Grace Jin

Coolie Mutiny

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Introductions, Root Division, 2024

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Biomythographical figurescapes inspired by “a Chapter on the Coolie Trade" by Edgar Holden in Harper’s Monthly, 1864, which described voyages and uprisings by indentured laborers transported from southern China to colonies in the Americas in the decades following the abolition of slavery. Reflecting on experiences of childhood family separation and transnational migration, I offer my body as a bridge across radical histories and liberatory futures, layering and blurring the boundaries between personal and collective, human and nonhuman, leaving remnants of bodies in motion, illegible, unbound, uprising, ever-expanding to hold the multiplicities of life free from the colonial hegemonic project. 

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