduate student will assist in preparing an annotated bibliography of existing scholarship on the following subjects:
South Asian entertainers in the 19th and 20th centuries
Popular entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th century involving racialized people

The student will also prepare a detailed catalogue of primary sources relevant to the project held in York University’s digital collections. This includes conducting primary research using The Times of India database, and the digital archives of '19th century periodicals', 'London Low Life', 'Victorian Popular Culture' and 'The World’s Fairs'.

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Qualifications Required

The undergraduate student should ideally have experience in historical research methods, including primary and secondary source analyses. They should be familiar with conducting research in digital archives and demonstrate strong research, writing and organizational skills. Familiarity with citation management tools, such as Zotero, are desirable.