Content area
Full Text
WOMEN'S ROLES IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING CARIBBEAN have historically centered on the image of the English "lady." Since Emancipation in the 1830s, class structures have encouraged Afro-Caribbean women in the "right" behaviors and modes of representation. The circumstances of employment, education, and "upward mobility" often hindered most women from performing this role. In her 1982 study of stereotypes of Caribbean women, Jamaican scholar-artistactivist Erna Brodber finds "especially for Barbados and Jamaica, that the 'right behavior' not only was not culturally prescribed for the majority of the population but in the early time segment especially seems not to have been performed by them. The models, however, were internalized as 'right' if not just as 'possible'. Today they are part of woman's psychic landscape and are influencing women's behavior."1 Throughout the twentieth century in particular, many of these models retreated into conversations of respectability.2 Most women on these islands, then, lived under the shadow of a foreign unachievable ideal.
There have been quite a few Afro-Caribbean women who have (in)famously made a name for themselves outside of the idealized image of "appropriate" womanhood. From Nanny to Rachael Pringle Polgreen,3 Jamaican and Barbadian women have embraced, reworked, and outright rejected the figure of the English "lady." Often not able to find themselves within the strict confines of such a foreign image that had been imposed so vigorously, they built their own images, reputations, and ultimately their own legacies by negotiating spaces and images of power in the public eye. Such negotiation has at times involved a violent rejection and/or mastery of global capitalist practices that center the female body as a site of contestation. In the case of Nanny, her legend as a maroon leader able to catch and return bullets with her behind marks a violent rejection of Jamaica's slave system and the possibility of her capture within it, while marking her body as a battlefield.4 Moreover in securing land rights for her people, Nanny agreed to fight on the side of the English crown in the event of a slave insurrection on the island.5 Thus, her legacy posits her body (and particularly her backside) as both a protector of the maroons and, if necessary, an enemy of those who might seek to join her. Rachael Pringle Polgreen...