African-Caribbean Women's Mobility and Self-Fashioning in Post-Diaspora Contexts.
Lead Research Organisation:
London South Bank University
Department Name: School of Arts and Creative Industries
Abstract
This research tests the effectiveness of 'post-diaspora' as a new concept and analytic tool. It asks how this concept can be used to reimagine new means by which African-Caribbean women achieve agency through mobility in twenty-first century contexts of globalization, transnationalism and deterritorialization. Post-diaspora is neither a departure from, nor a continuation of contemporary usages of diaspora: rather the 'post' signals a new problem space that allows us to imagine new futures, by focusing on mobility both as a defining feature of Caribbean identities and as a route to self-fashioning for African-Caribbean women. Rather than linear journeys that result in the reconstitution of a remembered past in a present of new physical and cultural geographies, post-diasporic journeys are rhizomatic: they radically configure the assumed significance of 'home' and 'away'. In rhizomatic journeys, roots are provisional and unfixed. Routes are often circuitous, and return - physical, rhetorical and economic - is a key component of African-Caribbean women's mobility (Trotz 2006; Trotz and Malone 2013; Reynolds 208, 2010).
While contemporary engagements with concepts of diaspora emphasise loss of 'origin', displacement, 'genealogies of dispossession' (Boyarin and Boyarin 2002; Cho2007), the formulation 'post-diaspora' moves away from ideas of homeland as singular and discrete, and from the accompanying idea that feelings of longing constitute the diasporic subject. As a concept, it intervenes in attempts in contemporary scholarship to progress discussions of the African diaspora beyond the privileging of nationalist sensibilities and an 'exaggerated attention to belonging' (Rushdy 2009), to more mobile and enabling articulations of blackness. It is a reimagining of affiliated identities beyond those that pertain to the nation state (Gilroy 2004, 2011; Hall 2007). Caribbean and African-Caribbean communities in North America, Britain and elsewhere are both twice diasporised (Hall 1976), and in the process of onward and recursive migrations, they are reconstituted by different and more variegated encounters (Cohen 2009). The concept of post-diaspora is attentive to the consequences of multiple encounters and the possibility of diverse affiliations.
This transdisciplinary Network uses knowledge and resources of five disciplinary areas: gender studies, literature, sociology, cultural geography and history. The Network also facilitates a trans-historical and transnational dialogue on the theme of post-diaspora. It connects scholars from Britain, the Caribbean and North America, who bring their own theoretical, methodological and disciplinary processes to answer the following questions:
1. What does present research tell us about how Britain, the Caribbean and North America can be understood in post-diaspora contexts?
2. What are the gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability?
3) How do these non-linear forms of mobility and the production of multiple affiliations produce the conditions for African-Caribbean women's agency and self-fashioning?
4) What forms of expression are available to reconfigure identities as post-diasporic?
These questions will be addressed through a website archiving the Network's activities and hosted by London South Bank University; a series of short research meetings and seminars of invited international scholars; an edited collection for a special issue of the interdisciplinary journal Small Axe and selected contributions to Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies; a one-day policy dialogue between members of the Network and the International Migration Taskforce, Planning Institute of Jamaica; two creative platforms of invited practitioners whose work addresses the theme; a meeting with the curators of the Black Cultural Archives, London.
While contemporary engagements with concepts of diaspora emphasise loss of 'origin', displacement, 'genealogies of dispossession' (Boyarin and Boyarin 2002; Cho2007), the formulation 'post-diaspora' moves away from ideas of homeland as singular and discrete, and from the accompanying idea that feelings of longing constitute the diasporic subject. As a concept, it intervenes in attempts in contemporary scholarship to progress discussions of the African diaspora beyond the privileging of nationalist sensibilities and an 'exaggerated attention to belonging' (Rushdy 2009), to more mobile and enabling articulations of blackness. It is a reimagining of affiliated identities beyond those that pertain to the nation state (Gilroy 2004, 2011; Hall 2007). Caribbean and African-Caribbean communities in North America, Britain and elsewhere are both twice diasporised (Hall 1976), and in the process of onward and recursive migrations, they are reconstituted by different and more variegated encounters (Cohen 2009). The concept of post-diaspora is attentive to the consequences of multiple encounters and the possibility of diverse affiliations.
This transdisciplinary Network uses knowledge and resources of five disciplinary areas: gender studies, literature, sociology, cultural geography and history. The Network also facilitates a trans-historical and transnational dialogue on the theme of post-diaspora. It connects scholars from Britain, the Caribbean and North America, who bring their own theoretical, methodological and disciplinary processes to answer the following questions:
1. What does present research tell us about how Britain, the Caribbean and North America can be understood in post-diaspora contexts?
2. What are the gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability?
3) How do these non-linear forms of mobility and the production of multiple affiliations produce the conditions for African-Caribbean women's agency and self-fashioning?
4) What forms of expression are available to reconfigure identities as post-diasporic?
These questions will be addressed through a website archiving the Network's activities and hosted by London South Bank University; a series of short research meetings and seminars of invited international scholars; an edited collection for a special issue of the interdisciplinary journal Small Axe and selected contributions to Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies; a one-day policy dialogue between members of the Network and the International Migration Taskforce, Planning Institute of Jamaica; two creative platforms of invited practitioners whose work addresses the theme; a meeting with the curators of the Black Cultural Archives, London.
Planned Impact
The network grant supports research and dialogue on new dimensions of migration during the UN Decade for People of African Descent. It is the first step in a longer-term strategy for new research partnerships between the two collaborating institutions: London South Bank University and The University of the West Indies, Jamaica. It builds on existing links between Dr. Leith Dunn (Co-I) and policy makers at the International Migration Taskforce at the Planning Institute of Jamaica. The Network extends established relations between Dr. Suzanne Scafe (PI) and curators and archivists at the Black Cultural Archives, London, and Network member Patricia Noxolo and the Drum Intercultural Arts Centre, Birmingham. It is anticipated that further research will strengthen further these Networks to invite formal collaboration from one or more of the non-academic participating institutions.
The Network will articulate how globalization might work for African-Caribbean women migrants, even while acknowledging and addressing its exclusions and the production of inequalities. It will address the following groups: Policy makers working on issues related to women in the African-Caribbean diaspora; not for profit/charitable organisations and the public. During the project, government policy makers at the Planning Institute, and the following beneficiaries will be engaged via public discussion panels and research seminars at the International Migration Taskforce and the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Jamaica:
1. HIBISCUS, an organization which helps in the rehabilitation of women drug couriers, and provides other programmes that aid women who are casualties of transnational economies. Hibiscus has an ongoing partnership with the Co-I, Dr. Dunn. During the project they will attend public discussion panels, small workshop meetings and creative performances.
2. The Black Cultural Archives: The final meeting will bring together the curators of existing collections both at the Black Cultural Archives and at the Tower Hamlets library for a discussion about how concepts of 'belonging', central to the themes of both archived collections, can be extended through discussion with Network members and the sharing of information from archives in Jamaica such as those held at the Memory Bank of Jamaica, and the University of the West Indies.
The online website will be the main method of communicating events and academic discussions undertaken by the Network. The website will be administered from within London South Bank's School of Arts and Creative Industries, in conjunction with the PI and Network members. The site will publicise the first call for participants for Seminar 1 in February 2017. By April 2017, it will list the full programme of events for the first meeting and the dates, locations and titles of the following 3 seminars.
The landing page of the website will provide information on the aims of the project and a navigational guide to its content. Thereafter the website will be the main channel of communication for all academic and public events organised by the Network; it will host members' blogs, conference papers, podcasts of key presentations and other material of academic and public interest. The website will include selective links with related research projects across the transdisciplinary field: all features will ensure that materials from the research will have an impact for a year within the life of the research and inform a follow-on project. The web-site will be a means of achieving both specific impact to the research community as well as wider impact to both professional and public audiences.
Dr. Trotz is editor of the widely-read 'In the Diaspora' column of Guyana Online and the online newspaper Stabroek News. Contributions on the Network theme from participants will be published to maximise the impact of the research area.
The Network will articulate how globalization might work for African-Caribbean women migrants, even while acknowledging and addressing its exclusions and the production of inequalities. It will address the following groups: Policy makers working on issues related to women in the African-Caribbean diaspora; not for profit/charitable organisations and the public. During the project, government policy makers at the Planning Institute, and the following beneficiaries will be engaged via public discussion panels and research seminars at the International Migration Taskforce and the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Jamaica:
1. HIBISCUS, an organization which helps in the rehabilitation of women drug couriers, and provides other programmes that aid women who are casualties of transnational economies. Hibiscus has an ongoing partnership with the Co-I, Dr. Dunn. During the project they will attend public discussion panels, small workshop meetings and creative performances.
2. The Black Cultural Archives: The final meeting will bring together the curators of existing collections both at the Black Cultural Archives and at the Tower Hamlets library for a discussion about how concepts of 'belonging', central to the themes of both archived collections, can be extended through discussion with Network members and the sharing of information from archives in Jamaica such as those held at the Memory Bank of Jamaica, and the University of the West Indies.
The online website will be the main method of communicating events and academic discussions undertaken by the Network. The website will be administered from within London South Bank's School of Arts and Creative Industries, in conjunction with the PI and Network members. The site will publicise the first call for participants for Seminar 1 in February 2017. By April 2017, it will list the full programme of events for the first meeting and the dates, locations and titles of the following 3 seminars.
The landing page of the website will provide information on the aims of the project and a navigational guide to its content. Thereafter the website will be the main channel of communication for all academic and public events organised by the Network; it will host members' blogs, conference papers, podcasts of key presentations and other material of academic and public interest. The website will include selective links with related research projects across the transdisciplinary field: all features will ensure that materials from the research will have an impact for a year within the life of the research and inform a follow-on project. The web-site will be a means of achieving both specific impact to the research community as well as wider impact to both professional and public audiences.
Dr. Trotz is editor of the widely-read 'In the Diaspora' column of Guyana Online and the online newspaper Stabroek News. Contributions on the Network theme from participants will be published to maximise the impact of the research area.
Organisations
- London South Bank University (Lead Research Organisation)
- Leeds Beckett University (Collaboration)
- Queens University (Collaboration)
- The Open University (Collaboration)
- York University Toronto (Collaboration)
- BIRMINGHAM CITY UNIVERSITY (Collaboration)
- University of West Indies (Collaboration)
- UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM (Collaboration)
- University of Toronto (Collaboration)
- QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST (Collaboration)
- University of the West Indies (Collaboration)
Publications
Scafe S
(2020)
African-Caribbean women interrogating diaspora/post-diaspora
in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal
| Description | The aim of the project was to rethink issues of diaspora in the context of African-Caribbean women. This meant investigating how African-Caribbean women who have migrated beyond the Caribbean form communities that reached out beyond the cultural and ethnic borders: African/Caribbean. Important new research questions were opened up: the Network investigated the impact of this more fluid and transient understanding of diasporic community on individual identities. The Network found that the significant staging posts of diasporic theory are being reconfigured under the pressure of globalization. Significant partnerships were developed. The Network hosted a series of international workshops and meetings, both physical and virtual, as well as a final conference, in order to engage scholars from a wide range of disciplines around the research topic. The objective of the meetings was to produce two edited publications. The first was published in 2019, and articles from the second publication have begun to appear in the on-line first system of the Taylor and Francis journal - African and Black Diaspora: an international journal. https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=rabd20 |
| Exploitation Route | The findings might be taken forward by scholars and activists investigating black feminist activism, migration and migration policy, diaspora, community and affect. The project tested a black feminist methodology, used to frame the interdisciplinarity of the Network's findings and publication outcomes. A black feminist methodology focuses not only on ways in which gender identities, roles and status are mediated by culture and class, but ways in which gender, culture and class is further mediated by mobility, legitimacy and geography. These latter categories are of particular relevance to the study of diaspora/post-diaspora in contemporary contexts of globalization, deterritorialisation and changing concepts of citizenship. The outcomes of this funding might be taken forward to further develop a black feminist methodology as a means of framing an investigation of Caribbean migration, diaspora and settlement, and issues of agency and legitimacy. Such a methodology can be used to frame a consideration of diaspora's others: forced migratory subjects; the forced removal of subjects and the cost - political, financial, and emotional - of citizenship. Globalization, as the outcomes of the study found, enables agency, but also limits agency and mobility. These limits can be further tested and described. More consideration can be given in further projects to the documentation and analysis of diasporic activism, in particular the role played by activists around issues of asylum, trafficking within and beyond Caribbean territories, and gender and sexual oppression. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/june2019/index.asp |
| Description | Findings from the project have been used in a public session in Toronto where participants engaged a members of the public, including feminist and queer activists around issues of diaspora, diasporicity and post-diaspora identities. These sessions included a public meeting that focused on the history of black feminist activism from the 1980s to the present; a public performance of Song for the Beloved, and a public exhibition. Members have been invited to given public lectures at the Black Cultural Archives, London UK, where issues of African-Caribbean migration, diaspora, and diasporic activism were addressed. This has served to take the Network's findings to a broader audience. Creative artists contributed to all public events, including the Network's final publication, which included poetry written by non-academic conference attendees: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=rabd20 |
| First Year Of Impact | 2018 |
| Sector | Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Description | "Defining Post-Diaspora" 2 x day workshop at LSBU; |
| Organisation | Birmingham City University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | All participants contributed a seminar paper that interrogated the the effectiveness of the concept of post-diaspora as a critical tool and a method of analysing migratory circuits among African-Caribbean women in the contemporary period. Patterns and effects of migration, issues and representations of agency were discussed in a multidisciplinary context. The range of disciplines included: the sociology of health; sociology and social sciences; education studies, literature; gender and development studies; cultural geography and anthropology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Denise Noble Diaspora, Transnationality and the Affective Trajectories of Black British Identity: This research cluster offers me the opportunity to both engage with how other Caribbean scholars are responding to the concept of post-diaspora and to evaluate its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own work. I intend to use this forum to focus on two key questions. First, what forms of emancipatory subjectivity are imagined and enabled in the processes of journeying between multiple registers of 'home', and 'foreign', especially where these produce discrepant affective registers of 'grounding', familiarity, identification, and orientation, but also, potential unsettlement, foreignness, disidentification and disorientation. Second, how can the concept of post-diaspora contribute to an analysis of these processes and help to explain the cultural politics of postcolonial identities? Dr. Andrea Davis, Mapping a Post-Diaspora Poetics of Black Women's Writing in Canada In this particular reading of blackness in Canada, I offer three exploratory tropes of black possibilities as a way of accounting for my own displaced black Jamaican body in Canada and the multiple intersections that connect my memories and desires of a more hopeful future to the circulating stories of African peoples similarly dispersed across the world. These three tropes-horizon, sea, and sound-frame my understanding of myself in and out of place, not as an anchored being, but as a body slippery, amorphous, expansive and transformative. These tropes are layered one upon the other and are in many ways interdependent. I use them specifically to read the works of Caribbean and African women writers in Canada. In so doing, I foreground a critique of settler colonial nations like Canada and make black peoples and peoples of colour and immigrant women accountable to the nation; that is, accountable to making the nation more critically aware of itself and the inequalities it perpetuates. ' Dr. Leith Dunn: Globalisation Struggle and Survival of Jamaican Women Migrants' The UN Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), the UN Sustainable Development Goals and CEDAW, the Women's Rights Convention, provide a framework to reflect on ways in which African Caribbean women have used migration for agency, equality, economic empowerment and self -identity in the rapidly changing context of globalisation. Purpose: The paper examines the scope, characteristics and consequences of Jamaican women's migration to Britain, North America and Canada in recent decades and policy responses. Methodology: Caribbean gender and development theories guide this case study on the situation of Jamaican women migrants in the Post Diaspora context of Britain, Canada and North America. It uses research on migration related to human trafficking, decent work and domestic workers, as well as temporary migrant workers (teachers, nurses and hospitality workers). A content analysis of Jamaica's International Migration Policy also assesses coherence in government policy responses to international migration trends and the National Policy for Gender Equality (2011). Results: Despite many achievements, the rapid pace of globalisation presents many areas for research to protect the rights of Jamaican women migrants, promote agency and economic empowerment and enhance policy coherence. Key words: Jamaican-women-migrants; human trafficking, gender equality, policy coherence Dr. Beverley Mullings, Queens University, Canada Gender, Generation and Diaspora in 21st century modes of Caribbean engagement and governance Feminist scholars have long argued the existence of gender hegemonies in diasporic formations, and the tendency for the contributions of women to social transformation to be relegated as secondary to the 'important business' of economic growth and political freedom. Linked to nationalist constructions of belonging, authenticity and citizenship nationalist approaches to diaspora rarely paid attention to existing gender, class, and racializing asymmetries that differentially positioned diaspora members within nationalist narratives. In this paper I argue that the recent emergence of diaspora strategies as a cornerstone of state governance threatens to reproduce the gender hegemonies of the past by focusing almost exclusively on the contributions of entrepreneurial émigré's, particularly those of high net worth. I also argue that contemporary state diaspora strategies potentially miss opportunities for progressive social transformation by devaluing the potential contributions of second and third generation diaspora members. Bringing cultural approaches, that view diaspora as a site of heterogeneity, contestation, creativity and innovation, into conversation with state-driven instrumental ones, this paper explores the ways that more mobile and enabling articulations of diasporic identity, particularly among second and third generation women could enhance the transformative potential of diaspora/state encounters in the multiple spaces that constitute the Caribbean diaspora Dr. Patricia Noxolo: University of Birmingham Caribbean in/securities, gender and post-diaspora I will outline the network's theoretical and conceptual approaches, looking at how they might intersect with those of the post-diaspora network, and relate this to the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, whose creative research and writing offers a gender-based approach both to in/security and to post-diaspora. Dr. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto - Diasporic Promiscuities: Research Reflections Diaspora, diasporic, diasporize. Whether as noun, adjective, or even verb, the term seems to have taken on a life of its own, from academics to World Bank officials, from state managers to communities. In worlds where diaspora proliferates, how might we specify more precisely without either limiting or drawing new boundaries around extra-territorial movement? Drawing on scholarship on transnational gendered itineraries and recent events in the region, this contribution reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that emerge when we turn our attention to women's connective and cross-border practices, where diasporic reproduction takes place, beyond gendered and sexual respectability, in unanticipated and transgressive ways. Dr. Gemma Romain - Independent Scholar Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, seeking to document as far as possible the migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. In this initial exploratory talk, I will focus on some of the histories, experiences and concepts I hope to investigate within the project. I intend my research to focus on the Network themes of the 'concept of return' and the 'gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African-Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability' by mapping routes of travel, migration and re-migration; mobility, settlement and instability in housing due to the intersections of race and gender; and the diasporic, post-diasporic, multi-ethnic gendered experiences of living and studying in 1920s and 1930s London. I will focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories, investigating documents such as passenger returns, census material, and electoral registers, student registration documents, library reader registrations, and archives of student societies and organisations. For example, through shipping passenger returns I will seek to map the routes of migration and re-migration of African-Caribbean women studying in 1920s and 1930s Britain, specifically London. I aim to explore within the project the experiences of African-Caribbean women students in finding housing and the role of geography and settlement in shaping individuals' experiences and identities, including diasporic and post-diasporic identities. I will explore the racial and gendered dimensions of the experiences of finding accommodation in interwar London, focusing on racism in accommodation and the experiences of Black women in finding accommodation in hostels and hotels. I will seek to explore the type of accommodation African-Caribbean women resided in - who else lived there and why - and seek to investigate how, because of these lived experiences, new diasporic and gendered identities might have been formed and forged. Dr. Jenny Douglas - Open University African-Caribbean Women's Health in the Atlantic Diaspora. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the mobility has affected African-Caribbean Women's health in the Atlantic diaspora. By the Atlantic diaspora, I mean North America, Britain and the Caribbean. Inequalities in health in African-Caribbean women are enduring. African-Caribbean women experience a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Lane et al, 2005; Collins and Johnson, 2008). In addition, Black Caribbean women with breast cancer have a significantly worse survival rate (Bowen, 2008; Jack et al, 2009). In relation to mental health, the research emphasis has been on Black Caribbean men with high rates of serious mental illness, while Black women have been seemingly ignored (Edge, 2013). The reproductive and sexual health of Black Caribbean women is also of concern. In the UK, policy and health service developments focusing on the health of Black and Minority ethnic health issues have failed to account for the specificity of Black Caribbean women's health and wellbeing. The inequalities African-Caribbean women face in education, employment, health and social care because of their racialised, gendered and classed experience are detrimental to their health and have a major impact on their life chances over the life course (Douglas and Watson,2013). Despite the geographical differences between African-Caribbean women in the UK and African- American women in the USA, research on inequalities in health highlights the relatively poor health of both groups and the similarities in demographic, social, health and economic profiles (Nazroo et al. 2007). Moreover, these two groups are not completely distinct as in addition to their histories emerging from transatlantic slavery, there has been continuous migration from the Caribbean to the USA and from the Caribbean to the UK as well as migration of African-Caribbeans from the UK to the USA, thus creating transnational Caribbean diasporic communities. Dr. Suzanne Scafe, London South Bank University Remembering "political blackness" as a space for agency, transformation and the emergence of post-diaspora identities. Today I'm focusing on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women's groups and the Black women's movement during the 1970s and '80s: I'm examining the reconfiguration of 'Black' in these life writing testimonies, as a connecting, oppositional identity. I interrogate both the movement's memorialisation in the context of British 'heritage' and its use, in academic contexts, to critique the perceived failures of political Blackness as a means defining feminist activism. Despite this critique, I propose that the Black women's movement's emphasis on an anti-imperialist context for identity formation, its focus on the practice of transculturality and its commitment to political social and cultural transformation as a mark of black feminist activism, provides a framework within to better understand emerging cultural production defined as 'Black British' in contemporary post-diaspora contexts. Dr. Beverley Goring, London South Bank University - African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency There is a long held perception of the connection between parental disposition and educational attainment and research regarding parental involvement would appear to support this. The popular belief is, given that African Caribbean children are one of the lower achieving groups academically as well as being over represented in exclusions from school statistics, the parents, mainly mothers, are less interested or engaged with their children's education and schooling, The simplicity of this argument espousing parental culpability finds favour within wider political, sociological and journalistic discourses where theories of cultural, material and cognitive deficit abound and are then utilised to explain away educational failure. Arguments that once challenged the role of the school as an institution which resides within the superstructure, and its contribution to educational disadvantage, are in retreat. Instead it appears that the family, mainly mothers, are a feature of derision and blame for the perceived pathological tendencies in families. This is was a strong revivalist theme especially in the reporting of the recent spate of stabbings in the capital. My original research on the topic of African Caribbean parents and their perspectives on education and schooling found parents obsessed with the notion of a 'good education'. They fought tirelessly and systematically to secure the best possible educational chances for their children. Sometimes they resorted to drastic measures, such as 'return migration' in their quest for better educational opportunities. This recourse to utilising transnational family connections within the wider African Caribbean diaspora, and other strategies, I argued, is a testament to parents exercising their agency and it gave an insight into the multifaceted nature of the lives of these women that run counter to the populist notion of what it meant to be African Caribbean parents, and especially mothers in modern Britain. This brings into focus the underlying dialectic between structure and agency. How do Caribbean women in the diaspora create a space between these two positions to mount a substantive challenge to disrupt the education system's status quo and contribute to an entity that fosters equality and social justice? Only then can all parents be assured that their children will receive a 'good education' and by extension contribute to sustainable communities. |
| Impact | Forthcoming |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | "Defining Post-Diaspora" 2 x day workshop at LSBU; |
| Organisation | Leeds Beckett University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | All participants contributed a seminar paper that interrogated the the effectiveness of the concept of post-diaspora as a critical tool and a method of analysing migratory circuits among African-Caribbean women in the contemporary period. Patterns and effects of migration, issues and representations of agency were discussed in a multidisciplinary context. The range of disciplines included: the sociology of health; sociology and social sciences; education studies, literature; gender and development studies; cultural geography and anthropology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Denise Noble Diaspora, Transnationality and the Affective Trajectories of Black British Identity: This research cluster offers me the opportunity to both engage with how other Caribbean scholars are responding to the concept of post-diaspora and to evaluate its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own work. I intend to use this forum to focus on two key questions. First, what forms of emancipatory subjectivity are imagined and enabled in the processes of journeying between multiple registers of 'home', and 'foreign', especially where these produce discrepant affective registers of 'grounding', familiarity, identification, and orientation, but also, potential unsettlement, foreignness, disidentification and disorientation. Second, how can the concept of post-diaspora contribute to an analysis of these processes and help to explain the cultural politics of postcolonial identities? Dr. Andrea Davis, Mapping a Post-Diaspora Poetics of Black Women's Writing in Canada In this particular reading of blackness in Canada, I offer three exploratory tropes of black possibilities as a way of accounting for my own displaced black Jamaican body in Canada and the multiple intersections that connect my memories and desires of a more hopeful future to the circulating stories of African peoples similarly dispersed across the world. These three tropes-horizon, sea, and sound-frame my understanding of myself in and out of place, not as an anchored being, but as a body slippery, amorphous, expansive and transformative. These tropes are layered one upon the other and are in many ways interdependent. I use them specifically to read the works of Caribbean and African women writers in Canada. In so doing, I foreground a critique of settler colonial nations like Canada and make black peoples and peoples of colour and immigrant women accountable to the nation; that is, accountable to making the nation more critically aware of itself and the inequalities it perpetuates. ' Dr. Leith Dunn: Globalisation Struggle and Survival of Jamaican Women Migrants' The UN Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), the UN Sustainable Development Goals and CEDAW, the Women's Rights Convention, provide a framework to reflect on ways in which African Caribbean women have used migration for agency, equality, economic empowerment and self -identity in the rapidly changing context of globalisation. Purpose: The paper examines the scope, characteristics and consequences of Jamaican women's migration to Britain, North America and Canada in recent decades and policy responses. Methodology: Caribbean gender and development theories guide this case study on the situation of Jamaican women migrants in the Post Diaspora context of Britain, Canada and North America. It uses research on migration related to human trafficking, decent work and domestic workers, as well as temporary migrant workers (teachers, nurses and hospitality workers). A content analysis of Jamaica's International Migration Policy also assesses coherence in government policy responses to international migration trends and the National Policy for Gender Equality (2011). Results: Despite many achievements, the rapid pace of globalisation presents many areas for research to protect the rights of Jamaican women migrants, promote agency and economic empowerment and enhance policy coherence. Key words: Jamaican-women-migrants; human trafficking, gender equality, policy coherence Dr. Beverley Mullings, Queens University, Canada Gender, Generation and Diaspora in 21st century modes of Caribbean engagement and governance Feminist scholars have long argued the existence of gender hegemonies in diasporic formations, and the tendency for the contributions of women to social transformation to be relegated as secondary to the 'important business' of economic growth and political freedom. Linked to nationalist constructions of belonging, authenticity and citizenship nationalist approaches to diaspora rarely paid attention to existing gender, class, and racializing asymmetries that differentially positioned diaspora members within nationalist narratives. In this paper I argue that the recent emergence of diaspora strategies as a cornerstone of state governance threatens to reproduce the gender hegemonies of the past by focusing almost exclusively on the contributions of entrepreneurial émigré's, particularly those of high net worth. I also argue that contemporary state diaspora strategies potentially miss opportunities for progressive social transformation by devaluing the potential contributions of second and third generation diaspora members. Bringing cultural approaches, that view diaspora as a site of heterogeneity, contestation, creativity and innovation, into conversation with state-driven instrumental ones, this paper explores the ways that more mobile and enabling articulations of diasporic identity, particularly among second and third generation women could enhance the transformative potential of diaspora/state encounters in the multiple spaces that constitute the Caribbean diaspora Dr. Patricia Noxolo: University of Birmingham Caribbean in/securities, gender and post-diaspora I will outline the network's theoretical and conceptual approaches, looking at how they might intersect with those of the post-diaspora network, and relate this to the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, whose creative research and writing offers a gender-based approach both to in/security and to post-diaspora. Dr. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto - Diasporic Promiscuities: Research Reflections Diaspora, diasporic, diasporize. Whether as noun, adjective, or even verb, the term seems to have taken on a life of its own, from academics to World Bank officials, from state managers to communities. In worlds where diaspora proliferates, how might we specify more precisely without either limiting or drawing new boundaries around extra-territorial movement? Drawing on scholarship on transnational gendered itineraries and recent events in the region, this contribution reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that emerge when we turn our attention to women's connective and cross-border practices, where diasporic reproduction takes place, beyond gendered and sexual respectability, in unanticipated and transgressive ways. Dr. Gemma Romain - Independent Scholar Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, seeking to document as far as possible the migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. In this initial exploratory talk, I will focus on some of the histories, experiences and concepts I hope to investigate within the project. I intend my research to focus on the Network themes of the 'concept of return' and the 'gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African-Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability' by mapping routes of travel, migration and re-migration; mobility, settlement and instability in housing due to the intersections of race and gender; and the diasporic, post-diasporic, multi-ethnic gendered experiences of living and studying in 1920s and 1930s London. I will focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories, investigating documents such as passenger returns, census material, and electoral registers, student registration documents, library reader registrations, and archives of student societies and organisations. For example, through shipping passenger returns I will seek to map the routes of migration and re-migration of African-Caribbean women studying in 1920s and 1930s Britain, specifically London. I aim to explore within the project the experiences of African-Caribbean women students in finding housing and the role of geography and settlement in shaping individuals' experiences and identities, including diasporic and post-diasporic identities. I will explore the racial and gendered dimensions of the experiences of finding accommodation in interwar London, focusing on racism in accommodation and the experiences of Black women in finding accommodation in hostels and hotels. I will seek to explore the type of accommodation African-Caribbean women resided in - who else lived there and why - and seek to investigate how, because of these lived experiences, new diasporic and gendered identities might have been formed and forged. Dr. Jenny Douglas - Open University African-Caribbean Women's Health in the Atlantic Diaspora. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the mobility has affected African-Caribbean Women's health in the Atlantic diaspora. By the Atlantic diaspora, I mean North America, Britain and the Caribbean. Inequalities in health in African-Caribbean women are enduring. African-Caribbean women experience a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Lane et al, 2005; Collins and Johnson, 2008). In addition, Black Caribbean women with breast cancer have a significantly worse survival rate (Bowen, 2008; Jack et al, 2009). In relation to mental health, the research emphasis has been on Black Caribbean men with high rates of serious mental illness, while Black women have been seemingly ignored (Edge, 2013). The reproductive and sexual health of Black Caribbean women is also of concern. In the UK, policy and health service developments focusing on the health of Black and Minority ethnic health issues have failed to account for the specificity of Black Caribbean women's health and wellbeing. The inequalities African-Caribbean women face in education, employment, health and social care because of their racialised, gendered and classed experience are detrimental to their health and have a major impact on their life chances over the life course (Douglas and Watson,2013). Despite the geographical differences between African-Caribbean women in the UK and African- American women in the USA, research on inequalities in health highlights the relatively poor health of both groups and the similarities in demographic, social, health and economic profiles (Nazroo et al. 2007). Moreover, these two groups are not completely distinct as in addition to their histories emerging from transatlantic slavery, there has been continuous migration from the Caribbean to the USA and from the Caribbean to the UK as well as migration of African-Caribbeans from the UK to the USA, thus creating transnational Caribbean diasporic communities. Dr. Suzanne Scafe, London South Bank University Remembering "political blackness" as a space for agency, transformation and the emergence of post-diaspora identities. Today I'm focusing on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women's groups and the Black women's movement during the 1970s and '80s: I'm examining the reconfiguration of 'Black' in these life writing testimonies, as a connecting, oppositional identity. I interrogate both the movement's memorialisation in the context of British 'heritage' and its use, in academic contexts, to critique the perceived failures of political Blackness as a means defining feminist activism. Despite this critique, I propose that the Black women's movement's emphasis on an anti-imperialist context for identity formation, its focus on the practice of transculturality and its commitment to political social and cultural transformation as a mark of black feminist activism, provides a framework within to better understand emerging cultural production defined as 'Black British' in contemporary post-diaspora contexts. Dr. Beverley Goring, London South Bank University - African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency There is a long held perception of the connection between parental disposition and educational attainment and research regarding parental involvement would appear to support this. The popular belief is, given that African Caribbean children are one of the lower achieving groups academically as well as being over represented in exclusions from school statistics, the parents, mainly mothers, are less interested or engaged with their children's education and schooling, The simplicity of this argument espousing parental culpability finds favour within wider political, sociological and journalistic discourses where theories of cultural, material and cognitive deficit abound and are then utilised to explain away educational failure. Arguments that once challenged the role of the school as an institution which resides within the superstructure, and its contribution to educational disadvantage, are in retreat. Instead it appears that the family, mainly mothers, are a feature of derision and blame for the perceived pathological tendencies in families. This is was a strong revivalist theme especially in the reporting of the recent spate of stabbings in the capital. My original research on the topic of African Caribbean parents and their perspectives on education and schooling found parents obsessed with the notion of a 'good education'. They fought tirelessly and systematically to secure the best possible educational chances for their children. Sometimes they resorted to drastic measures, such as 'return migration' in their quest for better educational opportunities. This recourse to utilising transnational family connections within the wider African Caribbean diaspora, and other strategies, I argued, is a testament to parents exercising their agency and it gave an insight into the multifaceted nature of the lives of these women that run counter to the populist notion of what it meant to be African Caribbean parents, and especially mothers in modern Britain. This brings into focus the underlying dialectic between structure and agency. How do Caribbean women in the diaspora create a space between these two positions to mount a substantive challenge to disrupt the education system's status quo and contribute to an entity that fosters equality and social justice? Only then can all parents be assured that their children will receive a 'good education' and by extension contribute to sustainable communities. |
| Impact | Forthcoming |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | "Defining Post-Diaspora" 2 x day workshop at LSBU; |
| Organisation | Open University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | All participants contributed a seminar paper that interrogated the the effectiveness of the concept of post-diaspora as a critical tool and a method of analysing migratory circuits among African-Caribbean women in the contemporary period. Patterns and effects of migration, issues and representations of agency were discussed in a multidisciplinary context. The range of disciplines included: the sociology of health; sociology and social sciences; education studies, literature; gender and development studies; cultural geography and anthropology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Denise Noble Diaspora, Transnationality and the Affective Trajectories of Black British Identity: This research cluster offers me the opportunity to both engage with how other Caribbean scholars are responding to the concept of post-diaspora and to evaluate its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own work. I intend to use this forum to focus on two key questions. First, what forms of emancipatory subjectivity are imagined and enabled in the processes of journeying between multiple registers of 'home', and 'foreign', especially where these produce discrepant affective registers of 'grounding', familiarity, identification, and orientation, but also, potential unsettlement, foreignness, disidentification and disorientation. Second, how can the concept of post-diaspora contribute to an analysis of these processes and help to explain the cultural politics of postcolonial identities? Dr. Andrea Davis, Mapping a Post-Diaspora Poetics of Black Women's Writing in Canada In this particular reading of blackness in Canada, I offer three exploratory tropes of black possibilities as a way of accounting for my own displaced black Jamaican body in Canada and the multiple intersections that connect my memories and desires of a more hopeful future to the circulating stories of African peoples similarly dispersed across the world. These three tropes-horizon, sea, and sound-frame my understanding of myself in and out of place, not as an anchored being, but as a body slippery, amorphous, expansive and transformative. These tropes are layered one upon the other and are in many ways interdependent. I use them specifically to read the works of Caribbean and African women writers in Canada. In so doing, I foreground a critique of settler colonial nations like Canada and make black peoples and peoples of colour and immigrant women accountable to the nation; that is, accountable to making the nation more critically aware of itself and the inequalities it perpetuates. ' Dr. Leith Dunn: Globalisation Struggle and Survival of Jamaican Women Migrants' The UN Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), the UN Sustainable Development Goals and CEDAW, the Women's Rights Convention, provide a framework to reflect on ways in which African Caribbean women have used migration for agency, equality, economic empowerment and self -identity in the rapidly changing context of globalisation. Purpose: The paper examines the scope, characteristics and consequences of Jamaican women's migration to Britain, North America and Canada in recent decades and policy responses. Methodology: Caribbean gender and development theories guide this case study on the situation of Jamaican women migrants in the Post Diaspora context of Britain, Canada and North America. It uses research on migration related to human trafficking, decent work and domestic workers, as well as temporary migrant workers (teachers, nurses and hospitality workers). A content analysis of Jamaica's International Migration Policy also assesses coherence in government policy responses to international migration trends and the National Policy for Gender Equality (2011). Results: Despite many achievements, the rapid pace of globalisation presents many areas for research to protect the rights of Jamaican women migrants, promote agency and economic empowerment and enhance policy coherence. Key words: Jamaican-women-migrants; human trafficking, gender equality, policy coherence Dr. Beverley Mullings, Queens University, Canada Gender, Generation and Diaspora in 21st century modes of Caribbean engagement and governance Feminist scholars have long argued the existence of gender hegemonies in diasporic formations, and the tendency for the contributions of women to social transformation to be relegated as secondary to the 'important business' of economic growth and political freedom. Linked to nationalist constructions of belonging, authenticity and citizenship nationalist approaches to diaspora rarely paid attention to existing gender, class, and racializing asymmetries that differentially positioned diaspora members within nationalist narratives. In this paper I argue that the recent emergence of diaspora strategies as a cornerstone of state governance threatens to reproduce the gender hegemonies of the past by focusing almost exclusively on the contributions of entrepreneurial émigré's, particularly those of high net worth. I also argue that contemporary state diaspora strategies potentially miss opportunities for progressive social transformation by devaluing the potential contributions of second and third generation diaspora members. Bringing cultural approaches, that view diaspora as a site of heterogeneity, contestation, creativity and innovation, into conversation with state-driven instrumental ones, this paper explores the ways that more mobile and enabling articulations of diasporic identity, particularly among second and third generation women could enhance the transformative potential of diaspora/state encounters in the multiple spaces that constitute the Caribbean diaspora Dr. Patricia Noxolo: University of Birmingham Caribbean in/securities, gender and post-diaspora I will outline the network's theoretical and conceptual approaches, looking at how they might intersect with those of the post-diaspora network, and relate this to the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, whose creative research and writing offers a gender-based approach both to in/security and to post-diaspora. Dr. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto - Diasporic Promiscuities: Research Reflections Diaspora, diasporic, diasporize. Whether as noun, adjective, or even verb, the term seems to have taken on a life of its own, from academics to World Bank officials, from state managers to communities. In worlds where diaspora proliferates, how might we specify more precisely without either limiting or drawing new boundaries around extra-territorial movement? Drawing on scholarship on transnational gendered itineraries and recent events in the region, this contribution reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that emerge when we turn our attention to women's connective and cross-border practices, where diasporic reproduction takes place, beyond gendered and sexual respectability, in unanticipated and transgressive ways. Dr. Gemma Romain - Independent Scholar Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, seeking to document as far as possible the migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. In this initial exploratory talk, I will focus on some of the histories, experiences and concepts I hope to investigate within the project. I intend my research to focus on the Network themes of the 'concept of return' and the 'gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African-Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability' by mapping routes of travel, migration and re-migration; mobility, settlement and instability in housing due to the intersections of race and gender; and the diasporic, post-diasporic, multi-ethnic gendered experiences of living and studying in 1920s and 1930s London. I will focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories, investigating documents such as passenger returns, census material, and electoral registers, student registration documents, library reader registrations, and archives of student societies and organisations. For example, through shipping passenger returns I will seek to map the routes of migration and re-migration of African-Caribbean women studying in 1920s and 1930s Britain, specifically London. I aim to explore within the project the experiences of African-Caribbean women students in finding housing and the role of geography and settlement in shaping individuals' experiences and identities, including diasporic and post-diasporic identities. I will explore the racial and gendered dimensions of the experiences of finding accommodation in interwar London, focusing on racism in accommodation and the experiences of Black women in finding accommodation in hostels and hotels. I will seek to explore the type of accommodation African-Caribbean women resided in - who else lived there and why - and seek to investigate how, because of these lived experiences, new diasporic and gendered identities might have been formed and forged. Dr. Jenny Douglas - Open University African-Caribbean Women's Health in the Atlantic Diaspora. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the mobility has affected African-Caribbean Women's health in the Atlantic diaspora. By the Atlantic diaspora, I mean North America, Britain and the Caribbean. Inequalities in health in African-Caribbean women are enduring. African-Caribbean women experience a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Lane et al, 2005; Collins and Johnson, 2008). In addition, Black Caribbean women with breast cancer have a significantly worse survival rate (Bowen, 2008; Jack et al, 2009). In relation to mental health, the research emphasis has been on Black Caribbean men with high rates of serious mental illness, while Black women have been seemingly ignored (Edge, 2013). The reproductive and sexual health of Black Caribbean women is also of concern. In the UK, policy and health service developments focusing on the health of Black and Minority ethnic health issues have failed to account for the specificity of Black Caribbean women's health and wellbeing. The inequalities African-Caribbean women face in education, employment, health and social care because of their racialised, gendered and classed experience are detrimental to their health and have a major impact on their life chances over the life course (Douglas and Watson,2013). Despite the geographical differences between African-Caribbean women in the UK and African- American women in the USA, research on inequalities in health highlights the relatively poor health of both groups and the similarities in demographic, social, health and economic profiles (Nazroo et al. 2007). Moreover, these two groups are not completely distinct as in addition to their histories emerging from transatlantic slavery, there has been continuous migration from the Caribbean to the USA and from the Caribbean to the UK as well as migration of African-Caribbeans from the UK to the USA, thus creating transnational Caribbean diasporic communities. Dr. Suzanne Scafe, London South Bank University Remembering "political blackness" as a space for agency, transformation and the emergence of post-diaspora identities. Today I'm focusing on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women's groups and the Black women's movement during the 1970s and '80s: I'm examining the reconfiguration of 'Black' in these life writing testimonies, as a connecting, oppositional identity. I interrogate both the movement's memorialisation in the context of British 'heritage' and its use, in academic contexts, to critique the perceived failures of political Blackness as a means defining feminist activism. Despite this critique, I propose that the Black women's movement's emphasis on an anti-imperialist context for identity formation, its focus on the practice of transculturality and its commitment to political social and cultural transformation as a mark of black feminist activism, provides a framework within to better understand emerging cultural production defined as 'Black British' in contemporary post-diaspora contexts. Dr. Beverley Goring, London South Bank University - African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency There is a long held perception of the connection between parental disposition and educational attainment and research regarding parental involvement would appear to support this. The popular belief is, given that African Caribbean children are one of the lower achieving groups academically as well as being over represented in exclusions from school statistics, the parents, mainly mothers, are less interested or engaged with their children's education and schooling, The simplicity of this argument espousing parental culpability finds favour within wider political, sociological and journalistic discourses where theories of cultural, material and cognitive deficit abound and are then utilised to explain away educational failure. Arguments that once challenged the role of the school as an institution which resides within the superstructure, and its contribution to educational disadvantage, are in retreat. Instead it appears that the family, mainly mothers, are a feature of derision and blame for the perceived pathological tendencies in families. This is was a strong revivalist theme especially in the reporting of the recent spate of stabbings in the capital. My original research on the topic of African Caribbean parents and their perspectives on education and schooling found parents obsessed with the notion of a 'good education'. They fought tirelessly and systematically to secure the best possible educational chances for their children. Sometimes they resorted to drastic measures, such as 'return migration' in their quest for better educational opportunities. This recourse to utilising transnational family connections within the wider African Caribbean diaspora, and other strategies, I argued, is a testament to parents exercising their agency and it gave an insight into the multifaceted nature of the lives of these women that run counter to the populist notion of what it meant to be African Caribbean parents, and especially mothers in modern Britain. This brings into focus the underlying dialectic between structure and agency. How do Caribbean women in the diaspora create a space between these two positions to mount a substantive challenge to disrupt the education system's status quo and contribute to an entity that fosters equality and social justice? Only then can all parents be assured that their children will receive a 'good education' and by extension contribute to sustainable communities. |
| Impact | Forthcoming |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | "Defining Post-Diaspora" 2 x day workshop at LSBU; |
| Organisation | Queen's University Belfast |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | All participants contributed a seminar paper that interrogated the the effectiveness of the concept of post-diaspora as a critical tool and a method of analysing migratory circuits among African-Caribbean women in the contemporary period. Patterns and effects of migration, issues and representations of agency were discussed in a multidisciplinary context. The range of disciplines included: the sociology of health; sociology and social sciences; education studies, literature; gender and development studies; cultural geography and anthropology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Denise Noble Diaspora, Transnationality and the Affective Trajectories of Black British Identity: This research cluster offers me the opportunity to both engage with how other Caribbean scholars are responding to the concept of post-diaspora and to evaluate its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own work. I intend to use this forum to focus on two key questions. First, what forms of emancipatory subjectivity are imagined and enabled in the processes of journeying between multiple registers of 'home', and 'foreign', especially where these produce discrepant affective registers of 'grounding', familiarity, identification, and orientation, but also, potential unsettlement, foreignness, disidentification and disorientation. Second, how can the concept of post-diaspora contribute to an analysis of these processes and help to explain the cultural politics of postcolonial identities? Dr. Andrea Davis, Mapping a Post-Diaspora Poetics of Black Women's Writing in Canada In this particular reading of blackness in Canada, I offer three exploratory tropes of black possibilities as a way of accounting for my own displaced black Jamaican body in Canada and the multiple intersections that connect my memories and desires of a more hopeful future to the circulating stories of African peoples similarly dispersed across the world. These three tropes-horizon, sea, and sound-frame my understanding of myself in and out of place, not as an anchored being, but as a body slippery, amorphous, expansive and transformative. These tropes are layered one upon the other and are in many ways interdependent. I use them specifically to read the works of Caribbean and African women writers in Canada. In so doing, I foreground a critique of settler colonial nations like Canada and make black peoples and peoples of colour and immigrant women accountable to the nation; that is, accountable to making the nation more critically aware of itself and the inequalities it perpetuates. ' Dr. Leith Dunn: Globalisation Struggle and Survival of Jamaican Women Migrants' The UN Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), the UN Sustainable Development Goals and CEDAW, the Women's Rights Convention, provide a framework to reflect on ways in which African Caribbean women have used migration for agency, equality, economic empowerment and self -identity in the rapidly changing context of globalisation. Purpose: The paper examines the scope, characteristics and consequences of Jamaican women's migration to Britain, North America and Canada in recent decades and policy responses. Methodology: Caribbean gender and development theories guide this case study on the situation of Jamaican women migrants in the Post Diaspora context of Britain, Canada and North America. It uses research on migration related to human trafficking, decent work and domestic workers, as well as temporary migrant workers (teachers, nurses and hospitality workers). A content analysis of Jamaica's International Migration Policy also assesses coherence in government policy responses to international migration trends and the National Policy for Gender Equality (2011). Results: Despite many achievements, the rapid pace of globalisation presents many areas for research to protect the rights of Jamaican women migrants, promote agency and economic empowerment and enhance policy coherence. Key words: Jamaican-women-migrants; human trafficking, gender equality, policy coherence Dr. Beverley Mullings, Queens University, Canada Gender, Generation and Diaspora in 21st century modes of Caribbean engagement and governance Feminist scholars have long argued the existence of gender hegemonies in diasporic formations, and the tendency for the contributions of women to social transformation to be relegated as secondary to the 'important business' of economic growth and political freedom. Linked to nationalist constructions of belonging, authenticity and citizenship nationalist approaches to diaspora rarely paid attention to existing gender, class, and racializing asymmetries that differentially positioned diaspora members within nationalist narratives. In this paper I argue that the recent emergence of diaspora strategies as a cornerstone of state governance threatens to reproduce the gender hegemonies of the past by focusing almost exclusively on the contributions of entrepreneurial émigré's, particularly those of high net worth. I also argue that contemporary state diaspora strategies potentially miss opportunities for progressive social transformation by devaluing the potential contributions of second and third generation diaspora members. Bringing cultural approaches, that view diaspora as a site of heterogeneity, contestation, creativity and innovation, into conversation with state-driven instrumental ones, this paper explores the ways that more mobile and enabling articulations of diasporic identity, particularly among second and third generation women could enhance the transformative potential of diaspora/state encounters in the multiple spaces that constitute the Caribbean diaspora Dr. Patricia Noxolo: University of Birmingham Caribbean in/securities, gender and post-diaspora I will outline the network's theoretical and conceptual approaches, looking at how they might intersect with those of the post-diaspora network, and relate this to the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, whose creative research and writing offers a gender-based approach both to in/security and to post-diaspora. Dr. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto - Diasporic Promiscuities: Research Reflections Diaspora, diasporic, diasporize. Whether as noun, adjective, or even verb, the term seems to have taken on a life of its own, from academics to World Bank officials, from state managers to communities. In worlds where diaspora proliferates, how might we specify more precisely without either limiting or drawing new boundaries around extra-territorial movement? Drawing on scholarship on transnational gendered itineraries and recent events in the region, this contribution reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that emerge when we turn our attention to women's connective and cross-border practices, where diasporic reproduction takes place, beyond gendered and sexual respectability, in unanticipated and transgressive ways. Dr. Gemma Romain - Independent Scholar Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, seeking to document as far as possible the migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. In this initial exploratory talk, I will focus on some of the histories, experiences and concepts I hope to investigate within the project. I intend my research to focus on the Network themes of the 'concept of return' and the 'gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African-Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability' by mapping routes of travel, migration and re-migration; mobility, settlement and instability in housing due to the intersections of race and gender; and the diasporic, post-diasporic, multi-ethnic gendered experiences of living and studying in 1920s and 1930s London. I will focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories, investigating documents such as passenger returns, census material, and electoral registers, student registration documents, library reader registrations, and archives of student societies and organisations. For example, through shipping passenger returns I will seek to map the routes of migration and re-migration of African-Caribbean women studying in 1920s and 1930s Britain, specifically London. I aim to explore within the project the experiences of African-Caribbean women students in finding housing and the role of geography and settlement in shaping individuals' experiences and identities, including diasporic and post-diasporic identities. I will explore the racial and gendered dimensions of the experiences of finding accommodation in interwar London, focusing on racism in accommodation and the experiences of Black women in finding accommodation in hostels and hotels. I will seek to explore the type of accommodation African-Caribbean women resided in - who else lived there and why - and seek to investigate how, because of these lived experiences, new diasporic and gendered identities might have been formed and forged. Dr. Jenny Douglas - Open University African-Caribbean Women's Health in the Atlantic Diaspora. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the mobility has affected African-Caribbean Women's health in the Atlantic diaspora. By the Atlantic diaspora, I mean North America, Britain and the Caribbean. Inequalities in health in African-Caribbean women are enduring. African-Caribbean women experience a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Lane et al, 2005; Collins and Johnson, 2008). In addition, Black Caribbean women with breast cancer have a significantly worse survival rate (Bowen, 2008; Jack et al, 2009). In relation to mental health, the research emphasis has been on Black Caribbean men with high rates of serious mental illness, while Black women have been seemingly ignored (Edge, 2013). The reproductive and sexual health of Black Caribbean women is also of concern. In the UK, policy and health service developments focusing on the health of Black and Minority ethnic health issues have failed to account for the specificity of Black Caribbean women's health and wellbeing. The inequalities African-Caribbean women face in education, employment, health and social care because of their racialised, gendered and classed experience are detrimental to their health and have a major impact on their life chances over the life course (Douglas and Watson,2013). Despite the geographical differences between African-Caribbean women in the UK and African- American women in the USA, research on inequalities in health highlights the relatively poor health of both groups and the similarities in demographic, social, health and economic profiles (Nazroo et al. 2007). Moreover, these two groups are not completely distinct as in addition to their histories emerging from transatlantic slavery, there has been continuous migration from the Caribbean to the USA and from the Caribbean to the UK as well as migration of African-Caribbeans from the UK to the USA, thus creating transnational Caribbean diasporic communities. Dr. Suzanne Scafe, London South Bank University Remembering "political blackness" as a space for agency, transformation and the emergence of post-diaspora identities. Today I'm focusing on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women's groups and the Black women's movement during the 1970s and '80s: I'm examining the reconfiguration of 'Black' in these life writing testimonies, as a connecting, oppositional identity. I interrogate both the movement's memorialisation in the context of British 'heritage' and its use, in academic contexts, to critique the perceived failures of political Blackness as a means defining feminist activism. Despite this critique, I propose that the Black women's movement's emphasis on an anti-imperialist context for identity formation, its focus on the practice of transculturality and its commitment to political social and cultural transformation as a mark of black feminist activism, provides a framework within to better understand emerging cultural production defined as 'Black British' in contemporary post-diaspora contexts. Dr. Beverley Goring, London South Bank University - African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency There is a long held perception of the connection between parental disposition and educational attainment and research regarding parental involvement would appear to support this. The popular belief is, given that African Caribbean children are one of the lower achieving groups academically as well as being over represented in exclusions from school statistics, the parents, mainly mothers, are less interested or engaged with their children's education and schooling, The simplicity of this argument espousing parental culpability finds favour within wider political, sociological and journalistic discourses where theories of cultural, material and cognitive deficit abound and are then utilised to explain away educational failure. Arguments that once challenged the role of the school as an institution which resides within the superstructure, and its contribution to educational disadvantage, are in retreat. Instead it appears that the family, mainly mothers, are a feature of derision and blame for the perceived pathological tendencies in families. This is was a strong revivalist theme especially in the reporting of the recent spate of stabbings in the capital. My original research on the topic of African Caribbean parents and their perspectives on education and schooling found parents obsessed with the notion of a 'good education'. They fought tirelessly and systematically to secure the best possible educational chances for their children. Sometimes they resorted to drastic measures, such as 'return migration' in their quest for better educational opportunities. This recourse to utilising transnational family connections within the wider African Caribbean diaspora, and other strategies, I argued, is a testament to parents exercising their agency and it gave an insight into the multifaceted nature of the lives of these women that run counter to the populist notion of what it meant to be African Caribbean parents, and especially mothers in modern Britain. This brings into focus the underlying dialectic between structure and agency. How do Caribbean women in the diaspora create a space between these two positions to mount a substantive challenge to disrupt the education system's status quo and contribute to an entity that fosters equality and social justice? Only then can all parents be assured that their children will receive a 'good education' and by extension contribute to sustainable communities. |
| Impact | Forthcoming |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | "Defining Post-Diaspora" 2 x day workshop at LSBU; |
| Organisation | University of Birmingham |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | All participants contributed a seminar paper that interrogated the the effectiveness of the concept of post-diaspora as a critical tool and a method of analysing migratory circuits among African-Caribbean women in the contemporary period. Patterns and effects of migration, issues and representations of agency were discussed in a multidisciplinary context. The range of disciplines included: the sociology of health; sociology and social sciences; education studies, literature; gender and development studies; cultural geography and anthropology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Denise Noble Diaspora, Transnationality and the Affective Trajectories of Black British Identity: This research cluster offers me the opportunity to both engage with how other Caribbean scholars are responding to the concept of post-diaspora and to evaluate its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own work. I intend to use this forum to focus on two key questions. First, what forms of emancipatory subjectivity are imagined and enabled in the processes of journeying between multiple registers of 'home', and 'foreign', especially where these produce discrepant affective registers of 'grounding', familiarity, identification, and orientation, but also, potential unsettlement, foreignness, disidentification and disorientation. Second, how can the concept of post-diaspora contribute to an analysis of these processes and help to explain the cultural politics of postcolonial identities? Dr. Andrea Davis, Mapping a Post-Diaspora Poetics of Black Women's Writing in Canada In this particular reading of blackness in Canada, I offer three exploratory tropes of black possibilities as a way of accounting for my own displaced black Jamaican body in Canada and the multiple intersections that connect my memories and desires of a more hopeful future to the circulating stories of African peoples similarly dispersed across the world. These three tropes-horizon, sea, and sound-frame my understanding of myself in and out of place, not as an anchored being, but as a body slippery, amorphous, expansive and transformative. These tropes are layered one upon the other and are in many ways interdependent. I use them specifically to read the works of Caribbean and African women writers in Canada. In so doing, I foreground a critique of settler colonial nations like Canada and make black peoples and peoples of colour and immigrant women accountable to the nation; that is, accountable to making the nation more critically aware of itself and the inequalities it perpetuates. ' Dr. Leith Dunn: Globalisation Struggle and Survival of Jamaican Women Migrants' The UN Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), the UN Sustainable Development Goals and CEDAW, the Women's Rights Convention, provide a framework to reflect on ways in which African Caribbean women have used migration for agency, equality, economic empowerment and self -identity in the rapidly changing context of globalisation. Purpose: The paper examines the scope, characteristics and consequences of Jamaican women's migration to Britain, North America and Canada in recent decades and policy responses. Methodology: Caribbean gender and development theories guide this case study on the situation of Jamaican women migrants in the Post Diaspora context of Britain, Canada and North America. It uses research on migration related to human trafficking, decent work and domestic workers, as well as temporary migrant workers (teachers, nurses and hospitality workers). A content analysis of Jamaica's International Migration Policy also assesses coherence in government policy responses to international migration trends and the National Policy for Gender Equality (2011). Results: Despite many achievements, the rapid pace of globalisation presents many areas for research to protect the rights of Jamaican women migrants, promote agency and economic empowerment and enhance policy coherence. Key words: Jamaican-women-migrants; human trafficking, gender equality, policy coherence Dr. Beverley Mullings, Queens University, Canada Gender, Generation and Diaspora in 21st century modes of Caribbean engagement and governance Feminist scholars have long argued the existence of gender hegemonies in diasporic formations, and the tendency for the contributions of women to social transformation to be relegated as secondary to the 'important business' of economic growth and political freedom. Linked to nationalist constructions of belonging, authenticity and citizenship nationalist approaches to diaspora rarely paid attention to existing gender, class, and racializing asymmetries that differentially positioned diaspora members within nationalist narratives. In this paper I argue that the recent emergence of diaspora strategies as a cornerstone of state governance threatens to reproduce the gender hegemonies of the past by focusing almost exclusively on the contributions of entrepreneurial émigré's, particularly those of high net worth. I also argue that contemporary state diaspora strategies potentially miss opportunities for progressive social transformation by devaluing the potential contributions of second and third generation diaspora members. Bringing cultural approaches, that view diaspora as a site of heterogeneity, contestation, creativity and innovation, into conversation with state-driven instrumental ones, this paper explores the ways that more mobile and enabling articulations of diasporic identity, particularly among second and third generation women could enhance the transformative potential of diaspora/state encounters in the multiple spaces that constitute the Caribbean diaspora Dr. Patricia Noxolo: University of Birmingham Caribbean in/securities, gender and post-diaspora I will outline the network's theoretical and conceptual approaches, looking at how they might intersect with those of the post-diaspora network, and relate this to the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, whose creative research and writing offers a gender-based approach both to in/security and to post-diaspora. Dr. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto - Diasporic Promiscuities: Research Reflections Diaspora, diasporic, diasporize. Whether as noun, adjective, or even verb, the term seems to have taken on a life of its own, from academics to World Bank officials, from state managers to communities. In worlds where diaspora proliferates, how might we specify more precisely without either limiting or drawing new boundaries around extra-territorial movement? Drawing on scholarship on transnational gendered itineraries and recent events in the region, this contribution reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that emerge when we turn our attention to women's connective and cross-border practices, where diasporic reproduction takes place, beyond gendered and sexual respectability, in unanticipated and transgressive ways. Dr. Gemma Romain - Independent Scholar Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, seeking to document as far as possible the migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. In this initial exploratory talk, I will focus on some of the histories, experiences and concepts I hope to investigate within the project. I intend my research to focus on the Network themes of the 'concept of return' and the 'gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African-Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability' by mapping routes of travel, migration and re-migration; mobility, settlement and instability in housing due to the intersections of race and gender; and the diasporic, post-diasporic, multi-ethnic gendered experiences of living and studying in 1920s and 1930s London. I will focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories, investigating documents such as passenger returns, census material, and electoral registers, student registration documents, library reader registrations, and archives of student societies and organisations. For example, through shipping passenger returns I will seek to map the routes of migration and re-migration of African-Caribbean women studying in 1920s and 1930s Britain, specifically London. I aim to explore within the project the experiences of African-Caribbean women students in finding housing and the role of geography and settlement in shaping individuals' experiences and identities, including diasporic and post-diasporic identities. I will explore the racial and gendered dimensions of the experiences of finding accommodation in interwar London, focusing on racism in accommodation and the experiences of Black women in finding accommodation in hostels and hotels. I will seek to explore the type of accommodation African-Caribbean women resided in - who else lived there and why - and seek to investigate how, because of these lived experiences, new diasporic and gendered identities might have been formed and forged. Dr. Jenny Douglas - Open University African-Caribbean Women's Health in the Atlantic Diaspora. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the mobility has affected African-Caribbean Women's health in the Atlantic diaspora. By the Atlantic diaspora, I mean North America, Britain and the Caribbean. Inequalities in health in African-Caribbean women are enduring. African-Caribbean women experience a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Lane et al, 2005; Collins and Johnson, 2008). In addition, Black Caribbean women with breast cancer have a significantly worse survival rate (Bowen, 2008; Jack et al, 2009). In relation to mental health, the research emphasis has been on Black Caribbean men with high rates of serious mental illness, while Black women have been seemingly ignored (Edge, 2013). The reproductive and sexual health of Black Caribbean women is also of concern. In the UK, policy and health service developments focusing on the health of Black and Minority ethnic health issues have failed to account for the specificity of Black Caribbean women's health and wellbeing. The inequalities African-Caribbean women face in education, employment, health and social care because of their racialised, gendered and classed experience are detrimental to their health and have a major impact on their life chances over the life course (Douglas and Watson,2013). Despite the geographical differences between African-Caribbean women in the UK and African- American women in the USA, research on inequalities in health highlights the relatively poor health of both groups and the similarities in demographic, social, health and economic profiles (Nazroo et al. 2007). Moreover, these two groups are not completely distinct as in addition to their histories emerging from transatlantic slavery, there has been continuous migration from the Caribbean to the USA and from the Caribbean to the UK as well as migration of African-Caribbeans from the UK to the USA, thus creating transnational Caribbean diasporic communities. Dr. Suzanne Scafe, London South Bank University Remembering "political blackness" as a space for agency, transformation and the emergence of post-diaspora identities. Today I'm focusing on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women's groups and the Black women's movement during the 1970s and '80s: I'm examining the reconfiguration of 'Black' in these life writing testimonies, as a connecting, oppositional identity. I interrogate both the movement's memorialisation in the context of British 'heritage' and its use, in academic contexts, to critique the perceived failures of political Blackness as a means defining feminist activism. Despite this critique, I propose that the Black women's movement's emphasis on an anti-imperialist context for identity formation, its focus on the practice of transculturality and its commitment to political social and cultural transformation as a mark of black feminist activism, provides a framework within to better understand emerging cultural production defined as 'Black British' in contemporary post-diaspora contexts. Dr. Beverley Goring, London South Bank University - African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency There is a long held perception of the connection between parental disposition and educational attainment and research regarding parental involvement would appear to support this. The popular belief is, given that African Caribbean children are one of the lower achieving groups academically as well as being over represented in exclusions from school statistics, the parents, mainly mothers, are less interested or engaged with their children's education and schooling, The simplicity of this argument espousing parental culpability finds favour within wider political, sociological and journalistic discourses where theories of cultural, material and cognitive deficit abound and are then utilised to explain away educational failure. Arguments that once challenged the role of the school as an institution which resides within the superstructure, and its contribution to educational disadvantage, are in retreat. Instead it appears that the family, mainly mothers, are a feature of derision and blame for the perceived pathological tendencies in families. This is was a strong revivalist theme especially in the reporting of the recent spate of stabbings in the capital. My original research on the topic of African Caribbean parents and their perspectives on education and schooling found parents obsessed with the notion of a 'good education'. They fought tirelessly and systematically to secure the best possible educational chances for their children. Sometimes they resorted to drastic measures, such as 'return migration' in their quest for better educational opportunities. This recourse to utilising transnational family connections within the wider African Caribbean diaspora, and other strategies, I argued, is a testament to parents exercising their agency and it gave an insight into the multifaceted nature of the lives of these women that run counter to the populist notion of what it meant to be African Caribbean parents, and especially mothers in modern Britain. This brings into focus the underlying dialectic between structure and agency. How do Caribbean women in the diaspora create a space between these two positions to mount a substantive challenge to disrupt the education system's status quo and contribute to an entity that fosters equality and social justice? Only then can all parents be assured that their children will receive a 'good education' and by extension contribute to sustainable communities. |
| Impact | Forthcoming |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | "Defining Post-Diaspora" 2 x day workshop at LSBU; |
| Organisation | University of Toronto |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | All participants contributed a seminar paper that interrogated the the effectiveness of the concept of post-diaspora as a critical tool and a method of analysing migratory circuits among African-Caribbean women in the contemporary period. Patterns and effects of migration, issues and representations of agency were discussed in a multidisciplinary context. The range of disciplines included: the sociology of health; sociology and social sciences; education studies, literature; gender and development studies; cultural geography and anthropology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Denise Noble Diaspora, Transnationality and the Affective Trajectories of Black British Identity: This research cluster offers me the opportunity to both engage with how other Caribbean scholars are responding to the concept of post-diaspora and to evaluate its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own work. I intend to use this forum to focus on two key questions. First, what forms of emancipatory subjectivity are imagined and enabled in the processes of journeying between multiple registers of 'home', and 'foreign', especially where these produce discrepant affective registers of 'grounding', familiarity, identification, and orientation, but also, potential unsettlement, foreignness, disidentification and disorientation. Second, how can the concept of post-diaspora contribute to an analysis of these processes and help to explain the cultural politics of postcolonial identities? Dr. Andrea Davis, Mapping a Post-Diaspora Poetics of Black Women's Writing in Canada In this particular reading of blackness in Canada, I offer three exploratory tropes of black possibilities as a way of accounting for my own displaced black Jamaican body in Canada and the multiple intersections that connect my memories and desires of a more hopeful future to the circulating stories of African peoples similarly dispersed across the world. These three tropes-horizon, sea, and sound-frame my understanding of myself in and out of place, not as an anchored being, but as a body slippery, amorphous, expansive and transformative. These tropes are layered one upon the other and are in many ways interdependent. I use them specifically to read the works of Caribbean and African women writers in Canada. In so doing, I foreground a critique of settler colonial nations like Canada and make black peoples and peoples of colour and immigrant women accountable to the nation; that is, accountable to making the nation more critically aware of itself and the inequalities it perpetuates. ' Dr. Leith Dunn: Globalisation Struggle and Survival of Jamaican Women Migrants' The UN Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), the UN Sustainable Development Goals and CEDAW, the Women's Rights Convention, provide a framework to reflect on ways in which African Caribbean women have used migration for agency, equality, economic empowerment and self -identity in the rapidly changing context of globalisation. Purpose: The paper examines the scope, characteristics and consequences of Jamaican women's migration to Britain, North America and Canada in recent decades and policy responses. Methodology: Caribbean gender and development theories guide this case study on the situation of Jamaican women migrants in the Post Diaspora context of Britain, Canada and North America. It uses research on migration related to human trafficking, decent work and domestic workers, as well as temporary migrant workers (teachers, nurses and hospitality workers). A content analysis of Jamaica's International Migration Policy also assesses coherence in government policy responses to international migration trends and the National Policy for Gender Equality (2011). Results: Despite many achievements, the rapid pace of globalisation presents many areas for research to protect the rights of Jamaican women migrants, promote agency and economic empowerment and enhance policy coherence. Key words: Jamaican-women-migrants; human trafficking, gender equality, policy coherence Dr. Beverley Mullings, Queens University, Canada Gender, Generation and Diaspora in 21st century modes of Caribbean engagement and governance Feminist scholars have long argued the existence of gender hegemonies in diasporic formations, and the tendency for the contributions of women to social transformation to be relegated as secondary to the 'important business' of economic growth and political freedom. Linked to nationalist constructions of belonging, authenticity and citizenship nationalist approaches to diaspora rarely paid attention to existing gender, class, and racializing asymmetries that differentially positioned diaspora members within nationalist narratives. In this paper I argue that the recent emergence of diaspora strategies as a cornerstone of state governance threatens to reproduce the gender hegemonies of the past by focusing almost exclusively on the contributions of entrepreneurial émigré's, particularly those of high net worth. I also argue that contemporary state diaspora strategies potentially miss opportunities for progressive social transformation by devaluing the potential contributions of second and third generation diaspora members. Bringing cultural approaches, that view diaspora as a site of heterogeneity, contestation, creativity and innovation, into conversation with state-driven instrumental ones, this paper explores the ways that more mobile and enabling articulations of diasporic identity, particularly among second and third generation women could enhance the transformative potential of diaspora/state encounters in the multiple spaces that constitute the Caribbean diaspora Dr. Patricia Noxolo: University of Birmingham Caribbean in/securities, gender and post-diaspora I will outline the network's theoretical and conceptual approaches, looking at how they might intersect with those of the post-diaspora network, and relate this to the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, whose creative research and writing offers a gender-based approach both to in/security and to post-diaspora. Dr. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto - Diasporic Promiscuities: Research Reflections Diaspora, diasporic, diasporize. Whether as noun, adjective, or even verb, the term seems to have taken on a life of its own, from academics to World Bank officials, from state managers to communities. In worlds where diaspora proliferates, how might we specify more precisely without either limiting or drawing new boundaries around extra-territorial movement? Drawing on scholarship on transnational gendered itineraries and recent events in the region, this contribution reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that emerge when we turn our attention to women's connective and cross-border practices, where diasporic reproduction takes place, beyond gendered and sexual respectability, in unanticipated and transgressive ways. Dr. Gemma Romain - Independent Scholar Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, seeking to document as far as possible the migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. In this initial exploratory talk, I will focus on some of the histories, experiences and concepts I hope to investigate within the project. I intend my research to focus on the Network themes of the 'concept of return' and the 'gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African-Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability' by mapping routes of travel, migration and re-migration; mobility, settlement and instability in housing due to the intersections of race and gender; and the diasporic, post-diasporic, multi-ethnic gendered experiences of living and studying in 1920s and 1930s London. I will focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories, investigating documents such as passenger returns, census material, and electoral registers, student registration documents, library reader registrations, and archives of student societies and organisations. For example, through shipping passenger returns I will seek to map the routes of migration and re-migration of African-Caribbean women studying in 1920s and 1930s Britain, specifically London. I aim to explore within the project the experiences of African-Caribbean women students in finding housing and the role of geography and settlement in shaping individuals' experiences and identities, including diasporic and post-diasporic identities. I will explore the racial and gendered dimensions of the experiences of finding accommodation in interwar London, focusing on racism in accommodation and the experiences of Black women in finding accommodation in hostels and hotels. I will seek to explore the type of accommodation African-Caribbean women resided in - who else lived there and why - and seek to investigate how, because of these lived experiences, new diasporic and gendered identities might have been formed and forged. Dr. Jenny Douglas - Open University African-Caribbean Women's Health in the Atlantic Diaspora. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the mobility has affected African-Caribbean Women's health in the Atlantic diaspora. By the Atlantic diaspora, I mean North America, Britain and the Caribbean. Inequalities in health in African-Caribbean women are enduring. African-Caribbean women experience a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Lane et al, 2005; Collins and Johnson, 2008). In addition, Black Caribbean women with breast cancer have a significantly worse survival rate (Bowen, 2008; Jack et al, 2009). In relation to mental health, the research emphasis has been on Black Caribbean men with high rates of serious mental illness, while Black women have been seemingly ignored (Edge, 2013). The reproductive and sexual health of Black Caribbean women is also of concern. In the UK, policy and health service developments focusing on the health of Black and Minority ethnic health issues have failed to account for the specificity of Black Caribbean women's health and wellbeing. The inequalities African-Caribbean women face in education, employment, health and social care because of their racialised, gendered and classed experience are detrimental to their health and have a major impact on their life chances over the life course (Douglas and Watson,2013). Despite the geographical differences between African-Caribbean women in the UK and African- American women in the USA, research on inequalities in health highlights the relatively poor health of both groups and the similarities in demographic, social, health and economic profiles (Nazroo et al. 2007). Moreover, these two groups are not completely distinct as in addition to their histories emerging from transatlantic slavery, there has been continuous migration from the Caribbean to the USA and from the Caribbean to the UK as well as migration of African-Caribbeans from the UK to the USA, thus creating transnational Caribbean diasporic communities. Dr. Suzanne Scafe, London South Bank University Remembering "political blackness" as a space for agency, transformation and the emergence of post-diaspora identities. Today I'm focusing on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women's groups and the Black women's movement during the 1970s and '80s: I'm examining the reconfiguration of 'Black' in these life writing testimonies, as a connecting, oppositional identity. I interrogate both the movement's memorialisation in the context of British 'heritage' and its use, in academic contexts, to critique the perceived failures of political Blackness as a means defining feminist activism. Despite this critique, I propose that the Black women's movement's emphasis on an anti-imperialist context for identity formation, its focus on the practice of transculturality and its commitment to political social and cultural transformation as a mark of black feminist activism, provides a framework within to better understand emerging cultural production defined as 'Black British' in contemporary post-diaspora contexts. Dr. Beverley Goring, London South Bank University - African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency There is a long held perception of the connection between parental disposition and educational attainment and research regarding parental involvement would appear to support this. The popular belief is, given that African Caribbean children are one of the lower achieving groups academically as well as being over represented in exclusions from school statistics, the parents, mainly mothers, are less interested or engaged with their children's education and schooling, The simplicity of this argument espousing parental culpability finds favour within wider political, sociological and journalistic discourses where theories of cultural, material and cognitive deficit abound and are then utilised to explain away educational failure. Arguments that once challenged the role of the school as an institution which resides within the superstructure, and its contribution to educational disadvantage, are in retreat. Instead it appears that the family, mainly mothers, are a feature of derision and blame for the perceived pathological tendencies in families. This is was a strong revivalist theme especially in the reporting of the recent spate of stabbings in the capital. My original research on the topic of African Caribbean parents and their perspectives on education and schooling found parents obsessed with the notion of a 'good education'. They fought tirelessly and systematically to secure the best possible educational chances for their children. Sometimes they resorted to drastic measures, such as 'return migration' in their quest for better educational opportunities. This recourse to utilising transnational family connections within the wider African Caribbean diaspora, and other strategies, I argued, is a testament to parents exercising their agency and it gave an insight into the multifaceted nature of the lives of these women that run counter to the populist notion of what it meant to be African Caribbean parents, and especially mothers in modern Britain. This brings into focus the underlying dialectic between structure and agency. How do Caribbean women in the diaspora create a space between these two positions to mount a substantive challenge to disrupt the education system's status quo and contribute to an entity that fosters equality and social justice? Only then can all parents be assured that their children will receive a 'good education' and by extension contribute to sustainable communities. |
| Impact | Forthcoming |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | "Defining Post-Diaspora" 2 x day workshop at LSBU; |
| Organisation | University of West Indies |
| Country | Jamaica |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | All participants contributed a seminar paper that interrogated the the effectiveness of the concept of post-diaspora as a critical tool and a method of analysing migratory circuits among African-Caribbean women in the contemporary period. Patterns and effects of migration, issues and representations of agency were discussed in a multidisciplinary context. The range of disciplines included: the sociology of health; sociology and social sciences; education studies, literature; gender and development studies; cultural geography and anthropology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Denise Noble Diaspora, Transnationality and the Affective Trajectories of Black British Identity: This research cluster offers me the opportunity to both engage with how other Caribbean scholars are responding to the concept of post-diaspora and to evaluate its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own work. I intend to use this forum to focus on two key questions. First, what forms of emancipatory subjectivity are imagined and enabled in the processes of journeying between multiple registers of 'home', and 'foreign', especially where these produce discrepant affective registers of 'grounding', familiarity, identification, and orientation, but also, potential unsettlement, foreignness, disidentification and disorientation. Second, how can the concept of post-diaspora contribute to an analysis of these processes and help to explain the cultural politics of postcolonial identities? Dr. Andrea Davis, Mapping a Post-Diaspora Poetics of Black Women's Writing in Canada In this particular reading of blackness in Canada, I offer three exploratory tropes of black possibilities as a way of accounting for my own displaced black Jamaican body in Canada and the multiple intersections that connect my memories and desires of a more hopeful future to the circulating stories of African peoples similarly dispersed across the world. These three tropes-horizon, sea, and sound-frame my understanding of myself in and out of place, not as an anchored being, but as a body slippery, amorphous, expansive and transformative. These tropes are layered one upon the other and are in many ways interdependent. I use them specifically to read the works of Caribbean and African women writers in Canada. In so doing, I foreground a critique of settler colonial nations like Canada and make black peoples and peoples of colour and immigrant women accountable to the nation; that is, accountable to making the nation more critically aware of itself and the inequalities it perpetuates. ' Dr. Leith Dunn: Globalisation Struggle and Survival of Jamaican Women Migrants' The UN Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), the UN Sustainable Development Goals and CEDAW, the Women's Rights Convention, provide a framework to reflect on ways in which African Caribbean women have used migration for agency, equality, economic empowerment and self -identity in the rapidly changing context of globalisation. Purpose: The paper examines the scope, characteristics and consequences of Jamaican women's migration to Britain, North America and Canada in recent decades and policy responses. Methodology: Caribbean gender and development theories guide this case study on the situation of Jamaican women migrants in the Post Diaspora context of Britain, Canada and North America. It uses research on migration related to human trafficking, decent work and domestic workers, as well as temporary migrant workers (teachers, nurses and hospitality workers). A content analysis of Jamaica's International Migration Policy also assesses coherence in government policy responses to international migration trends and the National Policy for Gender Equality (2011). Results: Despite many achievements, the rapid pace of globalisation presents many areas for research to protect the rights of Jamaican women migrants, promote agency and economic empowerment and enhance policy coherence. Key words: Jamaican-women-migrants; human trafficking, gender equality, policy coherence Dr. Beverley Mullings, Queens University, Canada Gender, Generation and Diaspora in 21st century modes of Caribbean engagement and governance Feminist scholars have long argued the existence of gender hegemonies in diasporic formations, and the tendency for the contributions of women to social transformation to be relegated as secondary to the 'important business' of economic growth and political freedom. Linked to nationalist constructions of belonging, authenticity and citizenship nationalist approaches to diaspora rarely paid attention to existing gender, class, and racializing asymmetries that differentially positioned diaspora members within nationalist narratives. In this paper I argue that the recent emergence of diaspora strategies as a cornerstone of state governance threatens to reproduce the gender hegemonies of the past by focusing almost exclusively on the contributions of entrepreneurial émigré's, particularly those of high net worth. I also argue that contemporary state diaspora strategies potentially miss opportunities for progressive social transformation by devaluing the potential contributions of second and third generation diaspora members. Bringing cultural approaches, that view diaspora as a site of heterogeneity, contestation, creativity and innovation, into conversation with state-driven instrumental ones, this paper explores the ways that more mobile and enabling articulations of diasporic identity, particularly among second and third generation women could enhance the transformative potential of diaspora/state encounters in the multiple spaces that constitute the Caribbean diaspora Dr. Patricia Noxolo: University of Birmingham Caribbean in/securities, gender and post-diaspora I will outline the network's theoretical and conceptual approaches, looking at how they might intersect with those of the post-diaspora network, and relate this to the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, whose creative research and writing offers a gender-based approach both to in/security and to post-diaspora. Dr. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto - Diasporic Promiscuities: Research Reflections Diaspora, diasporic, diasporize. Whether as noun, adjective, or even verb, the term seems to have taken on a life of its own, from academics to World Bank officials, from state managers to communities. In worlds where diaspora proliferates, how might we specify more precisely without either limiting or drawing new boundaries around extra-territorial movement? Drawing on scholarship on transnational gendered itineraries and recent events in the region, this contribution reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that emerge when we turn our attention to women's connective and cross-border practices, where diasporic reproduction takes place, beyond gendered and sexual respectability, in unanticipated and transgressive ways. Dr. Gemma Romain - Independent Scholar Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, seeking to document as far as possible the migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. In this initial exploratory talk, I will focus on some of the histories, experiences and concepts I hope to investigate within the project. I intend my research to focus on the Network themes of the 'concept of return' and the 'gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African-Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability' by mapping routes of travel, migration and re-migration; mobility, settlement and instability in housing due to the intersections of race and gender; and the diasporic, post-diasporic, multi-ethnic gendered experiences of living and studying in 1920s and 1930s London. I will focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories, investigating documents such as passenger returns, census material, and electoral registers, student registration documents, library reader registrations, and archives of student societies and organisations. For example, through shipping passenger returns I will seek to map the routes of migration and re-migration of African-Caribbean women studying in 1920s and 1930s Britain, specifically London. I aim to explore within the project the experiences of African-Caribbean women students in finding housing and the role of geography and settlement in shaping individuals' experiences and identities, including diasporic and post-diasporic identities. I will explore the racial and gendered dimensions of the experiences of finding accommodation in interwar London, focusing on racism in accommodation and the experiences of Black women in finding accommodation in hostels and hotels. I will seek to explore the type of accommodation African-Caribbean women resided in - who else lived there and why - and seek to investigate how, because of these lived experiences, new diasporic and gendered identities might have been formed and forged. Dr. Jenny Douglas - Open University African-Caribbean Women's Health in the Atlantic Diaspora. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the mobility has affected African-Caribbean Women's health in the Atlantic diaspora. By the Atlantic diaspora, I mean North America, Britain and the Caribbean. Inequalities in health in African-Caribbean women are enduring. African-Caribbean women experience a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Lane et al, 2005; Collins and Johnson, 2008). In addition, Black Caribbean women with breast cancer have a significantly worse survival rate (Bowen, 2008; Jack et al, 2009). In relation to mental health, the research emphasis has been on Black Caribbean men with high rates of serious mental illness, while Black women have been seemingly ignored (Edge, 2013). The reproductive and sexual health of Black Caribbean women is also of concern. In the UK, policy and health service developments focusing on the health of Black and Minority ethnic health issues have failed to account for the specificity of Black Caribbean women's health and wellbeing. The inequalities African-Caribbean women face in education, employment, health and social care because of their racialised, gendered and classed experience are detrimental to their health and have a major impact on their life chances over the life course (Douglas and Watson,2013). Despite the geographical differences between African-Caribbean women in the UK and African- American women in the USA, research on inequalities in health highlights the relatively poor health of both groups and the similarities in demographic, social, health and economic profiles (Nazroo et al. 2007). Moreover, these two groups are not completely distinct as in addition to their histories emerging from transatlantic slavery, there has been continuous migration from the Caribbean to the USA and from the Caribbean to the UK as well as migration of African-Caribbeans from the UK to the USA, thus creating transnational Caribbean diasporic communities. Dr. Suzanne Scafe, London South Bank University Remembering "political blackness" as a space for agency, transformation and the emergence of post-diaspora identities. Today I'm focusing on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women's groups and the Black women's movement during the 1970s and '80s: I'm examining the reconfiguration of 'Black' in these life writing testimonies, as a connecting, oppositional identity. I interrogate both the movement's memorialisation in the context of British 'heritage' and its use, in academic contexts, to critique the perceived failures of political Blackness as a means defining feminist activism. Despite this critique, I propose that the Black women's movement's emphasis on an anti-imperialist context for identity formation, its focus on the practice of transculturality and its commitment to political social and cultural transformation as a mark of black feminist activism, provides a framework within to better understand emerging cultural production defined as 'Black British' in contemporary post-diaspora contexts. Dr. Beverley Goring, London South Bank University - African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency There is a long held perception of the connection between parental disposition and educational attainment and research regarding parental involvement would appear to support this. The popular belief is, given that African Caribbean children are one of the lower achieving groups academically as well as being over represented in exclusions from school statistics, the parents, mainly mothers, are less interested or engaged with their children's education and schooling, The simplicity of this argument espousing parental culpability finds favour within wider political, sociological and journalistic discourses where theories of cultural, material and cognitive deficit abound and are then utilised to explain away educational failure. Arguments that once challenged the role of the school as an institution which resides within the superstructure, and its contribution to educational disadvantage, are in retreat. Instead it appears that the family, mainly mothers, are a feature of derision and blame for the perceived pathological tendencies in families. This is was a strong revivalist theme especially in the reporting of the recent spate of stabbings in the capital. My original research on the topic of African Caribbean parents and their perspectives on education and schooling found parents obsessed with the notion of a 'good education'. They fought tirelessly and systematically to secure the best possible educational chances for their children. Sometimes they resorted to drastic measures, such as 'return migration' in their quest for better educational opportunities. This recourse to utilising transnational family connections within the wider African Caribbean diaspora, and other strategies, I argued, is a testament to parents exercising their agency and it gave an insight into the multifaceted nature of the lives of these women that run counter to the populist notion of what it meant to be African Caribbean parents, and especially mothers in modern Britain. This brings into focus the underlying dialectic between structure and agency. How do Caribbean women in the diaspora create a space between these two positions to mount a substantive challenge to disrupt the education system's status quo and contribute to an entity that fosters equality and social justice? Only then can all parents be assured that their children will receive a 'good education' and by extension contribute to sustainable communities. |
| Impact | Forthcoming |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | "Defining Post-Diaspora" 2 x day workshop at LSBU; |
| Organisation | York University Toronto |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | All participants contributed a seminar paper that interrogated the the effectiveness of the concept of post-diaspora as a critical tool and a method of analysing migratory circuits among African-Caribbean women in the contemporary period. Patterns and effects of migration, issues and representations of agency were discussed in a multidisciplinary context. The range of disciplines included: the sociology of health; sociology and social sciences; education studies, literature; gender and development studies; cultural geography and anthropology. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Denise Noble Diaspora, Transnationality and the Affective Trajectories of Black British Identity: This research cluster offers me the opportunity to both engage with how other Caribbean scholars are responding to the concept of post-diaspora and to evaluate its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own work. I intend to use this forum to focus on two key questions. First, what forms of emancipatory subjectivity are imagined and enabled in the processes of journeying between multiple registers of 'home', and 'foreign', especially where these produce discrepant affective registers of 'grounding', familiarity, identification, and orientation, but also, potential unsettlement, foreignness, disidentification and disorientation. Second, how can the concept of post-diaspora contribute to an analysis of these processes and help to explain the cultural politics of postcolonial identities? Dr. Andrea Davis, Mapping a Post-Diaspora Poetics of Black Women's Writing in Canada In this particular reading of blackness in Canada, I offer three exploratory tropes of black possibilities as a way of accounting for my own displaced black Jamaican body in Canada and the multiple intersections that connect my memories and desires of a more hopeful future to the circulating stories of African peoples similarly dispersed across the world. These three tropes-horizon, sea, and sound-frame my understanding of myself in and out of place, not as an anchored being, but as a body slippery, amorphous, expansive and transformative. These tropes are layered one upon the other and are in many ways interdependent. I use them specifically to read the works of Caribbean and African women writers in Canada. In so doing, I foreground a critique of settler colonial nations like Canada and make black peoples and peoples of colour and immigrant women accountable to the nation; that is, accountable to making the nation more critically aware of itself and the inequalities it perpetuates. ' Dr. Leith Dunn: Globalisation Struggle and Survival of Jamaican Women Migrants' The UN Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), the UN Sustainable Development Goals and CEDAW, the Women's Rights Convention, provide a framework to reflect on ways in which African Caribbean women have used migration for agency, equality, economic empowerment and self -identity in the rapidly changing context of globalisation. Purpose: The paper examines the scope, characteristics and consequences of Jamaican women's migration to Britain, North America and Canada in recent decades and policy responses. Methodology: Caribbean gender and development theories guide this case study on the situation of Jamaican women migrants in the Post Diaspora context of Britain, Canada and North America. It uses research on migration related to human trafficking, decent work and domestic workers, as well as temporary migrant workers (teachers, nurses and hospitality workers). A content analysis of Jamaica's International Migration Policy also assesses coherence in government policy responses to international migration trends and the National Policy for Gender Equality (2011). Results: Despite many achievements, the rapid pace of globalisation presents many areas for research to protect the rights of Jamaican women migrants, promote agency and economic empowerment and enhance policy coherence. Key words: Jamaican-women-migrants; human trafficking, gender equality, policy coherence Dr. Beverley Mullings, Queens University, Canada Gender, Generation and Diaspora in 21st century modes of Caribbean engagement and governance Feminist scholars have long argued the existence of gender hegemonies in diasporic formations, and the tendency for the contributions of women to social transformation to be relegated as secondary to the 'important business' of economic growth and political freedom. Linked to nationalist constructions of belonging, authenticity and citizenship nationalist approaches to diaspora rarely paid attention to existing gender, class, and racializing asymmetries that differentially positioned diaspora members within nationalist narratives. In this paper I argue that the recent emergence of diaspora strategies as a cornerstone of state governance threatens to reproduce the gender hegemonies of the past by focusing almost exclusively on the contributions of entrepreneurial émigré's, particularly those of high net worth. I also argue that contemporary state diaspora strategies potentially miss opportunities for progressive social transformation by devaluing the potential contributions of second and third generation diaspora members. Bringing cultural approaches, that view diaspora as a site of heterogeneity, contestation, creativity and innovation, into conversation with state-driven instrumental ones, this paper explores the ways that more mobile and enabling articulations of diasporic identity, particularly among second and third generation women could enhance the transformative potential of diaspora/state encounters in the multiple spaces that constitute the Caribbean diaspora Dr. Patricia Noxolo: University of Birmingham Caribbean in/securities, gender and post-diaspora I will outline the network's theoretical and conceptual approaches, looking at how they might intersect with those of the post-diaspora network, and relate this to the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, whose creative research and writing offers a gender-based approach both to in/security and to post-diaspora. Dr. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto - Diasporic Promiscuities: Research Reflections Diaspora, diasporic, diasporize. Whether as noun, adjective, or even verb, the term seems to have taken on a life of its own, from academics to World Bank officials, from state managers to communities. In worlds where diaspora proliferates, how might we specify more precisely without either limiting or drawing new boundaries around extra-territorial movement? Drawing on scholarship on transnational gendered itineraries and recent events in the region, this contribution reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that emerge when we turn our attention to women's connective and cross-border practices, where diasporic reproduction takes place, beyond gendered and sexual respectability, in unanticipated and transgressive ways. Dr. Gemma Romain - Independent Scholar Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, seeking to document as far as possible the migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. In this initial exploratory talk, I will focus on some of the histories, experiences and concepts I hope to investigate within the project. I intend my research to focus on the Network themes of the 'concept of return' and the 'gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African-Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability' by mapping routes of travel, migration and re-migration; mobility, settlement and instability in housing due to the intersections of race and gender; and the diasporic, post-diasporic, multi-ethnic gendered experiences of living and studying in 1920s and 1930s London. I will focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories, investigating documents such as passenger returns, census material, and electoral registers, student registration documents, library reader registrations, and archives of student societies and organisations. For example, through shipping passenger returns I will seek to map the routes of migration and re-migration of African-Caribbean women studying in 1920s and 1930s Britain, specifically London. I aim to explore within the project the experiences of African-Caribbean women students in finding housing and the role of geography and settlement in shaping individuals' experiences and identities, including diasporic and post-diasporic identities. I will explore the racial and gendered dimensions of the experiences of finding accommodation in interwar London, focusing on racism in accommodation and the experiences of Black women in finding accommodation in hostels and hotels. I will seek to explore the type of accommodation African-Caribbean women resided in - who else lived there and why - and seek to investigate how, because of these lived experiences, new diasporic and gendered identities might have been formed and forged. Dr. Jenny Douglas - Open University African-Caribbean Women's Health in the Atlantic Diaspora. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the mobility has affected African-Caribbean Women's health in the Atlantic diaspora. By the Atlantic diaspora, I mean North America, Britain and the Caribbean. Inequalities in health in African-Caribbean women are enduring. African-Caribbean women experience a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Lane et al, 2005; Collins and Johnson, 2008). In addition, Black Caribbean women with breast cancer have a significantly worse survival rate (Bowen, 2008; Jack et al, 2009). In relation to mental health, the research emphasis has been on Black Caribbean men with high rates of serious mental illness, while Black women have been seemingly ignored (Edge, 2013). The reproductive and sexual health of Black Caribbean women is also of concern. In the UK, policy and health service developments focusing on the health of Black and Minority ethnic health issues have failed to account for the specificity of Black Caribbean women's health and wellbeing. The inequalities African-Caribbean women face in education, employment, health and social care because of their racialised, gendered and classed experience are detrimental to their health and have a major impact on their life chances over the life course (Douglas and Watson,2013). Despite the geographical differences between African-Caribbean women in the UK and African- American women in the USA, research on inequalities in health highlights the relatively poor health of both groups and the similarities in demographic, social, health and economic profiles (Nazroo et al. 2007). Moreover, these two groups are not completely distinct as in addition to their histories emerging from transatlantic slavery, there has been continuous migration from the Caribbean to the USA and from the Caribbean to the UK as well as migration of African-Caribbeans from the UK to the USA, thus creating transnational Caribbean diasporic communities. Dr. Suzanne Scafe, London South Bank University Remembering "political blackness" as a space for agency, transformation and the emergence of post-diaspora identities. Today I'm focusing on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women's groups and the Black women's movement during the 1970s and '80s: I'm examining the reconfiguration of 'Black' in these life writing testimonies, as a connecting, oppositional identity. I interrogate both the movement's memorialisation in the context of British 'heritage' and its use, in academic contexts, to critique the perceived failures of political Blackness as a means defining feminist activism. Despite this critique, I propose that the Black women's movement's emphasis on an anti-imperialist context for identity formation, its focus on the practice of transculturality and its commitment to political social and cultural transformation as a mark of black feminist activism, provides a framework within to better understand emerging cultural production defined as 'Black British' in contemporary post-diaspora contexts. Dr. Beverley Goring, London South Bank University - African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency There is a long held perception of the connection between parental disposition and educational attainment and research regarding parental involvement would appear to support this. The popular belief is, given that African Caribbean children are one of the lower achieving groups academically as well as being over represented in exclusions from school statistics, the parents, mainly mothers, are less interested or engaged with their children's education and schooling, The simplicity of this argument espousing parental culpability finds favour within wider political, sociological and journalistic discourses where theories of cultural, material and cognitive deficit abound and are then utilised to explain away educational failure. Arguments that once challenged the role of the school as an institution which resides within the superstructure, and its contribution to educational disadvantage, are in retreat. Instead it appears that the family, mainly mothers, are a feature of derision and blame for the perceived pathological tendencies in families. This is was a strong revivalist theme especially in the reporting of the recent spate of stabbings in the capital. My original research on the topic of African Caribbean parents and their perspectives on education and schooling found parents obsessed with the notion of a 'good education'. They fought tirelessly and systematically to secure the best possible educational chances for their children. Sometimes they resorted to drastic measures, such as 'return migration' in their quest for better educational opportunities. This recourse to utilising transnational family connections within the wider African Caribbean diaspora, and other strategies, I argued, is a testament to parents exercising their agency and it gave an insight into the multifaceted nature of the lives of these women that run counter to the populist notion of what it meant to be African Caribbean parents, and especially mothers in modern Britain. This brings into focus the underlying dialectic between structure and agency. How do Caribbean women in the diaspora create a space between these two positions to mount a substantive challenge to disrupt the education system's status quo and contribute to an entity that fosters equality and social justice? Only then can all parents be assured that their children will receive a 'good education' and by extension contribute to sustainable communities. |
| Impact | Forthcoming |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Migration, Diaspora, Postdiaspora: IGDS, University of the West Indies, Mona and Follow-up Skype Meeting of all partners on January 15th 2018 |
| Organisation | Birmingham City University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Meetings with the co-editors of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, based at UWI, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago Facilitating administrative support for a Special Issue of CRGS, which will be the first publication outcome of the Network. Employment of an administrative assistant to assist with the publication, funded by CRGS, UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad. Meetings and briefings at the National Library of Jamaica and the Memory Bank, Institute of Jamaica Presentations by research team and Network Members |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Beverley Goring African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Education movements necessarily operate within specific contexts and in the case of African Caribbean women it is the intersection between migration and diaspora. In post WWII Britain, which saw the influx the Caribbean migrants to the UK, it was known that very few had the intention of remaining, but viewed migration as transient as had been the case with USA earlier. However, the introduction of various immigration Acts, inspired by racism, curbed the freedom of movement and flexibility associated with early migration trends, and resulted in the development of a settled Caribbean diaspora. The idea of diaspora has its origins in forced dispersal and displacement of people, but the meaning is not static and is known to incorporate varying states of being. Agnew (2005) notes that discourses on diaspora emanate from three distinct but related sources: as a social form, as a type of social consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production. The Caribbean diaspora, which was mainly formed out of post war migration, can be represented in each of these categories. The education movements in which African Caribbean women have played a significant part have been inspired by their collective memories of home and childhood, and societal values that conceived education as a route out of poverty as well as a catalyst for social mobility. Disappointment with the education system in the UK drove them to seek solutions in the new diasporic spaces, reconstructing notions 'return' and 'home'. Diaspora therefore provides a lens within which to analyse the aspirations, actions and subjectivities of African Caribbean women. Dr. Gemma Romain The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, exploring migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. Using the 'Universities Bureau of the British Empire' publication listing Students from other Countries in the Universities and University Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland in October 1926 as a starting point, I focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories. In particular, I trace the diasporic and migratory experiences of Jamaican medical student Kathleen Alberta Vernon, who studied at the London School of Medicine for Women. Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Natasha Kay Mortley Traditional conceptualizations have generally treated migration as a sex undifferentiated phenomenon and rendered women invisible in the process for two main and related reasons. The first was a strong focus on the causes of migration and linked to this was a focus on roles and responsibilities, which was based on the westernized view of the male breadwinner and dutiful wife. This led to the over generalized view of the man migrating for better opportunities, mainly economic, in order to provide for his family and the wife and children as 'trailing migrants'. Gender is core organizing principle that undergirds all dimensions of the migration process. From the decision to migrate to continued links with home country and possible return, gender is a social construction that both determines and is determined by migration. Further, Caribbean women rarely ever fit into the 'trailing wife' mold. Baldwin and Mortley (2017) have put forth love power as a theoretical lens through which to understand and analyze migration movements of Caribbean women. They argue that love power dynamics can be creative and transcend boundaries and that women who migrate within this context are empowered actors who construct new realities, new networks towards rebuilding their space and realities. Employing the love power conceptualization, this paper will therefore focus on the multiple and leading roles that Caribbean migrant women play within the Diaspora. Dr. Aisha Spencer - "Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood": The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however, Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of a post-diasporic poetics, in four literary texts, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and outside of the dictates of the social ideals of the Jamaican nation. These Caribbean women writers challenge traditional and even postmodern ideas of womanhood and female identity, through the way each of these female child protagonists move through a post-diasporic process of navigation of both self and space in the fictional world of the Caribbean female-authored text. Dr. Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic Black women are less likely to be retained in tenure-track faculty positions than any other gender and racial/ ethnic group in higher education. We encounter "dual acts of race and sex discrimination" from the academic community, arguably leading to disparities in the number of tenure-track Black women faculty (Holmes, Danley Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007 p., 107). As an expat in my "foreign homeland", I am often reminded of how I must navigate power and privilege in the university as forms of resistance and subservience in a patriarchal hegemony. In this paper, I employ an autoethnographic frame to deconstruct everyday derogatory acts, comments and behavior in the academe that devalue female academics by persons of professional hierarchy (known as hierachical microagressions). This work builds on Young, Anderson and Stewart's (2015) framework on hierarchical microagressions by applying it to a Caribbean context. To traverse some of these academic spaces, I illustrate some of the conditions needed to create agency and a strong sense of the emancipatory self. |
| Impact | PUBLIC FORUM Friday September 15 2017 5:30-7:30pm African Caribbean Women and Migration Venue: Multifunctional Room, UWI Main Library Programme Welcome & Brief Overview of the Project Introduction of Keynote Speaker- Dr Leith Dunn Keynote Address: Professor Paulette Ramsey Introduction of Dr Velma Pollard - Dr Suzanne Scafe Readings: Dr Velma Pollard Introduction of Ms Tanya Shirley - Dr Aisha Spencer Readings: Ms Tanya Shirley Question and Answer session Suzanne Scafe Uneven agency and (post-)diasporic mobilities: Velma Pollard's short fiction; Denise Noble: Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Diasporic Mobilities; Pat Noxolo - post diaspora and space; Andrea Davis - A Post-diaspora Poetics: Old and New Ways of Theorizing Caribbean and Black Women's Writing in Canada. Gemma Romain - Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leith Dunn - Reflections on a Jamaican-Cuban Woman and Migration in the 1930s Shirley Tate: Black Hair Stories and Racism in South African, UK and US schools Beverley Goring: African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Beverly Mullings: Beyond 'harnessing', 'leveraging' and 'tapping': towards insurgent modes of diasporic engagement with second generation Caribbeans and beyond. Natasha Kay Mortley: Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Aisha T. Spencer: Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood: The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic January 15th 2018 - Follow up Skype meeting of Network partners in Toronto, UK and the University of the West Indies Programme of Papers for publication: Denise Noble 'Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Post-Diasporic Mobilities' Andrea Davis "'Homing Desires' in Diasporic Cities: A Literary History of Caribbean Women in London and Toronto." Aisha Spencer : (Post) diaspora in Caribbean women-authored young adult fiction Suzanne Scafe "Community, Interconnectivity and Mobility: Reading Post-diaspora in Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) and NW (2012) Jenny Douglas 'Black women and public health in the UK: organisation and activism'. Saran Stewart : Black+female+academic+diasporic Shirley Tate The dark skin I live in: Colourism's diasporic connections |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Migration, Diaspora, Postdiaspora: IGDS, University of the West Indies, Mona and Follow-up Skype Meeting of all partners on January 15th 2018 |
| Organisation | Leeds Beckett University |
| Department | Carnegie Faculty |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Meetings with the co-editors of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, based at UWI, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago Facilitating administrative support for a Special Issue of CRGS, which will be the first publication outcome of the Network. Employment of an administrative assistant to assist with the publication, funded by CRGS, UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad. Meetings and briefings at the National Library of Jamaica and the Memory Bank, Institute of Jamaica Presentations by research team and Network Members |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Beverley Goring African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Education movements necessarily operate within specific contexts and in the case of African Caribbean women it is the intersection between migration and diaspora. In post WWII Britain, which saw the influx the Caribbean migrants to the UK, it was known that very few had the intention of remaining, but viewed migration as transient as had been the case with USA earlier. However, the introduction of various immigration Acts, inspired by racism, curbed the freedom of movement and flexibility associated with early migration trends, and resulted in the development of a settled Caribbean diaspora. The idea of diaspora has its origins in forced dispersal and displacement of people, but the meaning is not static and is known to incorporate varying states of being. Agnew (2005) notes that discourses on diaspora emanate from three distinct but related sources: as a social form, as a type of social consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production. The Caribbean diaspora, which was mainly formed out of post war migration, can be represented in each of these categories. The education movements in which African Caribbean women have played a significant part have been inspired by their collective memories of home and childhood, and societal values that conceived education as a route out of poverty as well as a catalyst for social mobility. Disappointment with the education system in the UK drove them to seek solutions in the new diasporic spaces, reconstructing notions 'return' and 'home'. Diaspora therefore provides a lens within which to analyse the aspirations, actions and subjectivities of African Caribbean women. Dr. Gemma Romain The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, exploring migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. Using the 'Universities Bureau of the British Empire' publication listing Students from other Countries in the Universities and University Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland in October 1926 as a starting point, I focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories. In particular, I trace the diasporic and migratory experiences of Jamaican medical student Kathleen Alberta Vernon, who studied at the London School of Medicine for Women. Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Natasha Kay Mortley Traditional conceptualizations have generally treated migration as a sex undifferentiated phenomenon and rendered women invisible in the process for two main and related reasons. The first was a strong focus on the causes of migration and linked to this was a focus on roles and responsibilities, which was based on the westernized view of the male breadwinner and dutiful wife. This led to the over generalized view of the man migrating for better opportunities, mainly economic, in order to provide for his family and the wife and children as 'trailing migrants'. Gender is core organizing principle that undergirds all dimensions of the migration process. From the decision to migrate to continued links with home country and possible return, gender is a social construction that both determines and is determined by migration. Further, Caribbean women rarely ever fit into the 'trailing wife' mold. Baldwin and Mortley (2017) have put forth love power as a theoretical lens through which to understand and analyze migration movements of Caribbean women. They argue that love power dynamics can be creative and transcend boundaries and that women who migrate within this context are empowered actors who construct new realities, new networks towards rebuilding their space and realities. Employing the love power conceptualization, this paper will therefore focus on the multiple and leading roles that Caribbean migrant women play within the Diaspora. Dr. Aisha Spencer - "Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood": The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however, Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of a post-diasporic poetics, in four literary texts, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and outside of the dictates of the social ideals of the Jamaican nation. These Caribbean women writers challenge traditional and even postmodern ideas of womanhood and female identity, through the way each of these female child protagonists move through a post-diasporic process of navigation of both self and space in the fictional world of the Caribbean female-authored text. Dr. Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic Black women are less likely to be retained in tenure-track faculty positions than any other gender and racial/ ethnic group in higher education. We encounter "dual acts of race and sex discrimination" from the academic community, arguably leading to disparities in the number of tenure-track Black women faculty (Holmes, Danley Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007 p., 107). As an expat in my "foreign homeland", I am often reminded of how I must navigate power and privilege in the university as forms of resistance and subservience in a patriarchal hegemony. In this paper, I employ an autoethnographic frame to deconstruct everyday derogatory acts, comments and behavior in the academe that devalue female academics by persons of professional hierarchy (known as hierachical microagressions). This work builds on Young, Anderson and Stewart's (2015) framework on hierarchical microagressions by applying it to a Caribbean context. To traverse some of these academic spaces, I illustrate some of the conditions needed to create agency and a strong sense of the emancipatory self. |
| Impact | PUBLIC FORUM Friday September 15 2017 5:30-7:30pm African Caribbean Women and Migration Venue: Multifunctional Room, UWI Main Library Programme Welcome & Brief Overview of the Project Introduction of Keynote Speaker- Dr Leith Dunn Keynote Address: Professor Paulette Ramsey Introduction of Dr Velma Pollard - Dr Suzanne Scafe Readings: Dr Velma Pollard Introduction of Ms Tanya Shirley - Dr Aisha Spencer Readings: Ms Tanya Shirley Question and Answer session Suzanne Scafe Uneven agency and (post-)diasporic mobilities: Velma Pollard's short fiction; Denise Noble: Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Diasporic Mobilities; Pat Noxolo - post diaspora and space; Andrea Davis - A Post-diaspora Poetics: Old and New Ways of Theorizing Caribbean and Black Women's Writing in Canada. Gemma Romain - Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leith Dunn - Reflections on a Jamaican-Cuban Woman and Migration in the 1930s Shirley Tate: Black Hair Stories and Racism in South African, UK and US schools Beverley Goring: African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Beverly Mullings: Beyond 'harnessing', 'leveraging' and 'tapping': towards insurgent modes of diasporic engagement with second generation Caribbeans and beyond. Natasha Kay Mortley: Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Aisha T. Spencer: Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood: The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic January 15th 2018 - Follow up Skype meeting of Network partners in Toronto, UK and the University of the West Indies Programme of Papers for publication: Denise Noble 'Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Post-Diasporic Mobilities' Andrea Davis "'Homing Desires' in Diasporic Cities: A Literary History of Caribbean Women in London and Toronto." Aisha Spencer : (Post) diaspora in Caribbean women-authored young adult fiction Suzanne Scafe "Community, Interconnectivity and Mobility: Reading Post-diaspora in Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) and NW (2012) Jenny Douglas 'Black women and public health in the UK: organisation and activism'. Saran Stewart : Black+female+academic+diasporic Shirley Tate The dark skin I live in: Colourism's diasporic connections |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Migration, Diaspora, Postdiaspora: IGDS, University of the West Indies, Mona and Follow-up Skype Meeting of all partners on January 15th 2018 |
| Organisation | Queens University |
| Country | Bangladesh |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Meetings with the co-editors of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, based at UWI, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago Facilitating administrative support for a Special Issue of CRGS, which will be the first publication outcome of the Network. Employment of an administrative assistant to assist with the publication, funded by CRGS, UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad. Meetings and briefings at the National Library of Jamaica and the Memory Bank, Institute of Jamaica Presentations by research team and Network Members |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Beverley Goring African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Education movements necessarily operate within specific contexts and in the case of African Caribbean women it is the intersection between migration and diaspora. In post WWII Britain, which saw the influx the Caribbean migrants to the UK, it was known that very few had the intention of remaining, but viewed migration as transient as had been the case with USA earlier. However, the introduction of various immigration Acts, inspired by racism, curbed the freedom of movement and flexibility associated with early migration trends, and resulted in the development of a settled Caribbean diaspora. The idea of diaspora has its origins in forced dispersal and displacement of people, but the meaning is not static and is known to incorporate varying states of being. Agnew (2005) notes that discourses on diaspora emanate from three distinct but related sources: as a social form, as a type of social consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production. The Caribbean diaspora, which was mainly formed out of post war migration, can be represented in each of these categories. The education movements in which African Caribbean women have played a significant part have been inspired by their collective memories of home and childhood, and societal values that conceived education as a route out of poverty as well as a catalyst for social mobility. Disappointment with the education system in the UK drove them to seek solutions in the new diasporic spaces, reconstructing notions 'return' and 'home'. Diaspora therefore provides a lens within which to analyse the aspirations, actions and subjectivities of African Caribbean women. Dr. Gemma Romain The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, exploring migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. Using the 'Universities Bureau of the British Empire' publication listing Students from other Countries in the Universities and University Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland in October 1926 as a starting point, I focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories. In particular, I trace the diasporic and migratory experiences of Jamaican medical student Kathleen Alberta Vernon, who studied at the London School of Medicine for Women. Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Natasha Kay Mortley Traditional conceptualizations have generally treated migration as a sex undifferentiated phenomenon and rendered women invisible in the process for two main and related reasons. The first was a strong focus on the causes of migration and linked to this was a focus on roles and responsibilities, which was based on the westernized view of the male breadwinner and dutiful wife. This led to the over generalized view of the man migrating for better opportunities, mainly economic, in order to provide for his family and the wife and children as 'trailing migrants'. Gender is core organizing principle that undergirds all dimensions of the migration process. From the decision to migrate to continued links with home country and possible return, gender is a social construction that both determines and is determined by migration. Further, Caribbean women rarely ever fit into the 'trailing wife' mold. Baldwin and Mortley (2017) have put forth love power as a theoretical lens through which to understand and analyze migration movements of Caribbean women. They argue that love power dynamics can be creative and transcend boundaries and that women who migrate within this context are empowered actors who construct new realities, new networks towards rebuilding their space and realities. Employing the love power conceptualization, this paper will therefore focus on the multiple and leading roles that Caribbean migrant women play within the Diaspora. Dr. Aisha Spencer - "Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood": The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however, Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of a post-diasporic poetics, in four literary texts, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and outside of the dictates of the social ideals of the Jamaican nation. These Caribbean women writers challenge traditional and even postmodern ideas of womanhood and female identity, through the way each of these female child protagonists move through a post-diasporic process of navigation of both self and space in the fictional world of the Caribbean female-authored text. Dr. Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic Black women are less likely to be retained in tenure-track faculty positions than any other gender and racial/ ethnic group in higher education. We encounter "dual acts of race and sex discrimination" from the academic community, arguably leading to disparities in the number of tenure-track Black women faculty (Holmes, Danley Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007 p., 107). As an expat in my "foreign homeland", I am often reminded of how I must navigate power and privilege in the university as forms of resistance and subservience in a patriarchal hegemony. In this paper, I employ an autoethnographic frame to deconstruct everyday derogatory acts, comments and behavior in the academe that devalue female academics by persons of professional hierarchy (known as hierachical microagressions). This work builds on Young, Anderson and Stewart's (2015) framework on hierarchical microagressions by applying it to a Caribbean context. To traverse some of these academic spaces, I illustrate some of the conditions needed to create agency and a strong sense of the emancipatory self. |
| Impact | PUBLIC FORUM Friday September 15 2017 5:30-7:30pm African Caribbean Women and Migration Venue: Multifunctional Room, UWI Main Library Programme Welcome & Brief Overview of the Project Introduction of Keynote Speaker- Dr Leith Dunn Keynote Address: Professor Paulette Ramsey Introduction of Dr Velma Pollard - Dr Suzanne Scafe Readings: Dr Velma Pollard Introduction of Ms Tanya Shirley - Dr Aisha Spencer Readings: Ms Tanya Shirley Question and Answer session Suzanne Scafe Uneven agency and (post-)diasporic mobilities: Velma Pollard's short fiction; Denise Noble: Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Diasporic Mobilities; Pat Noxolo - post diaspora and space; Andrea Davis - A Post-diaspora Poetics: Old and New Ways of Theorizing Caribbean and Black Women's Writing in Canada. Gemma Romain - Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leith Dunn - Reflections on a Jamaican-Cuban Woman and Migration in the 1930s Shirley Tate: Black Hair Stories and Racism in South African, UK and US schools Beverley Goring: African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Beverly Mullings: Beyond 'harnessing', 'leveraging' and 'tapping': towards insurgent modes of diasporic engagement with second generation Caribbeans and beyond. Natasha Kay Mortley: Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Aisha T. Spencer: Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood: The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic January 15th 2018 - Follow up Skype meeting of Network partners in Toronto, UK and the University of the West Indies Programme of Papers for publication: Denise Noble 'Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Post-Diasporic Mobilities' Andrea Davis "'Homing Desires' in Diasporic Cities: A Literary History of Caribbean Women in London and Toronto." Aisha Spencer : (Post) diaspora in Caribbean women-authored young adult fiction Suzanne Scafe "Community, Interconnectivity and Mobility: Reading Post-diaspora in Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) and NW (2012) Jenny Douglas 'Black women and public health in the UK: organisation and activism'. Saran Stewart : Black+female+academic+diasporic Shirley Tate The dark skin I live in: Colourism's diasporic connections |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Migration, Diaspora, Postdiaspora: IGDS, University of the West Indies, Mona and Follow-up Skype Meeting of all partners on January 15th 2018 |
| Organisation | University of Birmingham |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Meetings with the co-editors of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, based at UWI, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago Facilitating administrative support for a Special Issue of CRGS, which will be the first publication outcome of the Network. Employment of an administrative assistant to assist with the publication, funded by CRGS, UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad. Meetings and briefings at the National Library of Jamaica and the Memory Bank, Institute of Jamaica Presentations by research team and Network Members |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Beverley Goring African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Education movements necessarily operate within specific contexts and in the case of African Caribbean women it is the intersection between migration and diaspora. In post WWII Britain, which saw the influx the Caribbean migrants to the UK, it was known that very few had the intention of remaining, but viewed migration as transient as had been the case with USA earlier. However, the introduction of various immigration Acts, inspired by racism, curbed the freedom of movement and flexibility associated with early migration trends, and resulted in the development of a settled Caribbean diaspora. The idea of diaspora has its origins in forced dispersal and displacement of people, but the meaning is not static and is known to incorporate varying states of being. Agnew (2005) notes that discourses on diaspora emanate from three distinct but related sources: as a social form, as a type of social consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production. The Caribbean diaspora, which was mainly formed out of post war migration, can be represented in each of these categories. The education movements in which African Caribbean women have played a significant part have been inspired by their collective memories of home and childhood, and societal values that conceived education as a route out of poverty as well as a catalyst for social mobility. Disappointment with the education system in the UK drove them to seek solutions in the new diasporic spaces, reconstructing notions 'return' and 'home'. Diaspora therefore provides a lens within which to analyse the aspirations, actions and subjectivities of African Caribbean women. Dr. Gemma Romain The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, exploring migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. Using the 'Universities Bureau of the British Empire' publication listing Students from other Countries in the Universities and University Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland in October 1926 as a starting point, I focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories. In particular, I trace the diasporic and migratory experiences of Jamaican medical student Kathleen Alberta Vernon, who studied at the London School of Medicine for Women. Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Natasha Kay Mortley Traditional conceptualizations have generally treated migration as a sex undifferentiated phenomenon and rendered women invisible in the process for two main and related reasons. The first was a strong focus on the causes of migration and linked to this was a focus on roles and responsibilities, which was based on the westernized view of the male breadwinner and dutiful wife. This led to the over generalized view of the man migrating for better opportunities, mainly economic, in order to provide for his family and the wife and children as 'trailing migrants'. Gender is core organizing principle that undergirds all dimensions of the migration process. From the decision to migrate to continued links with home country and possible return, gender is a social construction that both determines and is determined by migration. Further, Caribbean women rarely ever fit into the 'trailing wife' mold. Baldwin and Mortley (2017) have put forth love power as a theoretical lens through which to understand and analyze migration movements of Caribbean women. They argue that love power dynamics can be creative and transcend boundaries and that women who migrate within this context are empowered actors who construct new realities, new networks towards rebuilding their space and realities. Employing the love power conceptualization, this paper will therefore focus on the multiple and leading roles that Caribbean migrant women play within the Diaspora. Dr. Aisha Spencer - "Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood": The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however, Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of a post-diasporic poetics, in four literary texts, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and outside of the dictates of the social ideals of the Jamaican nation. These Caribbean women writers challenge traditional and even postmodern ideas of womanhood and female identity, through the way each of these female child protagonists move through a post-diasporic process of navigation of both self and space in the fictional world of the Caribbean female-authored text. Dr. Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic Black women are less likely to be retained in tenure-track faculty positions than any other gender and racial/ ethnic group in higher education. We encounter "dual acts of race and sex discrimination" from the academic community, arguably leading to disparities in the number of tenure-track Black women faculty (Holmes, Danley Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007 p., 107). As an expat in my "foreign homeland", I am often reminded of how I must navigate power and privilege in the university as forms of resistance and subservience in a patriarchal hegemony. In this paper, I employ an autoethnographic frame to deconstruct everyday derogatory acts, comments and behavior in the academe that devalue female academics by persons of professional hierarchy (known as hierachical microagressions). This work builds on Young, Anderson and Stewart's (2015) framework on hierarchical microagressions by applying it to a Caribbean context. To traverse some of these academic spaces, I illustrate some of the conditions needed to create agency and a strong sense of the emancipatory self. |
| Impact | PUBLIC FORUM Friday September 15 2017 5:30-7:30pm African Caribbean Women and Migration Venue: Multifunctional Room, UWI Main Library Programme Welcome & Brief Overview of the Project Introduction of Keynote Speaker- Dr Leith Dunn Keynote Address: Professor Paulette Ramsey Introduction of Dr Velma Pollard - Dr Suzanne Scafe Readings: Dr Velma Pollard Introduction of Ms Tanya Shirley - Dr Aisha Spencer Readings: Ms Tanya Shirley Question and Answer session Suzanne Scafe Uneven agency and (post-)diasporic mobilities: Velma Pollard's short fiction; Denise Noble: Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Diasporic Mobilities; Pat Noxolo - post diaspora and space; Andrea Davis - A Post-diaspora Poetics: Old and New Ways of Theorizing Caribbean and Black Women's Writing in Canada. Gemma Romain - Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leith Dunn - Reflections on a Jamaican-Cuban Woman and Migration in the 1930s Shirley Tate: Black Hair Stories and Racism in South African, UK and US schools Beverley Goring: African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Beverly Mullings: Beyond 'harnessing', 'leveraging' and 'tapping': towards insurgent modes of diasporic engagement with second generation Caribbeans and beyond. Natasha Kay Mortley: Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Aisha T. Spencer: Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood: The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic January 15th 2018 - Follow up Skype meeting of Network partners in Toronto, UK and the University of the West Indies Programme of Papers for publication: Denise Noble 'Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Post-Diasporic Mobilities' Andrea Davis "'Homing Desires' in Diasporic Cities: A Literary History of Caribbean Women in London and Toronto." Aisha Spencer : (Post) diaspora in Caribbean women-authored young adult fiction Suzanne Scafe "Community, Interconnectivity and Mobility: Reading Post-diaspora in Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) and NW (2012) Jenny Douglas 'Black women and public health in the UK: organisation and activism'. Saran Stewart : Black+female+academic+diasporic Shirley Tate The dark skin I live in: Colourism's diasporic connections |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Migration, Diaspora, Postdiaspora: IGDS, University of the West Indies, Mona and Follow-up Skype Meeting of all partners on January 15th 2018 |
| Organisation | University of Toronto |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Meetings with the co-editors of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, based at UWI, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago Facilitating administrative support for a Special Issue of CRGS, which will be the first publication outcome of the Network. Employment of an administrative assistant to assist with the publication, funded by CRGS, UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad. Meetings and briefings at the National Library of Jamaica and the Memory Bank, Institute of Jamaica Presentations by research team and Network Members |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Beverley Goring African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Education movements necessarily operate within specific contexts and in the case of African Caribbean women it is the intersection between migration and diaspora. In post WWII Britain, which saw the influx the Caribbean migrants to the UK, it was known that very few had the intention of remaining, but viewed migration as transient as had been the case with USA earlier. However, the introduction of various immigration Acts, inspired by racism, curbed the freedom of movement and flexibility associated with early migration trends, and resulted in the development of a settled Caribbean diaspora. The idea of diaspora has its origins in forced dispersal and displacement of people, but the meaning is not static and is known to incorporate varying states of being. Agnew (2005) notes that discourses on diaspora emanate from three distinct but related sources: as a social form, as a type of social consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production. The Caribbean diaspora, which was mainly formed out of post war migration, can be represented in each of these categories. The education movements in which African Caribbean women have played a significant part have been inspired by their collective memories of home and childhood, and societal values that conceived education as a route out of poverty as well as a catalyst for social mobility. Disappointment with the education system in the UK drove them to seek solutions in the new diasporic spaces, reconstructing notions 'return' and 'home'. Diaspora therefore provides a lens within which to analyse the aspirations, actions and subjectivities of African Caribbean women. Dr. Gemma Romain The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, exploring migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. Using the 'Universities Bureau of the British Empire' publication listing Students from other Countries in the Universities and University Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland in October 1926 as a starting point, I focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories. In particular, I trace the diasporic and migratory experiences of Jamaican medical student Kathleen Alberta Vernon, who studied at the London School of Medicine for Women. Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Natasha Kay Mortley Traditional conceptualizations have generally treated migration as a sex undifferentiated phenomenon and rendered women invisible in the process for two main and related reasons. The first was a strong focus on the causes of migration and linked to this was a focus on roles and responsibilities, which was based on the westernized view of the male breadwinner and dutiful wife. This led to the over generalized view of the man migrating for better opportunities, mainly economic, in order to provide for his family and the wife and children as 'trailing migrants'. Gender is core organizing principle that undergirds all dimensions of the migration process. From the decision to migrate to continued links with home country and possible return, gender is a social construction that both determines and is determined by migration. Further, Caribbean women rarely ever fit into the 'trailing wife' mold. Baldwin and Mortley (2017) have put forth love power as a theoretical lens through which to understand and analyze migration movements of Caribbean women. They argue that love power dynamics can be creative and transcend boundaries and that women who migrate within this context are empowered actors who construct new realities, new networks towards rebuilding their space and realities. Employing the love power conceptualization, this paper will therefore focus on the multiple and leading roles that Caribbean migrant women play within the Diaspora. Dr. Aisha Spencer - "Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood": The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however, Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of a post-diasporic poetics, in four literary texts, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and outside of the dictates of the social ideals of the Jamaican nation. These Caribbean women writers challenge traditional and even postmodern ideas of womanhood and female identity, through the way each of these female child protagonists move through a post-diasporic process of navigation of both self and space in the fictional world of the Caribbean female-authored text. Dr. Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic Black women are less likely to be retained in tenure-track faculty positions than any other gender and racial/ ethnic group in higher education. We encounter "dual acts of race and sex discrimination" from the academic community, arguably leading to disparities in the number of tenure-track Black women faculty (Holmes, Danley Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007 p., 107). As an expat in my "foreign homeland", I am often reminded of how I must navigate power and privilege in the university as forms of resistance and subservience in a patriarchal hegemony. In this paper, I employ an autoethnographic frame to deconstruct everyday derogatory acts, comments and behavior in the academe that devalue female academics by persons of professional hierarchy (known as hierachical microagressions). This work builds on Young, Anderson and Stewart's (2015) framework on hierarchical microagressions by applying it to a Caribbean context. To traverse some of these academic spaces, I illustrate some of the conditions needed to create agency and a strong sense of the emancipatory self. |
| Impact | PUBLIC FORUM Friday September 15 2017 5:30-7:30pm African Caribbean Women and Migration Venue: Multifunctional Room, UWI Main Library Programme Welcome & Brief Overview of the Project Introduction of Keynote Speaker- Dr Leith Dunn Keynote Address: Professor Paulette Ramsey Introduction of Dr Velma Pollard - Dr Suzanne Scafe Readings: Dr Velma Pollard Introduction of Ms Tanya Shirley - Dr Aisha Spencer Readings: Ms Tanya Shirley Question and Answer session Suzanne Scafe Uneven agency and (post-)diasporic mobilities: Velma Pollard's short fiction; Denise Noble: Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Diasporic Mobilities; Pat Noxolo - post diaspora and space; Andrea Davis - A Post-diaspora Poetics: Old and New Ways of Theorizing Caribbean and Black Women's Writing in Canada. Gemma Romain - Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leith Dunn - Reflections on a Jamaican-Cuban Woman and Migration in the 1930s Shirley Tate: Black Hair Stories and Racism in South African, UK and US schools Beverley Goring: African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Beverly Mullings: Beyond 'harnessing', 'leveraging' and 'tapping': towards insurgent modes of diasporic engagement with second generation Caribbeans and beyond. Natasha Kay Mortley: Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Aisha T. Spencer: Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood: The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic January 15th 2018 - Follow up Skype meeting of Network partners in Toronto, UK and the University of the West Indies Programme of Papers for publication: Denise Noble 'Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Post-Diasporic Mobilities' Andrea Davis "'Homing Desires' in Diasporic Cities: A Literary History of Caribbean Women in London and Toronto." Aisha Spencer : (Post) diaspora in Caribbean women-authored young adult fiction Suzanne Scafe "Community, Interconnectivity and Mobility: Reading Post-diaspora in Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) and NW (2012) Jenny Douglas 'Black women and public health in the UK: organisation and activism'. Saran Stewart : Black+female+academic+diasporic Shirley Tate The dark skin I live in: Colourism's diasporic connections |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Migration, Diaspora, Postdiaspora: IGDS, University of the West Indies, Mona and Follow-up Skype Meeting of all partners on January 15th 2018 |
| Organisation | University of the West Indies |
| Department | School of Education |
| Country | Jamaica |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Meetings with the co-editors of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, based at UWI, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago Facilitating administrative support for a Special Issue of CRGS, which will be the first publication outcome of the Network. Employment of an administrative assistant to assist with the publication, funded by CRGS, UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad. Meetings and briefings at the National Library of Jamaica and the Memory Bank, Institute of Jamaica Presentations by research team and Network Members |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Beverley Goring African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Education movements necessarily operate within specific contexts and in the case of African Caribbean women it is the intersection between migration and diaspora. In post WWII Britain, which saw the influx the Caribbean migrants to the UK, it was known that very few had the intention of remaining, but viewed migration as transient as had been the case with USA earlier. However, the introduction of various immigration Acts, inspired by racism, curbed the freedom of movement and flexibility associated with early migration trends, and resulted in the development of a settled Caribbean diaspora. The idea of diaspora has its origins in forced dispersal and displacement of people, but the meaning is not static and is known to incorporate varying states of being. Agnew (2005) notes that discourses on diaspora emanate from three distinct but related sources: as a social form, as a type of social consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production. The Caribbean diaspora, which was mainly formed out of post war migration, can be represented in each of these categories. The education movements in which African Caribbean women have played a significant part have been inspired by their collective memories of home and childhood, and societal values that conceived education as a route out of poverty as well as a catalyst for social mobility. Disappointment with the education system in the UK drove them to seek solutions in the new diasporic spaces, reconstructing notions 'return' and 'home'. Diaspora therefore provides a lens within which to analyse the aspirations, actions and subjectivities of African Caribbean women. Dr. Gemma Romain The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, exploring migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. Using the 'Universities Bureau of the British Empire' publication listing Students from other Countries in the Universities and University Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland in October 1926 as a starting point, I focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories. In particular, I trace the diasporic and migratory experiences of Jamaican medical student Kathleen Alberta Vernon, who studied at the London School of Medicine for Women. Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Natasha Kay Mortley Traditional conceptualizations have generally treated migration as a sex undifferentiated phenomenon and rendered women invisible in the process for two main and related reasons. The first was a strong focus on the causes of migration and linked to this was a focus on roles and responsibilities, which was based on the westernized view of the male breadwinner and dutiful wife. This led to the over generalized view of the man migrating for better opportunities, mainly economic, in order to provide for his family and the wife and children as 'trailing migrants'. Gender is core organizing principle that undergirds all dimensions of the migration process. From the decision to migrate to continued links with home country and possible return, gender is a social construction that both determines and is determined by migration. Further, Caribbean women rarely ever fit into the 'trailing wife' mold. Baldwin and Mortley (2017) have put forth love power as a theoretical lens through which to understand and analyze migration movements of Caribbean women. They argue that love power dynamics can be creative and transcend boundaries and that women who migrate within this context are empowered actors who construct new realities, new networks towards rebuilding their space and realities. Employing the love power conceptualization, this paper will therefore focus on the multiple and leading roles that Caribbean migrant women play within the Diaspora. Dr. Aisha Spencer - "Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood": The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however, Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of a post-diasporic poetics, in four literary texts, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and outside of the dictates of the social ideals of the Jamaican nation. These Caribbean women writers challenge traditional and even postmodern ideas of womanhood and female identity, through the way each of these female child protagonists move through a post-diasporic process of navigation of both self and space in the fictional world of the Caribbean female-authored text. Dr. Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic Black women are less likely to be retained in tenure-track faculty positions than any other gender and racial/ ethnic group in higher education. We encounter "dual acts of race and sex discrimination" from the academic community, arguably leading to disparities in the number of tenure-track Black women faculty (Holmes, Danley Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007 p., 107). As an expat in my "foreign homeland", I am often reminded of how I must navigate power and privilege in the university as forms of resistance and subservience in a patriarchal hegemony. In this paper, I employ an autoethnographic frame to deconstruct everyday derogatory acts, comments and behavior in the academe that devalue female academics by persons of professional hierarchy (known as hierachical microagressions). This work builds on Young, Anderson and Stewart's (2015) framework on hierarchical microagressions by applying it to a Caribbean context. To traverse some of these academic spaces, I illustrate some of the conditions needed to create agency and a strong sense of the emancipatory self. |
| Impact | PUBLIC FORUM Friday September 15 2017 5:30-7:30pm African Caribbean Women and Migration Venue: Multifunctional Room, UWI Main Library Programme Welcome & Brief Overview of the Project Introduction of Keynote Speaker- Dr Leith Dunn Keynote Address: Professor Paulette Ramsey Introduction of Dr Velma Pollard - Dr Suzanne Scafe Readings: Dr Velma Pollard Introduction of Ms Tanya Shirley - Dr Aisha Spencer Readings: Ms Tanya Shirley Question and Answer session Suzanne Scafe Uneven agency and (post-)diasporic mobilities: Velma Pollard's short fiction; Denise Noble: Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Diasporic Mobilities; Pat Noxolo - post diaspora and space; Andrea Davis - A Post-diaspora Poetics: Old and New Ways of Theorizing Caribbean and Black Women's Writing in Canada. Gemma Romain - Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leith Dunn - Reflections on a Jamaican-Cuban Woman and Migration in the 1930s Shirley Tate: Black Hair Stories and Racism in South African, UK and US schools Beverley Goring: African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Beverly Mullings: Beyond 'harnessing', 'leveraging' and 'tapping': towards insurgent modes of diasporic engagement with second generation Caribbeans and beyond. Natasha Kay Mortley: Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Aisha T. Spencer: Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood: The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic January 15th 2018 - Follow up Skype meeting of Network partners in Toronto, UK and the University of the West Indies Programme of Papers for publication: Denise Noble 'Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Post-Diasporic Mobilities' Andrea Davis "'Homing Desires' in Diasporic Cities: A Literary History of Caribbean Women in London and Toronto." Aisha Spencer : (Post) diaspora in Caribbean women-authored young adult fiction Suzanne Scafe "Community, Interconnectivity and Mobility: Reading Post-diaspora in Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) and NW (2012) Jenny Douglas 'Black women and public health in the UK: organisation and activism'. Saran Stewart : Black+female+academic+diasporic Shirley Tate The dark skin I live in: Colourism's diasporic connections |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Migration, Diaspora, Postdiaspora: IGDS, University of the West Indies, Mona and Follow-up Skype Meeting of all partners on January 15th 2018 |
| Organisation | University of the West Indies |
| Country | Barbados |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Meetings with the co-editors of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, based at UWI, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago Facilitating administrative support for a Special Issue of CRGS, which will be the first publication outcome of the Network. Employment of an administrative assistant to assist with the publication, funded by CRGS, UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad. Meetings and briefings at the National Library of Jamaica and the Memory Bank, Institute of Jamaica Presentations by research team and Network Members |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Beverley Goring African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Education movements necessarily operate within specific contexts and in the case of African Caribbean women it is the intersection between migration and diaspora. In post WWII Britain, which saw the influx the Caribbean migrants to the UK, it was known that very few had the intention of remaining, but viewed migration as transient as had been the case with USA earlier. However, the introduction of various immigration Acts, inspired by racism, curbed the freedom of movement and flexibility associated with early migration trends, and resulted in the development of a settled Caribbean diaspora. The idea of diaspora has its origins in forced dispersal and displacement of people, but the meaning is not static and is known to incorporate varying states of being. Agnew (2005) notes that discourses on diaspora emanate from three distinct but related sources: as a social form, as a type of social consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production. The Caribbean diaspora, which was mainly formed out of post war migration, can be represented in each of these categories. The education movements in which African Caribbean women have played a significant part have been inspired by their collective memories of home and childhood, and societal values that conceived education as a route out of poverty as well as a catalyst for social mobility. Disappointment with the education system in the UK drove them to seek solutions in the new diasporic spaces, reconstructing notions 'return' and 'home'. Diaspora therefore provides a lens within which to analyse the aspirations, actions and subjectivities of African Caribbean women. Dr. Gemma Romain The aim for my research within the Network is to investigate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora in relation to 1920s and 1930s multi-ethnic London, exploring migratory routes, settlement and housing experiences, studying experiences, friendships, networks, and developments of diasporic and post-diasporic identities of women of African-Caribbean heritage who were studying in the imperial metropole. This research is inspired by the work I carried out in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Bressey, Director of the UCL Equiano Centre, where we explored and mapped the historical geographies of the interwar Black community in relation to the London art world. Using the 'Universities Bureau of the British Empire' publication listing Students from other Countries in the Universities and University Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland in October 1926 as a starting point, I focus on exploring archival sources to reconstruct aspects of these histories. In particular, I trace the diasporic and migratory experiences of Jamaican medical student Kathleen Alberta Vernon, who studied at the London School of Medicine for Women. Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Natasha Kay Mortley Traditional conceptualizations have generally treated migration as a sex undifferentiated phenomenon and rendered women invisible in the process for two main and related reasons. The first was a strong focus on the causes of migration and linked to this was a focus on roles and responsibilities, which was based on the westernized view of the male breadwinner and dutiful wife. This led to the over generalized view of the man migrating for better opportunities, mainly economic, in order to provide for his family and the wife and children as 'trailing migrants'. Gender is core organizing principle that undergirds all dimensions of the migration process. From the decision to migrate to continued links with home country and possible return, gender is a social construction that both determines and is determined by migration. Further, Caribbean women rarely ever fit into the 'trailing wife' mold. Baldwin and Mortley (2017) have put forth love power as a theoretical lens through which to understand and analyze migration movements of Caribbean women. They argue that love power dynamics can be creative and transcend boundaries and that women who migrate within this context are empowered actors who construct new realities, new networks towards rebuilding their space and realities. Employing the love power conceptualization, this paper will therefore focus on the multiple and leading roles that Caribbean migrant women play within the Diaspora. Dr. Aisha Spencer - "Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood": The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however, Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of a post-diasporic poetics, in four literary texts, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and outside of the dictates of the social ideals of the Jamaican nation. These Caribbean women writers challenge traditional and even postmodern ideas of womanhood and female identity, through the way each of these female child protagonists move through a post-diasporic process of navigation of both self and space in the fictional world of the Caribbean female-authored text. Dr. Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic Black women are less likely to be retained in tenure-track faculty positions than any other gender and racial/ ethnic group in higher education. We encounter "dual acts of race and sex discrimination" from the academic community, arguably leading to disparities in the number of tenure-track Black women faculty (Holmes, Danley Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007 p., 107). As an expat in my "foreign homeland", I am often reminded of how I must navigate power and privilege in the university as forms of resistance and subservience in a patriarchal hegemony. In this paper, I employ an autoethnographic frame to deconstruct everyday derogatory acts, comments and behavior in the academe that devalue female academics by persons of professional hierarchy (known as hierachical microagressions). This work builds on Young, Anderson and Stewart's (2015) framework on hierarchical microagressions by applying it to a Caribbean context. To traverse some of these academic spaces, I illustrate some of the conditions needed to create agency and a strong sense of the emancipatory self. |
| Impact | PUBLIC FORUM Friday September 15 2017 5:30-7:30pm African Caribbean Women and Migration Venue: Multifunctional Room, UWI Main Library Programme Welcome & Brief Overview of the Project Introduction of Keynote Speaker- Dr Leith Dunn Keynote Address: Professor Paulette Ramsey Introduction of Dr Velma Pollard - Dr Suzanne Scafe Readings: Dr Velma Pollard Introduction of Ms Tanya Shirley - Dr Aisha Spencer Readings: Ms Tanya Shirley Question and Answer session Suzanne Scafe Uneven agency and (post-)diasporic mobilities: Velma Pollard's short fiction; Denise Noble: Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Diasporic Mobilities; Pat Noxolo - post diaspora and space; Andrea Davis - A Post-diaspora Poetics: Old and New Ways of Theorizing Caribbean and Black Women's Writing in Canada. Gemma Romain - Africa-Caribbean Women and London-based Universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leith Dunn - Reflections on a Jamaican-Cuban Woman and Migration in the 1930s Shirley Tate: Black Hair Stories and Racism in South African, UK and US schools Beverley Goring: African Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Educational Agency Beverly Mullings: Beyond 'harnessing', 'leveraging' and 'tapping': towards insurgent modes of diasporic engagement with second generation Caribbeans and beyond. Natasha Kay Mortley: Love Power Migration: The Multiple Roles of Caribbean Women within the Diaspora Aisha T. Spencer: Reshaping girlhood, reimagining womanhood: The female child protagonist and the post-diasporic condition in Caribbean female-authored fiction Saran Stewart: Navigating the Academy in the Post-Diaspora: The Sum Total Experiences of being Black+Woman+Academic January 15th 2018 - Follow up Skype meeting of Network partners in Toronto, UK and the University of the West Indies Programme of Papers for publication: Denise Noble 'Caribbean Women's Fugitive Negotiations and Post-Diasporic Mobilities' Andrea Davis "'Homing Desires' in Diasporic Cities: A Literary History of Caribbean Women in London and Toronto." Aisha Spencer : (Post) diaspora in Caribbean women-authored young adult fiction Suzanne Scafe "Community, Interconnectivity and Mobility: Reading Post-diaspora in Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) and NW (2012) Jenny Douglas 'Black women and public health in the UK: organisation and activism'. Saran Stewart : Black+female+academic+diasporic Shirley Tate The dark skin I live in: Colourism's diasporic connections |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Black Feminist & Queer Organizing in Canada and the UK Early Years to the 1980's featuring Peggy Bristow Grace Channer Junior Harrison Suzanne Scafe moderated by Beverly Bain |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was a public panel delivered in connection with a 2x day workshop at the University of Toronto |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Briefing and seminar at the archives held at the Memory Bank at the Institute of Jamaica and the National Library of Jamaica |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The purpose of the activity was to present the research themes of the Network to an audience of researchers outside the academic community of the University of the West Indies. The presentations and informal discussion session reached the librarians and archivists working at the National Library of Jamaica and the Memory Bank. In turn these organisations presented their work to us and together we prepared a strategy for further activities and possible funding applications. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |