Presenters and Abstracts

Title: Chinese Caribbean Studies: The Trajectory of a Field. 

Dr. Look Lai is the keynote speaker for the symposium. His 1993 book Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 is a foundational text for Chinese Caribbean Studies. Other books include The Chinese in the West Indies, 1806-1995: A Documentary History (2000) and West Meets East: The Life of Eugene Chen, 1875-1944 (2021). Working within a genealogical framework, the symposium honours the work of Dr. Look Lai, who is retired and lives in Trinidad and Tobago. Surfacing 2025 will make his knowledge and insights accessible to more junior scholars, creative practitioners, and interested publics, and we eagerly await his most recent ideas and reflections. 

In the keynote address, Dr. Look Lai will reflect on the evolution of his work and career in developing the study of Chinese in the Caribbean. His scholarship spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, takes a comparative and connective approach to Indian and Chinese labor migrations, and explores settlement and assimilation as well as homeland ties and politics. He will share insights into enduring debates, such as the tension between local and diasporic orientation. Dr. Look Lai is joined by historian Kathleen López, who will respond and further engage him in conversation about themes and challenges for new generations of scholars, writers, artists, and community members.

Presentation Title: Memory Archives of a Not-So-Distant Past – Cufun Landolio Attai 1917 – 1985

The experiences of Caribbean Immigrants of Asian descent are impacted by legacies of indentureship, contract labor, and ongoing migration circuits to the Caribbean. These histories have facilitated the movement of Indo-Caribbean, Chinese-Caribbean, Javanese-Caribbean, Japanese-Caribbean, and other Asian-Caribbean immigrant groups to various countries in the region and South America, including the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago (among others). There has been extensive historical and social science scholarship on Indo-Caribbean experiences of indentureship and contract labor, but less research has been conducted to document and theorize the experiences of the Chinese-Caribbean. My family’s journey with indentureship is an exciting and nuanced one, resulting in the merging of Indo-Trinidadian and Chinese-Trinidadian histories in the rural village of Toco. In this paper, I turn to my family’s archives and particularly to our collective memory to begin recovering our memories of my grandfather’s journeys between China and Trinidad and Tobago and communities in its diasporas. Through fragments of memory and material artifacts, I trace the intricate web of global connections that have shaped my family’s present. In honoring his memory, I not only reconnect with my personal history but also engage with the broader narratives of displacement, resilience, and cultural hybridity that characterize the experiences of many who navigated the tumultuous currents of empire and migration in the Caribbean.

Presentation Title: Dread in Exile: Works in Photography & Other Media 1980 – 2025

I will present 30 images from four bodies of creative work in the genres of self-portraiture: the I-Traits series, the Throne series, the Still Life series in both black and white and color, and the Jamaican portraits. I will address the themes of being biracial in Jamaica and my upbringing as the scion of a large Afro-Chinese Jamaican family of shopkeepers in downtown Kingston. I will also be showing the documentation of my now twelve-year project to rebuild and reconstruct Carew Castle, which is the name of the property of land in the rugged hills of St Catherine, Jamaica. I have inherited this piece of tropical rainforest and have been building ecological sanctuary and probable refuge for myself and family in the very near future.

Presentation Title: Between China & Mexico: Sonic Geographies of Whaling across the 19th-century Pacific

This paper explores how the songs of whales migrating across the Pacific and the songs of the whalers that pursued, materialize Chinese Mexican geographies in the nineteenth century. In this period, North Atlantic economies placed a high demand on whale oil that served as a source of illumination and lubrication for the machines that powered the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on whaling logs and journals, this paper considers how the mobility of whales and whalers brought together the east coast of China and the west coast of Mexico. It engages sonic speculation to discern these patterns of mobility by imaginatively attuning to the songs that whalers sang to coordinate the labor of killing alongside the songs that whales sang during breeding season. Analyzing these sounds of life and death together raises questions about species, space, and gender, as whalers were almost exclusively men, and only male whales produced song. Whales and whalers thus co-constructed a Chinese Mexican oceanic geography by elaborating a masculinist soundscape in their moves across the Pacific.

Presentation Title:  When Chiney Start Dredge: Exploring Grassroots Responses to the People’s Republic of China’s Development Presence in Jamaica

International discourse on the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) political and economic expansion across the African diaspora is often framed in binary terms. Western thought leaders frequently invoke concepts like the “China Model” and “Beijing Consensus” to portray China as an opportunistic economic authoritarian threatening the liberal world order. In contrast, the PRC presents itself as part of the Global South, committed to a “harmonious world order” rooted in sovereignty and mutual benefit (DeHart 2012). These macro-level narratives, overlook how working-class communities experience and reinterpret the impacts of PRC-led development in their daily lives. In this paper, I examine local responses to PRC development through two case studies in Jamaica between 2014 and 2018, the years preceding Jamaica’s adoption of the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative. By centering these voices, I explore how local perceptions of China’s presence align with or diverge from dominant geopolitical narratives, offering a grounded understanding of development, sovereignty, and resistance in the modern Sino-Caribbean interactions.

Presentation Title: Mobility in the Caribbean-Americas Region among Chinese from French Guiana and Martinique

The initial migrations to these territories date back to the late 19th century (coolies trade), followed by the 1920s-1940s for the Hakkas, and finally the 1970s-90s in French Guiana and 1995 in Martinique for the Chinese from Zhejiang. However, over several generations, these Chinese people have crisscrossed the Caribbean and the Americas (US, Canada) in search of economic or social opportunities, with returns to China. The trajectories of families will show us this migratory complexity.

Presentation Title: Entangled Genealogies: Planetary Care Ethics in Chinese Caribbean Art and Literature Elena Igartuburu, University of Oviedo

Despite its marginality, postcolonial novels by/and about Chinese diasporas in the Caribbean tend to reproduce the liberal ethno-racial structures of coloniality. Characters’ arcs are measured in terms of upward social and economic mobility that privileges individualism and reify racial and gender divides while erasing colonial and imperial histories of extraction. This paper argues that where the strictures of the novel as a literary form engage in the reproduction of colonial ethics of care, art provides a medium for Chinese Caribbean artists to imagine horizontal relational practices that align the histories of Chinese and African diasporas in the Caribbean. Drawing on the concepts of the planetary (Moraru 2014) and the plot (Wynter 1971), I focus on Kerry Young’s novels and Andrea Chung’s art as works that conceive of the entangled genealogies of Afro-Chinese relations, reveal extractive practices, and propose alternative networks of care.

Presentation Title: Do Not Touch the Yellow Woman: Breaking the Chinese Ornament in Literature

This paper examines the persistent Lotus Blossom and Dragon Lady tropes in the hispanophone Caribbean. Jacqueline Jiang draws from her PhD research on the Boricua Male Gaze, the silencing of archives, and Saidiya Hartman’s practice of critical fabulation. Engaging with Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism, Jiang also incorporates her own experiences through poetry to argue for the visibilization of Chinese presence in Caribbean spaces where they, oftentimes and still, remain overlooked. While her primary focus is on Chinese femme rhizomes, her analysis also considers male figures, including historian José Lee-Borges’s work on the Chinese in Puerto Rico.  

Presentation Title: Miss Chin Productions

This presentation, I will speak about my practice as a documentary filmmaker based in Toronto, whose work explores culture and identity of the Hakka Chinese in Jamaica and its diaspora. I will focus on three of my productions: A Brief Record of My Father’s Time at Seaabout my dad’s intimate account of his migrant journey from China to Jamaica in 1949 and then my family’s subsequent move to Canada in 1974; Half: The Story of a Chinese-Jamaican Sonabout Vincent Lee, a five-year-old, mixed-race child of a Chinese father and Jamaican mother, was sent by himself to live with relatives in his father’s village in southern China in 1936; and Peter Chin: The Blood Remembers about the maverick Jamaican-Canadian choreographer and dancer on how his Hakka heritage informs his performances and character. Finally, I will share how my Hakka upbringing in Jamaica has shaped my creative mission, question, and find answers about placemaking in the world that surrounds me. This diasporic experience has opened possibilities through syncretic practices where my ancestral, cultural and spiritual life can shuffle between different worlds, where the visual narratives and languages are constantly code switching, where the personal can address broader socio-political and historical issues, and where I am able to ask questions that seem like answers and find answers that pose new questions.

Presentation Title: They Came Too: Chinese Guyanese Women in the Archives

The presence of a significant number of women among the indentured workers imported from China to work on the sugar estates in Guyana was an anomaly in the history of indenture in the West Indies and the Americas. Yet for the most part they scarcely exist in the official records. However from the few events recorded in newspapers, documents and oral stories, it is possible to reconstruct a life quite different from that intended for them by the Colonial recruiters, the missionaries, the estate owners and their own menfolk.

Presentation Title: Degrees of Freedom: Chinese Contract Laborers ("Coolies") on Cuban Plantations: Extension of Slavery or Transition to Free?

In the labor history of the Caribbean, Cuba presented a unique situation in the second half of the nineteenth century, when 125,000 male Chinese laborers under 8-year contracts were brought into the Spanish island colony to work alongside a dwindling population of enslaved African men and women on the flourishing sugar plantations. Nowhere else in world history were indentured Asian--all men--and enslaved Africans, men and women, co-workers in the same space and time. This unprecedented labor population raises several questions regarding race, class, and gender: Were the Chinese black or white, slave or free? How did the absence of Chinese women affect race relations between Asians and Africans? Exploring these questions sheds light on the key one: did the Chinese coolies constitute slaves like their African co-workers and hence extend slavery in Cuba, or did they make the transition to freedom, thereby hastening that transition for enslaved Africans?

Title: How Can I Ask Questions From Afar?

I’m interested in researching and working with the place in the world where I belong. Being a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants in Costa Rica has shaped who I am and how I exist. There is a weaving of understandings, sensations, desires, and stories of different places that results in a nuanced way of thinking and feeling. The place where I live brings me an opportunity to ask questions and find answers about placemaking in the world that surrounds me. This diasporic experience has opened possibilities through syncretic practices where my ancestral, cultural and spiritual life can shuffle between different worlds, where the visual narratives and languages are constantly code switching, where the personal can address broader socio-political and historical issues, and where I am able to ask questions that seem like answers and find answers that pose new questions.

Presentation Title:  Indentureship, Migration and the Chinese Identity: A Comparison of the Chinese Guyanese and Chinese American Experience in Shinebourne’s The Last Ship and Yang’s American Born Chinese  

In this paper, the concept of pure Chineseness, the importance of traditions and personal, reconstructed histories will be explored in Shineboure’s prose fiction work, The Last Ship, and Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese. Migration affects the construction of Chineseness and challenges the concept of purity and coerces the creation of an identity and sense of self that balances and mitigates the seemingly conflicting Chinese and European identities. Shinebourne’s The Last Ship traverses the struggles with Chineseness and cultural acceptance for three generations. Yang’s American Born Chinese, on the other hand, explores the migratory experience of Jin Wang’s family in America.

Presentation Title: The Woman in the Chinese Collar: archives, silence, and creative practice

In this talk, I reflect on the research and writing of The Woman in the Chinese Collar, focusing on my exploration of historical records to uncover the life of my Afro-Chinese aunt, Nelsa. I will critically examine the limitations of traditional archival practices, particularly with regard to the lives of women marked by shame, sex work, and violence. I will discuss what alternatives may exist when the archive is closed, and reflect on the role of imagination, ancestral knowledge, and collaborative practices in reconstructing fragmented histories.

Presentation Title: Condition of Being Near 

Connecting racial stand-ins across history and geography to examine artistic expressions and interpretations of the new cultures that emerged through the movement of indentured laborers from southern China to the Caribbean, South America and Africa, following the emancipation and transition of African labor under colonial, then revolutionary, independent, and finally globalized governance. Then how are cultures and identities further transformed through contemporary migratory flows, reconfigured and reinforced borders that flatten diasporas and members of the global south as a monolithic, feared and misunderstood stand-in for ‘other’? On the flipside, how have artists and activists turned the neo-liberal and colonial instrumentalization of ‘Stand-In’ into a departure point for empathy, coalition-building and solidarity?

Presentation Title: On the Erotic Possibilities of Asian Caribbean Thought

What are the forms of knowledge that emerge from the relationship between the imaginaries and geographies of Asia and the Caribbean? These two regions matter given Asia’s expanding role as a global power and the Caribbean’s position as the crucible of Western modernity. This project thus considers the ways of knowing at the crossroads of the world's oldest and newest regions of global modernity. That something like Asian Caribbean thought has not already been explicitly articulated is surprising given the centrality of Asia for conceiving Caribbean and vice versa. While Asia has been key to the very imagining of the Caribbean since Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World in his search for the Far East, its significance for theorizing the region has yet to be fully explored. Similarly, while the project of Asian Studies engages the “West” as a figure of central antagonism, it has yet to substantively engage with the Caribbean as the very ground upon which Western modernity unfolded. Drawing on the work of Martinican theorist Éduoard Glissant, this talk foregrounds structures of desire as constitutive of geo-epistemologies and advances grammars of the erotic to forge possibilities of Asian Caribbean Thought.

Presentation Title: A Visible or Invisible Chinese Hakka Heritage

This presentation explores the visibility—or invisibility—of my Chinese Hakka heritage throughout my career, highlighting a selection of my work as a visual artist, curator, and writer. I am 87.5% of Chinese Hakka descent, born in 1952 in Suriname, before the country gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975. My mother was a member of the Moravian Church, while my father was Roman Catholic, and I was raised as a Roman Catholic girl in Suriname’s multi-ethnic society. During my adolescence, I attended AMS, then the only public senior high school. At the time, nationalistic ideals were centered around the mottos "Unity in Diversity" and "Wan bon, someni wiwiri" (One tree, so many leaves). These phrases reflected an utopian vision that encouraged individuals to take pride in their own cultural heritage while also respecting and understanding the diverse cultures that make up Suriname.

Presentation Title: Making Chinese Haitian Histories: Race, class, gender, and the struggle for Jamaican self-government

My three Bloomsbury published novels ‘Pao’ (2011), ‘Gloria’ (2013) and ‘Show Me A Mountain' (2016) explore the personal, social and political challenges at the heart of Jamaica’s struggle to escape from 300 years of British colonialism towards Independence and beyond. These works of fiction trace the inter-relationship of Yang Pao (a working-class Chinese man); his mistress, Gloria Campbell (a poor woman of African heritage) and his wife, Fay Wong (a wealthy woman of mixed Chinese/African heritage). This interweaved and multi-layered story is a chronicle of multicultural Jamaica set against the backdrop of Jamaica’s political turmoil between 1938 and the early 1980s. For the Chinese Caribbean Studies Network Symposium I will read from ‘Pao’.