Anglophone Literature of Caribbean Indenture

The Seductive Hierarchies of Empire

Alison Klein

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319990545
• eBook ISBN: 9783319990552
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is the first comprehensive study of Anglophone literature depicting the British Imperial system of indentured labor in the Caribbean. Through an examination of intimate relationships within indenture narratives, this text traces the seductive hierarchies of empire – the oppressive ideologies of gender, ethnicity, and class that developed under imperialism and indenture and that continue to impact the Caribbean today. It demonstrates that British colonizers, Indian and Chinese laborers, and formerly enslaved Africans negotiated struggles for political and economic power through the performance of masculinity and the control of migrant women, and that even those authors who critique empire often reinforce patriarchy as they do so. Further, it identifies a common thread within the work of those authors who resist the hierarchies of empire: a poetics of kinship, or, a focus on the importance of building familial ties across generations and across classifications of people.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Ties That Bind
• 2. To Have and To Hold: The Role of Marriage in Nonfiction Indenture Narratives
• 3. Tying the Knot: Early Depictions of Indenture
• 4. Tangled Up: Gendered Metaphors of Nation in Contemporary Indo-Caribbean Narratives
• 5. Family Ties: Embodiment of Female Laborers in the Poetry of Indenture
• 6. At the End of Their Tether: Women Writing about Indenture
• 7. Conclusion: Loose Threads
• Back Matter