From Colonial Subjects to Black Nations: Racializing the Caribbean

Chaired by: Dr Aaron Winter (Lancaster University)

In collaboration with Sociology at Lancaster University

Abstract

In this talk, Dr Jamella N. Gow will examine how global racial hierarchies rooted in histories of racialized Black labour under capitalism define Caribbean nations as Black. Tracing the global historical processes of colonialism, imperialist underdevelopment, and neoliberalism in the Caribbean, she will show how these processes then inform racist policies that target nations and their migrants by relying on tropes of both Black criminality and exploitability now reproduced on a global scale. Through a comparative case study of both Haiti and Jamaica, Dr Gow will argue for how both nations become positioned within local and global racial hierarchies reliant on global Blackness, and how they and their diaspora redefine themselves through their own iterations of Black nationalist identity.

Read the Identities article: ‘From colonial subjects to Black nations: racializing the Caribbean within global Blackness’

This lecture will take place online. Please register to attend, and a joining link will be sent to you on the day of the event.

Dr Jamella N. Gow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. Her research centres on themes of Black migration, borders and il/legality, comparative race, ethnicity and racialization, global political economy and immigrant activism. She examines how Afro-Caribbean migrants navigate racial and ethnic identity, inclusion and exclusion and diasporic politics through immigrant status and Blackness in the United States. She has published several articles on these topics in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, and others. She co-authored an edited volume with Philip Kretsedemas titled Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations: Revisioning Migrants and Mobilities through the Critique of Anti-Blackness which interrogates immigration scholarship through the interdisciplinary lens of Black Studies. Her current book project titled Black Migrants from Black Nations: Race, Blackness, and Immigrant Exclusion explores how racial, ethnic and national status markers shape the racialization and criminalization of Haitian, Jamaican and Afro-Cubans in south Florida.