This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia, the Center for African Studies, and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University.

Please note that this lecture is part of a two day exhibition. Click here for exhibition details. 

About the event
Drawing on her 2025 multimedia exhibition commemorating the 180th anniversary of Indian presence in Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein explores the botanical as an imaginative phyto-archive. She examines how reworked forms of folk art can center the contribution of Indian indentured labourers to the Caribbean landscape through the seeds, spices, and plant cuttings they carried in the hold of ships between 1838 and 1917. In this history, visualised especially through portraiture, plants emerge as co-migrants with their own stories of subjectivity, settlement and adaptation.

This phyto-migration is memorialised in jahajin bandals (ship-sister bundles) that visualise Indian women’s transoceanic practices of botanical home-making. Women’s art forms such as mehndi (henna) document and reimagine plants like moringa, pumpkin, bitter gourd, curry leaf, tamarind, and spinach as archives of rural life and women’s labour. Through jewellery, rangoli designs, and community film-making, Hosein engages in embodied theorising that departs from Euro-creole landscape traditions, unfolding how stories of plantation survival entwine landscape, culture, family, and love.

In dialogue with movements for reparation and repair, Hosein speculatively recovers erased narratives, challenges sugar’s dominance in Caribbean praxes of remembering, and makes visible mixed-race mothering and queer abundance. The botanical thus becomes a living archive of the afterlife of indenture. By creatively imagining Indo-Caribbean histories, feminine aesthetics, and agricultural traditions, Hosein tells a deeply personal, familial, and political story of women’s labour, the gender differential economies of cane and rice, and women’s generational transformations in the post-indenture Caribbean.

About the speaker
Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is an Indo-Caribbean feminist scholar, writer and activist who received the Medal for the Development of Women (Gold) in 2022 for her contribution to Trinidad and Tobago. She is Senior Lecturer and former Head at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (2016–2020), former Vice-Chair of the Equal Opportunity Commission (2020-2023) and has been involved in Caribbean feminist organising for thirty years. She co-edited the collections Indo-Caribbean Feminisms: Charting Crossings in Geography, Discourse, and Politics (CRGS 2012) and Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016). Her publications include, “No Pure Place for Resistance: Reflections on Being Ms. Mastana Bahar 2000 (2011), “Modern Negotiations: Indo-Trinidadian Girlhood and Gender Differential Creolization” (2012), “Democracy, Gender and Indian Muslim Modernity in Trinidad” (2015), “A Letter to My Great-Grandmother” (2018), “Post-Indentureship Caribbean Feminist Thought, Transoceanic Feminisms, and the Convergence of Asymmetries” (2020), The Botanical Afterlives of Indenture: Mehndi as Imaginative Visual Archive (2024), and the poem “Chutney Love” (2019). Her blog, Diary of a Mothering Worker, has been published as a national newspaper column since 2012, and includes numerous columns on Indo-Caribbean gender relations and feminisms. The exhibition, The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives, was first held at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in June 2025.

Photo: The photographer credit is Abigail Hadeed