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This book traces the powerful discourses and embodied practices through which Black Caribbean women have been imagined and produced as subjects of British liberal rule and modern freedom. It argues that in seeking to escape liberalism's gendered and racialised governmentalities, Black women's everyday self-making practices construct decolonising and feminising epistemologies of freedom. These, in turn, repeatedly interrogate the colonial logics of liberalism and Britishness. Genealogically structured, the book begins with the narratives of freedom and identity presented by Black British Caribbean women. It then analyses critical moments of crisis in British racial rule at home and abroad in which gender and Caribbean women figure as points of concern. Post-war Caribbean immigration to the UK, decolonisation of the British Caribbean and the post-emancipation reconstruction of the British Caribbean loom large in these considerations. In doing all of this, the author unravels the colonial legacies that continue to underwrite contemporary British multicultural anxieties. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of social and cultural history, politics, feminism, race and postcoloniality.
List of contents
Introduction: Decolonising and Feminising Freedom.- Part I. Narratives of Black Britishness and Black Womanhood.- Chapter 1. Turning History Upside Down.- Chapter 2. The Old and New Ethnicities of Postcolonial Black Britishness.- Chapter 3. Standing in the Bigness of who I am': Independent Women and the Paradoxes of Freedom.- Part II. Colonial Liberalism and Black Freedom.- Chapter 4. Two Reports, One Empire: Race and Gender in British Post-War Social Welfare Discourse.- Chapter 5. Discrepant Women and Imperial Patriarchies.- Part III. Neoliberalism's Postcolonial Liberties.- Chapter 6. Beyond Racial Trauma: Remembering Bodies, Healing the Self.- Chapter 7. Taking Liberties with Neoliberalism: Compliance and Refusal.- Chapter 8. Conclusion: Rebellious Histories and the Postcolonial Problem of Freedom.
