Jamaica Ladies

Author(s):  
Christine Walker

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(s):  
Nicholas J. Evans

The headstones and epitaphs marking the death of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish settlers on the Caribbean island of Barbados provide one of the earliest and most complete examples of British death culture overseas. Whilst the island was dominated by plantation slavery during the period in question, the surviving memorials from this period reveal little trace of the chattel slavery that made the island of great geopolitical importance to the British Empire. Instead the memorials examined here demonstrate a deep attachment to the ‘English’ identities of those who died in diaspora. The chapter compares such death culture with that of Jewish settlement on the island, a stream of evidence that demonstrates the island was a sanctuary for Jewish men, women and children from numerous countries during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-205
Author(s):  
Catherine R. Peters

In this article, I elaborate on Lisa Lowe’s “intimacies as method” by examining the case of 198 Chinese men conscripted to Trinidad in 1806. I argue that tracing Chinese migration to the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century demonstrates that the British empire began to imagine new hierarchies of unfreedom for people of Asian and African descent before the abolition of chattel slavery. British imperial actors hoped that Chinese men would assume a mediating function between white planters and the extant population of colour in Trinidad. This vision was predicated on the assumption that the migrants would partner with women of colour to form heterosexual intimacies while also refraining from other forms of socio-political contact with Afro-Trinidadians. Lowe’s intimacies as method guides my navigation of the imperial archive and, in particular, compels me to think relationally about differentially colonized and racialized sub jects in early nineteenth-century Trinidad, both as they were positioned in the colony and as they refused these stereotypes, brokering their own transactions and collaborations.


Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Jessica Marie Johnson

Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved and free women of African descent have been central to New Orleans’ culture and black community formation. Enslaved women of African descent who secured manumission—or legal documentation of their freedom—laid the foundation for the vibrant and politically savvy black community that would emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fight for freedom, however, would be long and winding, with complicated successes and failures reflecting diversity and conflict within and among women of African descent, as well as the changing geopolitical terrain the city was founded on and remained situated in throughout its long history. Recovering the voices of these early, founding women—the political and cultural ancestors of the Baby Dolls—is crucial to developing a history of women of African descent’s defiance and resistance to both racial and gendered oppression across New Orleans history.


Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh

Christian missionaries and clerics played an important, if difficult, role in the political campaign to promote monogamy and fertility in the Caribbean. Sex was big business in the Caribbean, where a hotel/prostitution industry catered to military men and island residents alike. Moreover, interracial liaisons provided opportunities for social advancement to women of African descent. Although Methodist missionaries at first tolerated polygamy among their enslaved converts, as the demographic problems in the region became politically urgent they sought increasingly to promote Christian marriage and discourage fertility control. Free women of color who resented the constraints of concubinage found Methodism particularly appealing. Evolving management strategies on the Anglican-owned Codrington plantation illustrate the pressure that Afro-Caribbean mothers faced to abandon matrifocal patterns of residence. Incentives such as land and provisions that had once been given to mothers gave way, by the 1830s, to rewards directed toward either couples or fathers.


Author(s):  
Michele Reid-Vazquez

This chapter examines representations of honor, gender, race, and labor in colonial Cuba through the lens of midwifery. More specifically, it considers how free women of African descent used occupational choice as a marker of identity and honor despite the limits of race and gender within Cuba's slave society. Using the tensions surrounding local and international debates over parteras (midwives) in the nineteenth century, the chapter looks at the ways that free women of color resisted the efforts of the colonial state to diminish their participation in midwifery. It also discusses the professionalization in medicine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and its impact on midwifery in Cuba, along with the colonial state's attempts to regulate midwives. Finally, it considers how free black and mulatto women appropriated elite discourses of honor and created a labor niche that challenged established socioracial codes of conduct. It shows that medical professionalization, feminine ideals, honor, occupational whitening, and racial denigration converged to shape the social and economic parameters for free women of African descent in colonial Cuba.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dhomirotul Firdaus ◽  
Zaenal Arifin

The focus of this article is to discuss how the conception of a woman's position according to M. Quraish Shihab in his book "Tafsir al Misbah". The writing of this article is motivated by the fact that society today still positions women in a marginal position, despite the fact that many Moslems thinkers argue that women have the same dignity as men. And even among certain (urban) communities, women have become drivers of social, economic and political change. But understanding the Indonesian people (especially rural) still positions women in marginal positions. This study generate several conclusions, first, that women's education must be emphasized more on the principle of sharing in improving quality rather than competence to win and lose, continuously empowering, strengthening with religious material, and starting early. Second, according to M. Quraish Shihab women's education is oriented towards material (physical) and immaterial (mind and soul). And third, the paradigm and thought map of M. Quraish Shihab is a critique of the conservative and liberal paradigms, where education should free women from subordination and marginalization due to the discriminative ideology adopted by the people today, as a reflection of religious interpretations of the community against religious teachings, impressive concern for the issue of social injustice, lawsuit for gender discrimination, and social issues.   Fokus pada artikel ini adalah membahas tentang bagaimana konsepsi kedudukan perempuan menurut M. Quraish Shihab dalam bukunya “Tafsir al Misbah”. Penulisan artikel ini dilatarbelakangi dengan fakta masyarakat saat ini yang masih memposisikan perempuan dalam posisi yang marginal, meskipun sebenarnya telah banyak pemikir muslim yang berpendapat bahwa perempuan memiliki martabat yang sama dengan kaum laki-laki. Dan bahkan di kalangan masyarakat tertentu (perkotaan), perempuan telah menjadi penggerak perubahan sosial, ekonomi dan politik. Namun mainstrem masyarakat Indonesia (khususnya pedesaan) masih memposisikan perempuan di posisi yang marginal. Studi ini menghasilkan beberapa kesimpulan, pertama, bahwa pendidikan perempuan harus lebih ditekankan pada prinsip saling berbagi dalam meningkatkan kualitas bukan kompetensi untuk menang dan kalah, kontinyu melakukan pemberdayaan, melakukan penguatan dengan materi agama, dan dimulai sejak dini. Kedua, menurut M. Quraish Shihab pendidikan perempuan diorientasi pada unsur material (jasmani) dan imaterial (akal dan jiwa). Dan Ketiga, peta paradigma dan pemikiran M. Quraish Shihab merupakan kritik terhadap paradigm konservatif dan liberal, di mana pendidikan seharusnya membebaskan kaum perempuan dari subordinasi dan marginalisasi akibat ideologi diskrimatif yang dianut masyarakat saat ini, sebagai cerminan dari tafsiran keagamaan masyarakat tehadap ajaran agama, mengesankan kepeduliannya terhadap persoalan ketidakadilan sosial, gugatan atas diskriminasi gender, dan persoalan sosial.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-51
Author(s):  
Ida Monika Putu Ayu Dewi

Laws are the norms that govern all human actions that can be done and should not be carried out both written and unwritten and have sanctions, so that the entry into force of these rules can be forced or coercive and binding for all the people of Indonesia. The most obvious form of manifestation of legal sanctions appear in criminal law. In criminal law there are various forms of crimes and violations, one of the crimes listed in the criminal law, namely the crime of Human Trafficking is often perpetrated against women and children. Human Trafficking is any act of trafficking offenders that contains one or more acts, the recruitment, transportation between regions and countries, alienation, departure, reception. With the threat of the use of verbal and physical abuse, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of a position of vulnerability, example when a person has no other choice, isolated, drug dependence, forest traps, and others, giving or receiving of payments or benefits women and children used for the purpose of prostitution and sexual exploitation. These crimes often involving women and children into slavery. Trafficking in persons is a modern form of human slavery and is one of the worst forms of violation of human dignity (Public Company Act No. 21 of 2007, on the Eradication of Trafficking in Persons). Crime human trafficking crime has been agreed by the international community as a form of human rights violation.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Muganiwa

The paper argues that children face challenges in growing up and fitting into their societies and that these challenges need to be addressed with care. These challenges, which are complicated by the effects of colonialism, war and economic crises in the context of Zimbabwe, are portrayed in the novels Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga 1989), The Book of Not (Dangarembga 2006), The Uncertainty of Hope (Tagwira 2006) and Running with Mother (Mlalazi 2012). In analysing the characters of the children portrayed in these four novels, the vulnerability of children, regardless of their age, is demonstrated. The child characters strive to help their parents and be useful citizens and yet at times this contrasts with their desire to be sheltered and treated as children. This contradiction is best exhibited in teenagers who try to fashion their own identity that is separate from the people around them but who still require guidance to do so.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 294
Author(s):  
Laura Cervi ◽  
Fernando García ◽  
Carles Marín Lladó

During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on the construction of social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes the fantasmatic dimension of political discourse from Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter accounts between 1 March and 31 May. To do so, it applies a Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The study findings show that in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the main beatific and horrific subjects remain the core populist signifiers: the people and the elite. While Bolsonaro’s narrative was predominantly beatific, centered on the government, Trump’s was mostly horrific, centered on the elite. Trump signified the pandemic as a subject and an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed it as a circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined the people as working people, therefore their concerns about the pandemic were focused on the people’s ability to work.


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