Kirandeep Bhanot

I am a second-year PhD student at the University of Toronto. My current research is interested in the plantation stage in the colonial Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, I am interested in the development of colonial theatre in the Caribbean alongside the rise of the plantation economy, enslaved labour, and ecological control. My project observes the stagings of British plays in this plantation space, but also investigates how the plantation itself becomes a stage, a theatricalized site of imperial ideology, with controlled and choreographed performances of labour in front of the watchful audiences of the plantation owners. Yet, the plantation also serves as an integral landscape to the enslaved and ecological uprisings, revolutions, and counter-performances against the vicious colonial rule. My project is invested in observing this performative connection that runs through the three things that were transported to the Caribbean: the natural ecology, racialized bodies, and the theatre.