“As fool-proof as possible:” Overpopulation, Colonial Demography, and the Jamaica Birth Control League

Briggs, Jill

doi:10.2979/globalsouth.4.2.157

Cited by 12 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…In the twentieth century, fertility rates began to fall in Europe and a discourse of perilous overpopulation in the non-White world became prominent (Briggs 2011). When explanations for and solutions to the grave poverty in the Carribean were demanded in the aftermath of the social and economic unrest in the 1930s, overpopulation emerged as a menace to social and economic progress and the prospect of independence—deflecting attention away from colonial policies.…”

Section: Women's Reproduction and Development: The Visiting Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Properties of Citizens

Robinson

2013

Du Bois Rev.

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This paper considers how a taxonomy of conjugality-marriage, common-law marriage, and visiting relationships-emerged as a specialized vocabulary to apprehend and govern the postcolonial Caribbean. Although the metaphor of intersections does not fully capture the ways these categories relate to each other to produce social meaning, I employ an intersectional framework to offer a close reading of the routes through which these and other social differences and equivalences are produced as dimensions of citizenship in specific historical contexts, such as the period of decolonization and Caribbean nation-formation. In so doing, I illustrate how the categorization of intimate relationships codified a hierarchy based on intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and established rough moral boundaries for a heterosexual Caribbean nation. The lives of working class Black women animate the categorization. I show how by centering these women in intimate relationship codes their sexuality is contained and patriarchy naturalized. In this paper, I suggest that we should mark the role intersectionality plays in constituting categories of intimate association, explore how these categories shape sentiments about belonging, and articulate the social costs of their instantiations.

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Section: Women's Reproduction and Development: The Visiting Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Properties of Citizens

Robinson

2013

Du Bois Rev.

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Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin's The Other Side of Paradise

Stitt¹

2014

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism

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Queer Fractals

2024

Fractal Repair

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This chapter situates history making as a way of redressing contemporary queer violence in Jamaica. In so doing, it considers how mathematics shapes historical thought as a mode of representation and suggests displacing the dominance of arithmetic in practices of history making. It centers Jamaica in the history of modern mathematics that served colonial projects to regulate race, gender, and sexual relations on both sides of the Atlantic. The chapter contends that turning to geometry facilitates a different kind of approach to historical inquiry and uses geometry to think about the relationship between how the fields of Caribbean Studies and Queer Studies practice history making. It proposes fractal geometry as a fitting mode of representation for constructing Caribbean histories of queerness, introduces queer fractals as a theory and method of reparative history making, and considers the implications of queer fractals for debates about the politics of reparations.

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“As fool-proof as possible:” Overpopulation, Colonial Demography, and the Jamaica Birth Control League

Cited by 12 publications

References 4 publications

The Properties of Citizens

The Properties of Citizens

Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin's The Other Side of Paradise

Queer Fractals

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