Barriteau and Ulysse

The pairing of Ulysse’s ethnography with Barriteau’s article was amazingly complementary. Reading the Barriteau article prior to Downtown Ladies, it was easy to see how Barriteau feels that black feminist theory can contribute to feminist Caribbean scholarship. As Lowe pointed out, the effects of colonialism and enslavement are not just something felt in the United States.  However, at a certain point, black feminist theory becomes more specialized to the experiences of black women in the United States and the ways in which the enslavement of Africans and other groups has shaped the structure of the United States.

Barriteau’s article focuses on the many ways in which black feminist theory can contribute to Caribbean scholarship. One way in which it can is through “the notion that race, class, gender and sexuality are co-dependent variables that cannot readily be separated and ranked in scholarship, in political practice, or lived experience”(Barriteau, 15). These intersections create a unique set of experiences for black women in the US and Caribbean alike. Black female bodies have been and continue to be exploited in both these contexts. The black body has been seen as ‘capital’ by Europeans for quite a while and Ulysse argues that this view has become entrenched in the socioeconomic practices of ICIs in Jamaica. One such example of this is the beautification processes that ICIs tend to go through. On one hand these processes underline the Eurocentric standards of beauty and femininity, but they also underscore the fact that these women have the means and time to spend on themselves.

Black feminist theory uses, as Barriteau claims, the ‘lived experience’ to ‘validate knowledge claims’ and in many ways this approach to theory allows for a more subjective and comprehensive look at how race, class, gender and sexuality intersect. Ulysse’s research proves this by exploring the interconnection of higglers and colonialism in Jamaica with the current day ICIs.

Black feminist theory’s contribution to Caribbean scholarship does have its limits though. In many ways black feminist theory and its ideologies highlight the racialized and gendered issues that arise in a post-colonial/post-slavery society, but there is a point where these experiences are those unique to black women in the United States. Those who identify as black are a minority group in the United States and for a hundred years of its history slavery was still a practice. With emancipation came new ways to target black individuals through imprisonment, segregation, and an overwhelming racist mentality. These racialized practices have created these unique experiences that black feminism tries to address.

On page 12 of Barriteau’s article, she manages to show how black feminist theory not only can contribute to Caribbean scholarship, but it can also help to ‘deconstruct patriarchal relations’ in general with one eloquent statement: “However, the crucible of racism exposes patriarchy as a construct that is neither natural, nor sanctioned by biology, nor ordained by religion, as it is clear that racism denies black men the patriarchal privileges held by white men, thus exposing the fallacy that maleness automatically confers power.”