Introduction: The Ties That Bind

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.