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2. Hierarchies of Whiteness in the Geographies of Empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barretts of Jamaica
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Green,Cecilia A. (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2006
- Published:
- The Netherlands: KITLV Press
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Nieuwe West - Indische Gids
- Journal Title Details:
- 80(1/2) : 5-43
- Notes:
- he author criticizes scholarship by Trevor Burnard and attempts to demonstrate the need to systematize a framework that captures the complexity of West Indian social structure and looks beyond the most visceral racial divide on the one hand or the merely local on the other. Burnard, in his recent book on Thomas Thistlewood, the eighteenth-century Jamaican overseer, pen-keeper, and slaveowning diarist, notes the spirit of egalitarianism that existed among Whites in Jamaica and the absence of class conflict among them, despite clear socioeconomic differences. The argument is clearly correct on a number of points, and not without significant merit and insight, Green argues. The fact that race trumped class in the White créole imagination and that recruitment to political office was of necessity inclusive of "lesser Whites" should not in any way provide an excuse for leaving those inequalities unexamined--especially when they formed a key constitutive element in the production of empire, she continues.;