African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
346 p, Contents: 1. The Search for Origins: Women and the Division of Labour during Slavery and Indentureship -- 2. 'A Woman's Place': Colonial Ideology and the Reality of Women's Work 1898-1938 -- 3. The Politics of Sex, Race and Class -- 4. The Early Labour Movement -- 5. Women and Labour Struggles: 1900-1938 -- 6. The Early Women's Movement -- 7. The War and Post-War Economy and the Rise of the Middle Strata: 1939-1960 -- 8. Post-War Welfare Policy and 'Women's Work' -- 9. The Post-War Women's Movement: 1939-62 -- 10. Responsible Trade Unionism and the Woman Worker: 1939-62 -- 11. Constitutional Change and the New Nationalist Politics -- Chronology of Trade Union Development: 1919-1960
289 p., Argues that Caribbean writers challenge state notions of democracy and revolution by embracing ideological opacity (forms of political action that are not immediately legible) as a form of radicalism. Writers such as Merle Collins, Dionne Brand, and George Lamming narrated a new revolutionary consciousness using literary form and structure to express créolité (Caribbean cultural hybridity) and represent political resistance. This form of radicalism allows writers to explore political change in terms that are more subtle than discourses of outright revolution. The dissertation draws on the work of theorist Édouard Glissant who uses opacity as a critical term to articulate the right of Caribbean people to create their own forms of knowledge and to refuse Western epistemologies.
