Arunima Datta - "Race, Anxiety and Shopping in the Australian Outback: Indian Hawkers and Victoria's 1884 Smallpox Outbreak"

For the first episode of our new season, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) welcomes Prof. Arunima Datta (University of North Texas) to discuss her article, "Race, Anxiety and Shopping in the Australian Outback: Indian Hawkers and Victoria's 1884 Smallpox Outbreak," as well as her newly-published second monograph, Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (Oxford UP, 2023). Their conversation covers many of the themes that animate Prof. Datta's research: South Asian migration under the British Empire, labour history from a subaltern perspective, and the intersections of gender and race.

Prof. Datta is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UNT, Associate Editor for both Gender & History and Britain and the World, and Associate Review Editor for the American Historical Review. Her first monograph, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya, was published in 2021.

Links:

University Profile: https://history.unt.edu/people/arunima-datta

"Race, Anxiety and Shopping": https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003152149-27/race-anxiety-shopping-australian-outback-arunima-datta

Waiting on Empire: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/waiting-on-empire-9780192848239?cc=ca&lang=en&

The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."

Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con