Caribbean Review of Gender Studies Special Issue
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Caribbean Review of Gender Studies Special Issue Gender and Anticolonialism in the the Interwar Caribbean
OVERVIEW
The decades between the First and Second World Wars witnessed intensified challenges to both European and US imperialism in the Caribbean. Issuing demands for self-determination and full citizenship rights, activists utilized new mass organizations—such as trade unions, political parties, and nationalist associations—as well as older collectives such as mutual aid societies, religious groups, and cultural clubs to contest the legitimacy of foreign rule. The duration, scale, and militancy of anticolonial mobilizations varied widely across the region, as activists employed tactics ranging from formal negotiation with the state to armed guerilla warfare. Yet, as an interdisciplinary literature has demonstrated, the surge in grassroots protest during the interwar years occurred throughout the colonial Caribbean as well as in the formally independent nation-states of Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Thus, the political ferment of the interwar era not only laid the groundwork for post-World War II independence movements, but also created an opening to contest hegemonic constructions of race, gender, and nation.
This special issue will examine how gender shaped anticolonial thought and praxis in the interwar Caribbean (1919-39). Studying the global origins of anticolonialism, feminist scholars have deconstructed the “citizen/subject” binary, highlighting the relationship among political exclusion, racial hierarchies, and gender inequality. They have also illuminated how oppositional movements throughout the colonized world reconfigured and reproduced ideas about sexual difference, articulating citizenship claims through gendered ideologies that often affirmed—rather than dislodged—patriarchy.
