Constructing and Challenging Creole Whiteness in Jamaica, 1865-1938

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

By interrogating creole whiteness in Jamaica between two moments of significant public unrest, myproject enhances understandings of racialised colonial power structures. Drawing upon Critical WhitenessStudies, I deploy creole whiteness as a privileged but porous racial category inextricable from thepolitical, social and economic inequalities of post-emancipation Jamaica. Creole whiteness denotesJamaica's locally-born white population and explicitly engages with creolisation, the process ofasymmetrical interaction between cultural groups in the Caribbean (Brathwaite, 1971; Bolland, 2002).Distinguishing creole from colonial whites born at the metropole who were serving, working or visitingJamaica, this thesis will dissect concepts of belonging and collective identity on local and imperial scales.Framed between the Morant Bay rebellion and the 1938 labour strikes, I use gender, class and space asunits of analysis to ask what it meant to be both creole and white in Jamaica during this period.This project has evolved from my undergraduate dissertation on whiteness in Jamaica during theabolition era. Drawing on similar methodologies, I will combine archival research and newspaper analysisto probe post-emancipation articulations of race and belonging. Developing my earlier study of visualsources depicting Jamaican carnival during slavery, I will also use photographs and postcards to dissectwhite creole self-representations and their relationships to place.