This chapter employs an archive that was counterinsurgent in its creation in order to tease out an insurgent narrative of the uprisings, spotlighting the demands and experiences of working people as it traces the spread of labor unrest across various plantations that year. The central argument is that despite racialized job segmentation, residential segregation, and disparate historical experiences, the unrest demonstrates active cooperation among the Black and Indian communities that confronted the sugar industry and colonial state. In this case, strong racial identities did not preclude joint action. The chapter demonstrates that laborers were not only aware of their position in the colonial economy, but also advanced a vision of modern politics and connected their interests to global concerns of their day, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia and ideas about communism.

This introduction situates the rebellions in British Guiana within the larger context of unrest in the Caribbean during the 1930s. I also discuss the concepts of solidarity, overlapping diasporas, and modern politics to explore how this story fits into the broader historiography, and why the stakes of this project have implications both within and beyond the region.

Chapter 2 explores racialization through identity development on the ground. The diasporic projects led by African- and Indian-Guianese communities during the 1930s demonstrate how they expressed racial consciousness at the time. African-Guianese celebrated the centennial of their emancipation from enslavement, while Indian-Guianese celebrated the centenary of their arrival in the colony. African-Guianese continued to build connections across the Black world; projects ranged from the development of a local Tuskegee (loosely modeled after African American leader Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama), dedicated to gendered projects of economic uplift, to the British Guiana branch of the Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which organized support for Ethiopia against Italy’s invasion in 1935. Indian-Guianese were concurrently expressing their desire to retain Indian languages and culture, requesting steamship services to India, and fighting for inclusion during the post-indenture period. Both communities supported anticolonial projects in Ethiopia and India but drew on their identities as British subjects to do so. I also explore a tradition of protest through which both communities came together in the city and on the plantation, with the examples of rebellions in 1905 and 1924. This chapter breathes life into the term “overlapping diasporas.”

The conclusion explores the meaning and takeaways of the 1935 uprisings and explores ideas about solidarity that gain power from recognizing and understanding difference, and it notes this legacy of possibility.

Ultimately, the rebellions led to uneven gains and significant losses for working people. This chapter discusses the impact of the rebellions, highlights the aspirations of Guianese working people in their wake, and examines how a government-mediated solution narrowed their broader vision. These and other uprisings in the region spurred significant changes in British imperial economic and social policy in the Caribbean.

This volume explores how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the turn of the century. We are interested not only in understanding how literature and the arts confronted the unprecedented penetration of global capital in Latin America, but also in exploring the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labor conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, creating original discourses, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. The various contributions provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and nonmetropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.

This introductory chapter poses the book’s main questions, surveys the literature on the Arab Spring, places the Arab Spring in historical and comparative perspectives, introduces the book’s explanatory framework and methodology, and provides an overview of the book. Of the countries involved in and affected by the Arab Spring protests, why was Tunisia the only country to embark on a procedural and consensual democratic transition? Why not Egypt? Why did the Bahraini monarchy call on outside military assistance to repress the protests, while the Moroccan monarchy quickly agreed to constitutional amendments? Why did Libya, Syria, and Yemen descend into internationalized civil conflicts? More broadly, what prevented a region-wide democratic transition? We present our thesis regarding the salience of type of state, civil society, gender relations and women’s mobilizations, and international influences in shaping transition possibilities and trajectories. Tables and figures illustrate the argument and situate the 2011 uprisings along a historical continuum of protest and mobilization in the MENA region.