Caribbean Women and the Question of Knowledge. Veronica M. Gregg. Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies

Transcription

1 Atlantic Crossings: Women's Voices, Women's Stories from the Caribbean and the Nigerian Hinterland Dartmouth College, May 18-20, 2001 Caribbean Women and the Question of Knowledge by Veronica M. Gregg Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies Hunter College, City University of New York 695 Park Avenue New York, N.Y presented at Atlantic Crossings Workshop Dartmouth College May 18 20, 2001 (Please do not cite or circulate without permission)

2 1 What have Caribbean women contributed to the creation of Caribbean society and culture? What is their role in the debates about the meanings of Caribbean history and identity? How do they help shape the consciousness of a people? What effect have they had do they have on the ways in which knowledge is produced and ideas disseminated? Does gender inflect their contributions to the intellectual traditions and cultures of the region? How? As a corollary, how do Caribbean women s views, ideas, and concerns intersect with both the intellectual history and the classroom experiences of Caribbean Studies and Women s Studies within the region, in other parts of the African Diaspora, in Africa? The end product of these questions will be an anthology whose working title is Caribbean Women: A Treasury of Knowledge. This anthology is a small part of what I hope will be a collaborative, multidisciplinary effort similar to The Women Writing Africa series undertaken by the Feminist Press. My discussion paper briefly clarifies the objectives of this initial project and points to some of the challenges and problems through which it must pass. Beginning with generations of women born in the postslavery era, the collection presents some of their own interventions in the major social, political, intellectual, and cultural concerns of the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. With the Anglophone Caribbean as its primary focus, it includes women s words on politics, religion, social conditions,

3 2 international concerns, Pan-Africanism, colonialism, education, history, literature, culture, to name some. The purpose of this undertaking is to discern, demonstrate, and advance the viability of an intellectual culture or cultures among Caribbean women; to search for and bring into clearer focus what Caribbean women have thought, said, written about themselves and about the societies in which they lived. What defines this project is a desire to understand how the women s consciousness and intellect worked upon, even as they were shaped by, the worlds they knew. To carefully study the products of the minds of Caribbean women is to recognize the transforming potential of their intellectual labor. It is also to make available hidden resources on which scholars and students can draw; and from which we may yet learn to rethink our understanding of the Caribbean, the African Diaspora, and Africa. Several reasons have contributed to the necessity and desire to search for and study the ideas produced by Caribbean women of previous and present generations. The first is linked, paradoxically, to the fact that there is no shortage of material on Caribbean women. The work of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists that explores issues related to Caribbean women forms a veritable library extending back to the nineteenth century, and beyond. Since the 1970s, scholars have unearthed and explored aspects of the rebel past of Caribbean women. There have been studies on the lives and work of

4 3 slave higglers; Nanny, the Maroon chieftainess; Mary Prince; the Hart sisters; and Mary Seacole; to name some. There have also been studies that directed our attention to the sometimes unnamed but sharply defined women of abandoned character and contumacious conduct who questioned and worried, challenged and tweaked the oppressive sociopolitical systems that formed Caribbean societies. The postwar period of the 1940s saw the rise in investigations into kinship, gender, mating, and what was termed the looseness of conjugal bonds. The conceptual framework of these studies was one of deviance and dysfunction, rooted in the intensive sexuality of the black Caribbean woman. The leading document, which would spawn sociological models, as well as directly affect social policy and political outcomes, was the West India Royal Commission Report (1945); which is more popularly known as the Moyne Commission Report. Undoubtedly, there have been major shifts in sociological and anthropological scholarship since that time. However, lower-class black females as objects of study their lives examined through pre-ordained categories still form the bedrock of scholarly pursuits. In most cases, their own understanding of their lives is not a factor in the scholarship on these women. The reconstruction of these lives is the intellectual property or purview of others. The knowledge produced about these women continues to be used to discipline fields of

5 4 study, to institute social policy, and, above all, to profoundly order Caribbean reality. The subjectness of lower class black females, alongside the diversity of Caribbean women, has yet to fully become the object of disciplined attentiveness. Caribbean women as a whole, despite some exceptions, still do not seem to play a central role in the production of knowledge about the Caribbean or about women. The discourses, the categories of thought, and the terms of analysis are established by others. This remains largely true in spite of the fact that before, during, and after the period in which the dominant sociological paradigms were being put in place, Caribbean women, themselves, were simultaneously working out the historical, intellectual, and political dimensions of the systemic structures out of which the social concerns arose. In the field of literature, the current literary critical approach makes much of the coming to voice of Caribbean women writers in the 1980s; even as it often assumes no prior intellectual life. The so-called emergence of Caribbean women writers has been attributed to the opening up of educational opportunities in the 1950s, within the West Indies, and to the third wave international women s movement of the 1960s. These two events, as important as they are, cannot fully explain the presence of these women writers. Other questions must be answered: From whence did they come? How were they spawned? Who prepared this generation

6 5 of women writers? Nothing, after all, can come from nothing. There is an intimate connection between the sociological approach, with its focus on Caribbean women as objects of study, and the critical inquiry that assumes no literary, intellectual, or historical antecedents for contemporary women writers. Inherent in these modes of analysis is the danger of the disfiguring gaze, which forecloses any meaningful understanding of the lives and work of Caribbean women. It also makes impossible an ethical relation between the women studied and those (including other Caribbean women and men) who study them. Another seemingly contemporary issue that prompts a study of the place of women in the Caribbean intellectual and cultural landscape is the intense anxiety about men at risk, which has gained wide currency among Caribbean intellectuals and educators at home and abroad. Although connected to the US preoccupation with black men as an endangered species (and the current scholarly explorations of black masculinities); within the Caribbean, fears about men s fate are not only linked to racism and racial hierarchies. They are more closely tied to concerns about women s perceived advancement, empowerment, and privilege. This is not a new idea. Concerns about whether Caribbean males can be men, and females, women, have very deep and tangled roots. To dig up and untangle these roots is to systematically examine, how, in the context of Caribbean history, gender emerges, and

7 6 then functions, as a critical marker. It is to understand, as well, how inexorably the ideology of race configures the meaning of gender. The interlocking of the categories of race and gender works through language to create certain key ideas and meanings through which the Caribbean itself becomes intelligible. The effect of which is a seemingly immutable and intertwined racial/sexual/social/symbolic order from which, in turn, consciousness and identity take their shape. Central to this configuration is the production, ownership, and control of knowledge. The representation of Caribbean women, especially those designated as lower class black females, is a fundamental part of epistemic decisions (taken centuries ago) that continue to powerfully shape scholarship on the Caribbean and the African Diaspora. We must continue to consider why, and study how these decisions were enacted. The most urgent task that remains, however, is to listen carefully to what Caribbean women themselves, as subjects, have been saying all along.