Anglophone Literature of Caribbean Indenture

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.

Auteur

Alison Klein is a Lecturer in International Writing at Duke University, USA. Her work has been published in the anthology Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments, and the journals Anthurium, South Asian Review, and The Journal of Commonwealth Literatures.

Contenu

1. Introduction: The Ties That Bind2. To Have and to Hold: The Role of Marriage in Nonfiction Indenture Narratives3.Tying the Knot: Early Depictions of Indenture4.Tangled Up: Gendered Metaphors of Nation in Contemporary Indo-Caribbean Narratives5. Family Ties: Embodiment of Female Laborers in the Poetry of Indenture6. At the End of their Tether: Women Writing about Indenture7. Conclusion: Loose Threads