Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Caribbean World

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, a growing interest in the centrality of sex/gender and racial ideologies to British, and particularly English, settler colonialism in North America and the Caribbean has transformed the historiography of the Anglo-Atlantic world. By integrating the provisional hierarchies of gender, class and colour formed within localised but interconnected colonial cultures in the British Atlantic community, historians including have identified strong links between gendered social identities and emerging systems of racial domination. 1 Likewise, scholars adopting feminist, poststructuralist and deconstructive approaches in their research on Britain and the empire, most notably Ann Laura Stoler, Catherine Hall, Felicity Nussbaum and Kathleen Wilson, have revealed how the entangled axes of gender, sexuality and race became fused with and helped legitimate power regimes and identity processes throughout the British imperial world, as well as in Britain itself. 2 Attending to the marking of difference across early America and the British empire has revitalised both of these fields, complicating our understanding of gender, race and national belonging during the long eighteenth century.Multitudes of heavily gendered and racialised identities (individual as well as national) arose from and were transformed by the aggregate social contexts and interactions of diverse peoples -diverse by language, religion, ethnicity, culture, appearance and country of origin -that characterised the British Atlantic empire. 3 In the Caribbean island colonies, where minority populations of free West Indian slaveholders sought metropolitan recognition of their claim to British liberty, law and identity, citizenship became firmly linked to concepts of whiteness over the course of the eighteenth century. 4 By the end of the Seven Years' War (1756-63), to self-identify as a 'British' West Indian, entitled to the same rights and privileges as a freeborn, essentially English subject at home, was necessarily to be 'white'. That Creole, or native-born, West Indian elites formulated a distinctly colonial version of white British identity does not mean, however, that this articulation went uncontested in the metropole. 5 Rather, many contemporary observers believed that immersion in Caribbean slave society, with its predominantly African population, high mortality rates, endemic violence, deep-seated

Gender, Family, Race, and the Colonial State in Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica

“…Barash 1990;Burnard 2006;Bush 1981;Mackie 2006; Mair 2006:3-40, 101-85;Newman 2010; Wilson 2003:129-68; Yeh 2006. 6 Forde-Jones 1998; C. Jones 2007:13-79; Lockley 2005:976; Mair 2006:135-48.…”

A Certain Class of Undesirables

“…Various scholars, in different historical locations and at different times, have shown that the hierarchy of sexual relationships is determined by notions of race, class and gender (Wekker, 2006). The intersections between these categories have been extensively researched and theorised during the period of the British empire (Altink, 2005b;Ballhatchet, 1980;Blunt, 2003;Ghosh, 2006;Hyam, 1986;Kempadoo, 2000;Levine, 2013;McClintock, 2013;Mohammed, 2000;Newman, 2010). The picture that emerges from these historical studies is that specific attention was paid to upholding and regulating the racial and sexual boundary between racialised men and White women.…”