Date of Award
May 2020
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
African American Studies
Advisor(s)
Linda Carty
Keywords
Downtown, Gender, Higglers, Jamaica, Womanhood, working-class women
Subject Categories
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
This project examines the lived experiences of higglers in Downtown, Kingston, and how they survive Jamaica’s misogynistic capitalist patriarchal society as marginalized Black working-class women. Data were gathered through a series of semi-structured and unstructured interviews, and participant observation and journal entries. My theoretical frame employed historical materialism and Black Feminist epistemological standpoints which include Caribbean, African, and ‘Third World’ feminism, through a gendered lens to deconstruct neoliberal global capitalism in neocolonial Jamaica. My project also assumes that the impact of neoliberal global capitalism that thrives on patriarchy has forced Black working-class women in Jamaican to reproduce a political consciousness of survival in the informal economy. Understanding how the legacies of (British-American) capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism provided the stimulus for Jamaica’s peripheral position on the global landscape and the ways in which sexual and gendered politics negatively affect higglers, I primarily engage discourses of difference, power, privilege, and resistance. Ultimately, I found that there is a growing anti-Black womanhood (neo)colonial gendered coded sentiment that has been culturally normalized in Jamaica.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Brown, Reneé, "Voices of the (In)Visible: A Gendered Study on Higglers In Downtown Kingston, Jamaica" (2020). Theses - ALL. 390.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/390
