Abstract
The introduction offers background on the British Imperial system of indentured labor and the role of indenture in colonial and anti-colonial literature. It lays out the book’s focus upon the “seductive hierarchies of empire”: the ideologies of gender, ethnicity, and class that developed under imperialism and indenture and that continue to hold sway in the Caribbean today. Additionally, it proposes a “poetics of kinship,” a focus on the importance of building familial ties across generations and across classifications of people in order to counter the repressive ideologies of empire.
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Notes
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Elizabeth E. Weber summarizes the argument of literary intellectual Liang Qichao, who suggested in 1902 that literature had the power to move the masses: “In the creation of provocative…and enchanting fictional worlds, authors could stealthily inculcate with particular social values those readers who might be less receptive to more overtly political tracts and nonfiction essays” (Weber 2016, 304).
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Deepchand Beeharry: That Others Might Live (1976); Sharlow: The Promise (1995); David Dabydeen: The Counting House, published in 1996 (2005); Roy Heath: The Shadow Bride (1996); Patricia Powell: The Pagoda (1998); Cristina García: Monkey Hunting (2003); Helen Atteck: Bound for Trinidad: An Historical Novel (2004); Ron Ramdin: Rama’s Voyage (2004); Ryhaan Shah’s A Silent Life (2005); Peggy Mohan: Jahajin (2007); Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies (2008); Khalil Rahman Ali: Sugar’s Sweet Allure (2013).
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Puri has stated that she “had not intended (indeed, had cautioned against) constructions of douglaness that were idealizing, paradigmatic, or prescriptive” (Puri 2016, 322).
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Klein, A. (2018). Introduction: The Ties That Bind. In: Anglophone Literature of Caribbean Indenture. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99055-2_1
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