In Downtown Ladies by Gina A. Ulysse, she sets up the basic subject matter of her book, which also served as her dissertation topic for her Ph. D. in anthropology, but not before taking care to set up both the historical context of Jamaica as her "field" and the social context of the meaning of race/color, gender, and class as well as her personal context of being a "regional native, local outsider" as a Haitian feminist anthropologist. Ulysse's establishment of these contexts serve to debunk the oppressive, mythical notion of objectivity often ascribed to white male academicians.
Ulysse chooses as her dissertation topic and subject matter for this book the imaginings versus realities of informal commercial importers, or ICIs, and the various ways they are perceived as extensions of stereotypical notions of higglers and market women as juxtaposed to the reality of their existence. In Chapter One, she gives historical context to notions of ladies and women, showing how they are dichotomized against each other, and the race and class codes that interweave the dichotomy. In reference to the Cult of True Womanhood, aka the Cult of Domesticity, Ulysse argues "it is not womanhood per se that black females were denied by the Cult....Rather, they were specifically shorn of what we have come to regard as femininity, that is the desexualized demeanor that females (who are not ladies) must mindfully cultivate in the moment to restrain their purported natural instincts." (26). Ulysse continually references the woman/lady dichotomy in her book, bringing in notions of class and race/color. In the dichotomy sense, white women are automatically ladies, whereas black women are not given the assumption and must prove themselves worthy of the title. Poor and working class women are not ladies, especially as they need to provide economic support for themselves that may not challenge, and even reaffirm, the womanhood but denies their ability to be ladies. This directly influences the role of ICIs, as they are taking economic control of their lives through the trade. Perhaps in titling the book Downtown Ladies, Ulysse seeks to challenge woman/lady dichotomy by reaffirming femininity of the women.
The perceptions of ICIs descends from perceptions of the market woman and the higgler. In Chapter Two, Ulysse provides historiography that lays the context for her research and field study. From the time of slavery, attempts and successes at economic independence have been part of the Jamaican story, including Jamaican women. With these attempts and successes also comes regulation from government authority, imposing gender as well as race/color control on an economic activity that affects class, from the time of market women, to higglers, to ICIs. "While on the one hand governments profess the well-meaning intent of their policies, on the other hand their actual effects only further impinge upon and constrict the lives of the poor resulting in greater socioeconomic instability. (87)." This reality will be reflected in some ICIs personal decisions to be registered or unregistered as well as visible or invisible, both in regards to government regulation and negative connotations associated with being an ICI.
In Chapter Three, Ulysse takes care to create what she calls an "auto-ethnograhic quilt" that situates her role as Black feminist anthropologist and Haitian expatriate, a "regional native, local outsider." This role affects both the perceptions of her at her graduate school as well as the perception of her in the field as Black feminist anthropologist. Her auto-ethnographic quilt lays foundation for explanation of her methods, from how she is perceived because of her title as anthropologist, to how she is perceived for her style of dress and hairstyle as accessories to her dark skin. While on the one hand, her positioning of her person can be seen as necessary because of her gender and race, as expected of her in a white-male dominant academy and consequently disempowering, her positioning of herself is also empowering as she challenges the myth of objectivity. The privilege of objectivity is afforded to white researches, especially male, in a way that affects the ability to research and have taken seriously the research of female academicians and academicians of color. When not positioning the researcher, those who are studied are treated as less human with the inability to perceive difference among those who question them and write about them.
With these historical, social, and personal contexts in place, by Chapter Four, Ulysse has set a thorough foundation for the interpretation and understanding of her research of ICIs in Jamaica. Her methods are worthy of noting as effective in introducing her research, so that by the time she situates her profiles of the ICIs, both formal and informal, visible and invisible, the reader of her work is better equipped at understanding how gender, race/color, and class interweave in the studies of this Haitian anthropologist. Everything has relevance, and Ulysse lays out the relevance in her positioning of the field research.
Greater appreciation for this research can be experienced when the scholarship of Violet Eudine Barriteau is considered. Her essay "The relevance of Black feminist scholarship: A Caribbean Perspective" seeks to start a conversation about the effectiveness of Black feminist thought to theorize across nationalities and races (9), including the Caribbean. Black feminist thought, lacking in white male researcher privilege, can be pigeon-holed into relevant only to Black women and women of color, but Barriteau shows that it serves to bring in the relevance of various differences, since "white or other feminist theorising that refuses or fails to recognise race [and other differences] as a relation of domination withing feminism and society facilitates the continued oppression of black women [and other oppressed women] withing the feminist movement and withing society. (15)" Positioning of historiography and self must be increasingly demanded to ensure collective liberation, as showcased by Ulysse and promoted by Barriteau.
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