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.
