Author: Christine Walker
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469655276
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
Jamaica Ladies is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence. Female colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves socially and financially on the island. By owning others, they wielded forms of legal, social, economic, and cultural authority not available to them in Britain. In addition, slaveholding allowed free women of African descent, who were not far removed from slavery themselves, to cultivate, perform, and cement their free status. Alongside their male counterparts, women bought, sold, stole, and punished the people they claimed as property and vociferously defended their rights to do so. As slavery's beneficiaries, these women worked to stabilize and propel this brutal labor regime from its inception.
Author: Lucille Mathurin Mair
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 532
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Book Description
An exposure of women as agents of history - a path-breaking achievement at a time when Caribbean historiography ignored women. The white woman consumed, the coloured woman served and the black woman laboured.
Author: Gina A. Ulysse
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226841235
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
The Caribbean “market woman” is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs—who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica. Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global economies. Gina Ulysse carefully explores how ICIs, determined to be self-employed, struggle with government regulation and other social tensions to negotiate their autonomy. Informing this story of self-fashioning with reflections on her own experience as a young Haitian anthropologist, Ulysse combines the study of political economy with the study of individual and collective identity to reveal the uneven consequences of disrupting traditional class, color, and gender codes in individual societies and around the world.
Author: Carol Watson Williams
Publisher: Inter-American Development Bank
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
This study was specifically designed to collect information on women’s health and their experiences of violence in Jamaica. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used to collect the data, including a household survey, in-depth interviews and focus group sessions. The household survey resulted in 1,340 respondents, with a household response rate of 85.5 percent and an individual response rate of 65.9 percent. The questionnaire covered, inter alia, general and reproductive health; attitudes towards gender roles; experiences with intimate partner violence; impacts and coping with intimate partner violence; and experiences with non-partner violence.
Author: Sasha Turner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081229405X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.
Author: Winnifred Brown-Glaude
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826501907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Making a living in the Caribbean requires resourcefulness and even a willingness to circumvent the law. Women of color in Jamaica encounter bureaucratic mazes, neighborhood territoriality, and ingrained racial and cultural prejudices. For them, it requires nothing less than a herculean effort to realize their entrepreneurial dreams. In Higglers in Kingston, Winnifred Brown-Glaude puts the reader on the ground in frenetic urban Kingston, the capital and largest city in Jamaica. She explores the lives of informal market laborers, called "higglers," across the city as they navigate a corrupt and inaccessible "official" Jamaican economy. But rather than focus merely on the present-day situation, she contextualizes how Jamaica arrived at this point, delving deep into the island's history as a former colony, a home to slaves and masters alike, and an eventual nation of competing and conflicted racial sectors. Higglers in Kingston weaves together contemporary ethnography, economic history, and sociology of race to address a broad audience of readers on a crucial economic and cultural center.
Author: Augusta Lynn Bolles
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793615578
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
In Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica: Seven Miles of Sandy Beach, A. Lynne Bolles examines Jamaican women tourist workers and their workplaces in Negril, Jamaica. A major component of Negril’s tourism success is the labor of women tourist workers, ranging from housekeepers to hotel and business owners. Bolles’s ethnographic research examines key aspects of women’s labor in the tourist industry through the lenses of class, color, education, and training. Through the narratives of thirty interlocutors, Bolles focuses on the prescience of emotional labor and face-to-face encounters, investigating these women’s ideas about tourism on the local level and their wariness of the changing physical environment as a result of tourism expansion. For more information, check out A Conversation with A. Lynn Bolles: Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica.
Author: Marlon James
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101011319
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
From the author of the National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf and the WINNER of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings "An undeniable success.” — The New York Times Book Review A true triumph of voice and storytelling, The Book of Night Women rings with both profound authenticity and a distinctly contemporary energy. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings, desires, and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link. But the real revelation of the book-the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose-is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once breathtakingly daring and wholly in command of his craft.
Author: Augusta Lynn Bolles
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
Sister Jamaica is about women factory workers, their households, jobs and lives in Kingston during the destabilization of the Michael Manley administration (1978-79). It shows how these working class women and their household members achieved access to scarce resources and survived a national political and economic crisis. The author argues that such achievements were the result of these women and their households exercising a variety of traditional and contemporary cultural, social and economic options. Bolles looks at the influences of race, class and gender, emphasizing women's roles in kinship, kindredship and domestic organization. Domestic chores, cash flows and networks of exchange are examined in order to illustrate which household member performed what kind of task and under what kind of circumstances. The division of labor among 127 households is examined. Finally, Bolles looks at the factories and female work forces against the background of international capitalism. This text will provide beneficial reading for introductory anthropology classes and courses in women's studies, Afro-American studies, and Caribbean and Latin American studies.
Author: Diana Paton
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478013095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
From Miss Lou to Bob Marley and Usain Bolt to Kamala Harris, Jamaica has had an outsized reach in global mainstream culture. Yet many of its most important historical, cultural, and political events and aspects are largely unknown beyond the island. The Jamaica Reader presents a panoramic history of the country, from its precontact indigenous origins to the present. Combining more than one hundred classic and lesser-known texts that include journalism, lyrics, memoir, and poetry, the Reader showcases myriad voices from over the centuries: the earliest published black writer in the English-speaking world; contemporary dancehall artists; Marcus Garvey; and anonymous migrant workers. It illuminates the complexities of Jamaica's past, addressing topics such as resistance to slavery, the modern tourist industry, the realities of urban life, and the struggle to find a national identity following independence in 1962. Throughout, it sketches how its residents and visitors have experienced and shaped its place in the world. Providing an unparalleled look at Jamaica's history, culture, and politics, this volume is an ideal companion for anyone interested in learning about this magnetic and dynamic nation.
