feminism and women’s literature in early Jamaican nationalism
نویسنده
چکیده
This essay analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. Largely overlooked, this archival material is significant because it suggests a subtle yet significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but rather, it emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism, encompassing the overlapping projects of Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism. Thus, it becomes clear that first wave feminism, including white women writers, played a key but brief role in the formation of the middle class nationalism that would later dominate Jamaica’s transition to independence. During the first five years of publication of the Jamaica Times, women wrote a significant proportion of the short stories published. However, they became marginalized as black folk culture became the defining symbol of national authenticity. The marginalization of middle class women writers reflects a broader pattern. In adopting first wave feminism from Britain and the United States, Jamaican nationalists reproduced colonial race and class dynamics that established an unbridgeable divide between middle class women, who served as ‘ladies bountiful,’ and the usually darker-skinned compatriots to whom they ministered. This class division continued to limit feminist activism in Jamaica throughout the first and
منابع مشابه
Gnawing at the Seams: Challenges for Contemporary Jamaican Feminism and the Equality Question
Long before the term ―feminism‖ existed, women always sought opportunities for social and economic empowerment, whether through welfare-oriented schemes or through other forms of activism. The 1970s Caribbean experience marked significant developments in feminism where women advocated, and through those efforts, permeated state institutions to achieve legal shifts in the interest of themselves ...
متن کاملEvolution of the female roles in the US (Case study: The Hollywood movies in the late 1970s and early 1980s)
Prior to the 1980s, numerous charges of discrimination were noteworthy among women in Hollywood. In those years, women were in uncertain situations, so they seemed aimless and vulnerable. In the period that this article focuses on, the female characters are or have become intelligent and therefore open-minded and potentially independent. Although, they are still vulnerable and unsure of themsel...
متن کاملPostcolonial feminist reading of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns
Postcolonial feminism is an exploration into the interactions of colonialism with gender, nation, class, race, and sexualities in different contexts of women’s lives. Postcolonial feminism or the ‘Third World feminism’ originated as a critique of mainstreams in the Western feminist theorists, investigating the portrayal of women in the literature and society of the colonized countries as margin...
متن کاملMusic and the Rise of Caribbean Nationalism: The Jamaican Case
Caribbean nationalism emerged in many ways, but music played a vital role in furnishing emotion and ideological cohesion, and fueled the excitement and sustainability of nationalist identification leading up and following independence. This study employs the musical form, ska, to exemplify how music generated a sense of nationalism in Jamaica during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and as such p...
متن کامل