Contested Labors: New Guinean Women and the German Colonial Indenture, 1884-1914

Abstract

This dissertation examines the complex social, cultural, and political worlds occupied by laboring New Guinean women under German colonial rule. It traces women’s lives and labors within the colony’s system of “cheap” contract labor—from their near-invisibility in the official records of the ruling chartered company (1884-1899) to their centrality in divisive colonial debates that characterized later periods of imperial governance (1899-1914). In so doing, this project reveals the significance of women’s labors—broadly conceived—to fundamental questions of German colonial governance embedded in evolving understandings of race, gender and sexuality. It thereby intervenes in historiographies of colonial (Papua) New Guinea and the Pacific more broadly by demonstrating that what had conventionally been understood as a masculine plantation labor force was undergirded by highly gendered and racialized regimes of sexual exploitation and unpaid reproductive labors. Moreover, this dissertation elucidates the ways in which New Guineans negotiated European claims to their laboring, racialized, and often eroticized bodies, and confronted and contested German efforts to align local understandings of gender, sexuality, family, and labor with imperial concerns. Informed by a theoretical literature that understands the colony as a site of embodied “contact,” this dissertation draws attention to the quotidian and highly embodied nature of New Guinean women’s experiences of colonial power in multiple, concrete, and heterogenous sites of colonial interaction. These sites include recruitment ships, plantations, mission stations, administrative centers, and the home of white colonists, as well as vernacular village spaces: sites in which a diversity of colonial actors made varying claims to women’s productive, sexual, and reproductive labors. Reading indentured women’s court testimonies against the grain of government correspondences, colonists’ and travelers’ writings, mission reports, and scientific texts, this dissertation sheds new light on the dynamic relationships between developments in colonial rule and shifting, often competing European representational strategies that worked to legitimize imperial interventions into subaltern life cycles.