Representing the nation: Gender, culture, and the state in Anglophone Caribbean society.

Abstract

How and when do people begin imagining themselves as subjects of a Nation? Exactly what kinds of discourses enable people to map their identities in and through the geo-political unit of the nation-state. This project, located within the climate of emergent nationalist agitation in Jamaica, will explore both the construction and destruction of what Benedict Anderson calls the "idea of nationalness." Drawing upon his suggestive notion that nations are "imagined," called into being by discrete but overlapping cultural apparatuses, I want to situate the emergent anti-colonial nationalisms of the Caribbean as a field of competing discourses emerging from specific ideological and political crises. Using specific moments in Caribbean cultural history, my main goal is to show that the region's nationalism did not emerge as a uniform and completed project, but it was articulated unevenly and contradictorily by competing social interests. The first chapter begins with an examination of the historical models--plantation-society and creole society models--that have structured the discourses of Caribbean social organization. It links the historical work of two important West Indian writers/intellectuals, Orlando Patterson's Sociology of Slavery and E. K. Braithwaite's The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, and lays the intellectual foundation upon which cultural and society will be discussed. Chapter 2 examines the construction and contestation over the development of a literary institution in Jamaica. It begins with a discussion of Edna Manley's inaugural 1937 sculpture, Negro Aroused, as the context for the development of a modern post colonial aesthetics in which the figure of the black male peasant would be forefronted. From there, I examine the gendered portrayals of "blackness" in H. G. de Lisser's Jane's Career and George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin. Chapter 3 uses C. L. R James's monumental cultural study of Caribbean cricket, Beyond a Boundary, to link the history of beauty contests with the destiny of Caribbean national identity. An examination of the troubled history of the "Miss Jamaica" and the "Miss Chinese Jamaica" pageants (1950-1965) shows how the notion of a stable, gendered, racial Caribbean "identity" was made and unmade through regional culture.