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.