5.
Gender and Race Crossing the English Atlantic

Organizers:

Description:

This workshop explores the ways in which gender and race are figured in the crossing of the Atlantic from England to the Caribbean. Travel narratives and letters that reflect on English travelers in both Africa and the Caribbean provide a useful lens for thinking about the ways in which place shapes interlocking concepts of race and gender. English expansion in the 17th century led both to increased contact with existing societies in Africa and the New World, and the creation of new societies in England’s American colonies. These new societies depended upon coerced labor and while initially that labor came from indentured white servants, after the introduction of sugar to the Caribbean, that labor was performed by enslaved people of African descent.

We will use this movement to explore the emergence and interrelationships of gender and race. It uses as a central source Richard Ligon’s History of Barbados (1657) which provides an account of Ligon’s own journey to Barbados by way of the Cape Verde Islands, his three years on the island, as well as a natural history and social description of the island in the early years of the sugar revolution. Ligon was a royalist exile whose anomalous position in Barbados rendered him an acute observer of social relations. His account is particularly interesting because of the tensions between his broad generalizations and his detailed descriptions. While Ligon serves as a critical source for the early history of Barbados, his history cannot be read in any kind of straightforward way. Ligon’s account will be supplemented by excerpts from a number of other contemporary sources to provide additional perspective on the intersections of race, gender and class in the 17th century Caribbean.

Readings will be posted on a limited access website prior to the conference; participants will be invited to offer their own resources at the conference. The organizers have each approached Ligon in the context of different projects: Susan Amussen as a historian working on the English experience of settlement in the Caribbean, for which Ligon provides a central account; Kim Hall as a literary scholar working on aesthetic strategies used by the English to address cultural changes brought about by Atlantic production of sugar; Jennifer Morgan as a colonial historian working on a comparative study of enslaved women in colonial Barbados and South Carolina.

For the workshop, we will begin by providing context for the readings—not more than ten minutes of introduction—before opening the discussion to the participants. The discussion will focus on the following questions:
  1. Who gets to define race? Gender? Who is silent?
  2. Are there competing definitions of race and gender operative here? Whose? How are they manifest?
  3. What difference does place (i.e. Africa vs. Caribbean) make, if any?
  4. How does class complicate relations of race and/or gender?


In the last five minutes, we'll see whether we can come to any kind of concluding formulations or models.

Required Readings:

Recommended Readings: