Ghost - The Afterlives of Contract and Enslavement

Project

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the entangled cultural memories of plantation indentured labour under Portuguese colonialism in Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe, dating from the 20th century to the present. By examining how and why indentured labor narratives, commonly referred to as contrato, evolve over time in two African archipelagos, GHOST addresses a gap in global plantation studies, which tend to focus on the Americas. Its originality arises from a groundbreaking interdisciplinary approach to colonial plantations, forced labor, and memorialization processes: haunting.

As spectral agents - or the return of the dead as spirits - that can disrupt dominant narratives of the past by transcending fixed boundaries of time and space through ritual possession or other mechanisms. As a result, the ghost can serve as a means of voicing social protest and the multiplicity of experiences on indentured labour.
As a metaphor and rhetorical device to address colonial violence and its persistent legacies in the present, as well as to discuss notions of historical injustice and representation. In this sense, the ghost is both a figure of memory and a mode of historical critique as well as a mode of reconstruction and reconfiguration of postcolonial present (and future).
As a systematic process of disqualifying, dehumanizing, and dispossessing concrete subjects, regarded as subaltern and unworthy of social recognition. Through this third reading, the ghost becomes a symbol of indentured laborers' spectral citizenship.

Research Objectives

Located within the interdisciplinary fields of Postcolonial, Cultural and Memory Studies, this project addresses three main research questions. What is the nature of the narratives concerning indentured labor and “contrato”? How are they culturally, socially and politically manifested in Cape Verde and São Tomé? In what ways can this shared colonial past be decolonized through haunting? A synchronic and diachronic approach is taken by GHOST in its pursuit of three core research objectives:

1. To provide a comparative cultural history of indentured labour by mapping and analysing the narratives produced by Cape Verdeans and Santomeans, and determine how these experiences are both object and subject of divergent memories.
To develop a combined analysis of gendered indentured labour narratives and the conceptual and multidisciplinary framework of haunting in order to further its analytical and political significance.
To demonstrate how (post)colonial hauntings may highlight the political and social power of humanities and cultural analysis in recognizing dismissed colonial pasts and their long-lasting legacies, identifying alternative methods of producing emancipatory knowledge capable of confronting past and present forms of violence.

By the end of the project, GHOST will have produced results that expand epistemological knowledge regarding haunting in (post)colonial contexts. It will also unpack social, cultural and political memory formats that resist dominant histories, thus creating spaces, beyond hegemonic narratives, for a more critical and democratic analysis of indentured labour. To achieve this, the project proposes an innovative approach to:

Investigate the ways in which contrato is experienced in Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe, identifying a range of social practices that promote cognitive justice in relation to these subaltern knowledges.
Expand and modify our understanding of indentured labour through two under-researched case studies, contributing to the internationalisation of an important aspect of global history that is marginally represented.
Demonstrate how (post)colonial hauntings may highlight the political and social power of humanities and cultural analysis in recognizing dismissed colonial pasts and their long-lasting legacies.

The Afterlives of Contract and Enslavement

Narratives in indentured labour between Cape Verde and S. Tomé and Príncipe

Project

Research Objectives

Team