Forward Ever with Jacqueline Creft: The Paradox of Women's Liberation in the Caribbean Revolutionary Left (original) (raw)
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS CRGS Issue — Gender and Anticolonialism in the Interwar Caribbean
OVERVIEW The decades between the First and Second World Wars witnessed intensified challenges to both European and US imperialism in the Caribbean. Issuing demands for self-determination and full citizenship rights, activists utilized new mass organizations—such as trade unions, political parties, and nationalist associations—as well as older collectives such as mutual aid societies, religious groups, and cultural clubs to contest the legitimacy of foreign rule. The duration, scale, and militancy of anti-colonial mobilizations varied widely across the region, as activists employed tactics ranging from formal negotiation with the state to armed guerrilla warfare. Yet, as an interdisciplinary literature has demonstrated, the surge in grassroots protest during the interwar years occurred throughout the colonial Caribbean as well as in the formally independent nation-states of Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Thus, the political ferment of the interwar era not only laid the groundwork for post-World War II independence movements, but also created an opening to contest hegemonic constructions of race, gender, and nation. This special issue will examine how gender shaped anti-colonial thought and praxis in the interwar Caribbean (1919-39). Studying the global origins of anticolonialism, feminist scholars have deconstructed the “citizen/subject” binary, highlighting the relationship among political exclusion, racial hierarchies, and gender inequality. They have also illuminated how oppositional movements throughout the colonized world reconfigured and reproduced ideas about sexual difference, articulating citizenship claims through gendered ideologies that often affirmed—rather than dislodged—patriarchy. Intervening in this burgeoning literature, Caribbeanist scholars have investigated how local understandings of “womanhood” and “manhood” shaped resistance to colonialism in the turbulent 1920s and 1930s. In addition, they have documented women’s myriad roles in struggles against colonial rule, excavating the forgotten connections between anti-colonial and feminist movements. Disrupting the longstanding focus on the “fathers” of Caribbean nationalism, groundbreaking biographical accounts of female activists have revealed women’s crucial contributions as intellectuals, organizers, and foot soldiers during the interwar years. Building on these foundational works, an important body of scholarship has also begun to interrogate “the sexual inheritances of nationalism” and the “heterosexual imperative of citizenship” in the postcolonial era (Alexander 1994: 11, 6). For this special issue, we invite submissions that deepen the literature on gender and anticolonialism in the interwar Caribbean (including the global Caribbean diaspora). We hope to include essays based on specific case studies as well as theoretical works that grapple with the gendered implications of anticolonialism in a region forged through centuries of colonial incursions. Possible topics for exploration include (but are not limited to): — Constructions of masculinity and femininity in interwar anti-colonial movements Organized labor in the Caribbean and the fight against colonialism — Caribbean feminist thought in the interwar era — Nationalism, gender, and the circum-Caribbean press — The campaign against the U.S. occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic — Challenges to Canadian annexation campaigns in the British Caribbean — Anti-colonial currents in literary and cultural movements (e.g. Négritude, surrealism, indigenism, and Afrocubanismo) — The ideology and praxis of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) — The role of Caribbean activists in the Communist International and other leftist organizations — Movements for Puerto Rican independence — Transnational ties between Caribbean anti-colonial activism and post-World War I nationalism in Asia and Africa — The role of religion and spirituality in anti-colonial movements
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 2018
In this issue of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, we examine the political ferment of the interwar period (1918–1939), tracking how gendered conceptions of rights, respectability, leadership, and belonging informed anti-colonial thought and praxis. Rather than constructing a singular narrative of Caribbean anti-colonialism, we grapple with the varied political visions and modes of resistance that animated critiques of colonial rule, attending at once to place-specific strategies and to shared regional agendas. The articles featured in this issue present new research on gender and anti-colonialism in Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Trinidad, British Guiana (Guyana), and Caribbean diasporic communities in Panama and the United States. We seek to disrupt the longstanding focus on the “fathers” of Caribbean nationalism by excavating women’s contributions to the region’s nationalist struggles. In addition, we foreground gender and sexuality as crucial sites of contestation within nationalist struggles to show how Caribbean women and men alike employed gender ideologies to assess grassroots resistance movements and new forms of belonging. Bridging the fields of women’s history and gender and sexuality studies, this issue offers a feminist analysis of the social, material, and discursive dimensions of anti-colonialism in the interwar-era Greater Caribbean.
This paper explores the complex history of Caribbean feminist activism in the late twentieth-century, based on interviews with Peggy Antrobus of Barbados, Andaiye and Alissa Trotz of Guyana and Patricia Mohammed of Trinidad. It attempts to create a hitherto absent archive of these figures while interpreting their ideological and political positions. It is divided into three sections. The first explores the individual trajectories that gave these women a political consciousness. The second explores the regional and global linkages of Caribbean women's/feminist activism. The third discusses the long crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, including the decline of 'Left' projects and the impact of growth-oriented economic policies, and their role in engendering a Caribbean feminism which was not subordinated to larger nationalist or revolutionary projects. The paper ends by comparing how these persons have positioned themselves and reflect on the contemporary feminist movement.
The Politics of Memory: Historicizing Caribbean Women’s Political Activism - Verene A. Shepherd
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 2019
My talk this evening is about historical memory and what women of the Caribbean as individuals or as a collective, and Caribbean states more broadly, conscious of women’s historic contributions, have done with such memory. Memories can be both pleasant and upsetting and what we do with memories depends on the nature of the memories, our distance from them, our philosophy of life, our activism or political commitment and what Fabienne Viala in her excellent book The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism and Commemorations in the Caribbean, calls “the different national templates of memory. ”We can adopt a posture of willed ignorance – that is, develop historical amnesia, refusing to remember; or we can remember deliberately and act on them intentionally. It is the project of acting on those memories—should we choose not to forget— that is political about memory.
Stories in Caribbean Feminism: Reflections on the Twentieth Century
Written and delivered as the Fifth Anniversary Public Lecture of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, this paper explores first hand lived anecdotes of incidents and ideas that make up the history of Caribbean feminism in the twentieth century
Inescapable Entanglements: Notes on Caribbean Feminist Engagement
Introduction It is an incredible honour to have been invited to share this twentieth birthday of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies. I would like to thank the faculty, staff and students for their amazing warmth and hospitality. Let me take this opportunity to also recognize Professor Barbara Bailey, whose commitment to gender equality is manifested not just in her contribution as Regional Coordinator of the IGDS, but in the work she has accomplished nationally, regionally and internationally. In particular, Professor Bailey’s commitment to education and the foundational texts in Caribbean Gender Studies that she has co-authored/coedited are an amazing legacy for generations of scholars to come. We know that the IGDS was a dimension of women’s and feminist activism in the Caribbean, from WAND to CAFRA, from Sistren to NUDE. We had taken our struggle to the academy, making these institutional spaces the site of our demands for recognition. Today the IGDS boasts a regional programme with a superb publication record, training undergraduate and graduate students, initiating collaborations with academic partners and communities. It extends itself to wider communities, whether it is the open access feminist journal at St Augustine, the work at Mona with Haitian colleagues after the earthquake to develop a certificate programme in Gender Studies, or the Summer Institute in Gender Studies at Cave Hill which brings together university students, farmers, civil servants, community activists and police officers from across the region.