ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to trace some of the more significant discursive and material practices of a gendered and racist colonial Asia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that went towards constituting the category of 'the coolie'. Especially dear to the discourse in question was the notion that a 'coolie' was essentially a peasant, given to a generalised disposition of immobility. The persistence of this fictive construction, we argue, served to obstruct and/or deny the proletarianisation of migrant coolie labour, spawning a set of contradictions that in turn revealed the contradictions inherent in the material practices of capitalism in Asia. Chief among these contradictions was that of a peasant-coolie who was both immobile and unstable, hyper-settled and unsettled. These contradictions infected nationalist as much as colonialist literature, and persist to this day, not only in the rhetoric of emerging nationalisms of certain nation-states where 'coolies' are immigrants, but also, to one degree or another, in the discourses of labour unions and 'coolies' themselves. The resultant identity of a 'coolie' is best described as a fractured one, whose most poignant representations are to be found in the fractured moral identities of the female coolie and child coolie.
