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.

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 Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal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.

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.

As the ubiquitous Jamaican musician Bob Marley once famously sang, "half the story has never been told." This rings particularly true for the little-known women in Jamaican music who comprise significantly less than half of the Caribbean nation's musical landscape. This book covers the female contribution to Jamaican music and its subgenres through dozens of interviews with vocalists, instrumentalists, bandleaders, producers, deejays and supporters of the arts. Relegated to marginalized spaces, these pioneering women fought for their claim to the spotlight amid oppressive conditions to help create and shape Jamaica's musical heritage.

White women who inhabited the West Indies in the eighteenth century fascinated metropolitan observers. In popular prints, novels, and serial publications, these women appeared to stray from "proper" British societal norms. Although many women who lived in the Caribbean island of Jamaica might have fit the model, extant writings from Ann Brodbelt, Sarah Dwarris, Margaret and Mary Cowper, Lady Maria Nugent, and Ann Appleton Storrow show a longing to remain connected with metropolitan society and their loved ones separated by the Atlantic. Sensibility and awareness of metropolitan material culture masked a lack of empathy towards subordinates and opened the white women in these islands to censure. Novels and popular publications portrayed white women in the Caribbean as prone to overconsumption, but these women seem to prize items not for their inherent value. They treasured items most when they came from beloved connections. This colonial interchange forged and preserved bonds with loved ones and comforted the women in the West Indies during their residence in these sugar plantation islands. This book seeks to complicate the stereotype of insensibility and overconsumption that characterized the perception of white women who inhabited the British West Indies in the long eighteenth century. This book will appeal to students and researchers alike who are interested in the social and cultural history of British Jamacia and the British West Indies more generally.

Theater is an essential theoretical and practical site for forging Black radical thought, Africana feminisms, and womanism. Nicosia M. Shakes draws on ethnographic research in Jamaica and South Africa to analyze the vital relationship between activism and theater production. Concentrating on four performance events, Shakes situates the work of theater groups and projects within a trajectory of women-led social justice movements established in Jamaica, South Africa, and globally from the early 2000s to the present. Her analysis reveals movements driven by Black women’s artistic, intellectual, and organizational labor and focused on issues that range from sexual violence to reproductive justice to the spatial manifestations of racial, gender, and economic oppression. Shakes shows how theater’s political and pedagogical roles become entangled with histories and geographies of oppression and resistance; the identities and connections created by movements of people in the context of colonial and settler colonial histories; and ideas of womanism and feminism.

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.

The Santora family ride again in the side-splitting sequel to Greetings From Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer

"Historically, women have been under-represented in politics. Patriarchal political parties, debilitating customs and discriminatory selection processes, and obstructionist attitudes have generally contributed to the inability of women to enter mainstream political life in a significant way. In Women in Caribbean Politics Cynthia Barrow-Giles and her co-contributors profile 20 of the most influential women in modern Caribbean politics who have struggled and excelled, in spite of the obstacles. Divided into four parts, this volume looks at women who led the struggle for freedom; those who agitated for equal rights and justice in the pre-independence period; postcolonial trailblazers; as well as a group which Cynthia Barrow-Giles refers to as Women CEOs. The profiles cover women from 12 territories, with varying political, ethnic and socio-economic issues. Anyone with an interest in Caribbean Politics or Gender Studies will find Women in Caribbean Politics to be an excellent introduction. For students and teachers, it will be a valuable resource, as it highlights some of the little-known stories of Caribbean women who have set the foundation for, and continue to help to shape the identity of their nations and the region on a whole. "

"His work contributes to the ongoing interest in the history of women and in the history of resistance."--Jacket.