“’A Power Able to Overawe Them All’: Criminality and the Uses of Fear,” begins with a discussion of criminality in The Queen v. Eduljee Byramjee (1846). At the heart of the case was the question of whether criminal convictions could be appealed to the Privy Council. On the one hand, to limit appeals to the Queen would implicitly serve to undermine her absolute sovereignty. On the other hand, granting the right to appeal would undermine the authority of the colonial courts and intervene in the social, political, and economic uses to which Indian criminals were put. This chapter also shows how the fiction of Indian criminality became useful to the exercise of British sovereignty. As the last ready supply of working bodies after the abolition of slavery, and the end of British penal transport, Indian criminals provided essential physical labor for the territorial expansion of Empire. The rhetoric of Indian degeneracy, then, was central to both the ideological and material terms by which the British consolidated and expanded their sovereignty. (Word Count: 10,500)

Exploring the effectiveness of the use of anthologies as a discursive and theoretical platform for celebrating and registering the emergence of Caribbean feminist work, this essay surveys these publications and maps the emergence of Caribbean feminist criticism as a mode of theoretical challenge that enacted a transformative critical praxis that not only centred women’s lived experiences, but also fostered transnational alliances, dialogues and partnerships among women. In reading these texts, the essay notes how a politics of inclusion proved necessary for reclaiming and reconceptualizing Caribbean female histories and reading narratives of gendered lives, alongside an expanded focus on racialized transnational subjects that complicated a black–white paradigm. The essay argues that anthologies disrupt the centrality and singularity of authorship, authority and knowledge production.