Feminist Histories of the Interwar Caribbean: Anti- colonialism, Popular Protest, and the Gendered Struggle for Rights (original) (raw)

2018, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies

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.