Tangled Up: Gendered Nationhood in Indo- Caribbean Indenture Narratives

Alison Klein

doi:10.33596/anth.292

Abstract

Novels that explore the British imperial system of indentured labor in the Caribbean often contain the trope of a relationship developing between a British man in power and a female Indian laborer. This essay explores the use of this relationship as a metaphor for Britain’s colonial relationship with India in two novels by contemporary Indo-Caribbean authors, David Dabydeen’s The Counting House and Sharlow’s The Promise. The Counting House and The Promise use this metaphor to attack the racist interventions of imperialism and indenture, but the novels also maintain the more conventional views of gender that were concretized under these systems and that persist in the Caribbean today.

Highlights

Cover Page Acknowledgments I would like to gratefully acknowledge the CUNY Graduate Center's Doctoral Student Research Grant Program and The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Summer Research Travel Fellowship, which funded the research for this article
A rare first-person account from a female laborer, Doolarie describes the degrading experience of indenture, as the workers were loaded into trucks “like flour bags” and taken to the plantation
Far more men indentured than women, and so the lives of the few female laborers took on a metaphoric weight in the rhetoric around indenture

Summary

Introduction

Cover Page Acknowledgments I would like to gratefully acknowledge the CUNY Graduate Center's Doctoral Student Research Grant Program and The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Summer Research Travel Fellowship, which funded the research for this article. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol 12, Iss. 2 [2015], Art. 4 paper will consider the ways that Dabydeen and Sharlow1 restructure the metaphor of the relationship between an Indian woman and a British man in order to challenge the cultural hierarchy of imperialism, yet fail to dismantle the patriarchal view of nationalism that underlies this metaphor.

Results

Conclusion