Reads Carnival-related performances in relationship to the colonial and national histories of the circulation of Indian and black women's bodies in Trinidad and Tobago, asking what is at stake in these occupations of genre, form, and performative presence in the latest global scenes of late capitalism (where image and sound, as cultural productions, are always in circulation beyond the scope of the nation, and their own "original" referents).
Examines the impact of the Universal Negro Improvement League (UNIA) on the British colony of Bermuda where the majority black population was segregated and disenfranchised while white elites enjoyed total political and economic power. The efforts of UNIA leaders like Marcus Garvey made UNIA a global organization and strongly influenced Caribbean regional politics. Attention is given to the impact of tourism which became Bermuda's primary industry in the 1920s when blacks were evicted from their homes to make room for white resorts.
The article discusses discrimination against free blacks and colored (mixed-race) people in the justice system of 18th-century Curaçao, then a colony of the Netherlands run by the Dutch West India Company. Two examples are examined, that of the Dutch prosecutor Hubertus Coerman, who complained of the situation to company directors in 1766, and the Curaçaoan free black woman Mariana Franko, who complained to the directors in the same year after being falsely accused of theft and banished from the colony. Differences between the administration of justice in the Netherlands and in the Dutch West Indies are then discussed.
this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of 'whiteness' in Anglo-Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth-century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio-sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.
Argues that free African and African-descended women participated in Spain's colonization of the Caribbean to a degree that has not been fully recognized. Regularly described as vecinas (heads of household) and as spouses to Iberian men in key port cities, free women of color played active roles in the formation and maintenance of Spanish Caribbean society during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not as peripheral or marginalized figures, but as non-elite insiders who pursued their own best interests and those of their families and associates.
Analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. This archival material is significant because it suggests a significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century, but emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism encompassing Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism.
