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This article theorizes the discursive endeavors of indentured communities to archive history, through comparing Shani Mootoo’s  Cereus Blooms at Night  (1996) and Chang-Rae Lee’s  On Such a Full Sea  (2014). Set in fictional labor colonies in the Americas, the two antirealist narratives show how collective literary form reveals the persistent ways in which historical knowledge is recorded and circulated. Drawing on Rey Chow’s scholarship, the article contends that the assemblages of discourses and acts of lore-making manifested in both novels gesture to the alternative modes of recounting the untold histories of indentureship. I conceptualize the communal archive through three key frameworks: movement, network, and imagination. The disciplinary forces of the indenture system are theorized in movement, a term that explicates the workers’ liminal positions in the colony. Network captures each community’s dynamism, multiplicity, and cacophony. By paying attention to the gossip culture, I examine how gossip as discourse network redefines the unruly acts of collaboration among the indentured. Finally, my analysis identifies imagination as a conceptual agent that gives form to the rebellious network and promises its continuation. The polyphonic and motley communal archive offers a new method of engaging with diasporic literary texts that serve as alternative historical accounts for the footnoted and silenced.

Indentured History in Lore: Theorizing the Communal Discourse Archive