eBook - PDF
Downtown Ladies
Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
Downtown Ladies
Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica
About this book
The Caribbean "market woman" is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs—who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica.
Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global economies. Gina Ulysse carefully explores how ICIs, determined to be self-employed, struggle with government regulation and other social tensions to negotiate their autonomy. Informing this story of self-fashioning with reflections on her own experience as a young Haitian anthropologist, Ulysse combines the study of political economy with the study of individual and collective identity to reveal the uneven consequences of disrupting traditional class, color, and gender codes in individual societies and around the world.
Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global economies. Gina Ulysse carefully explores how ICIs, determined to be self-employed, struggle with government regulation and other social tensions to negotiate their autonomy. Informing this story of self-fashioning with reflections on her own experience as a young Haitian anthropologist, Ulysse combines the study of political economy with the study of individual and collective identity to reveal the uneven consequences of disrupting traditional class, color, and gender codes in individual societies and around the world.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Downtown Ladies by Gina A. Ulysse in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Chicago PressYear
2008Print ISBN
9780226841229, 9780226841212eBook ISBN
9780226841236Table of contents
- Contents
- Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Toward a Reflexive Political Economy within a Political Economy of Reflexivity
- Chapter 1. Of Ladies and Women: Historicizing Gendered Class and Color Codes
- Chapter 2. From Higglering to Informal Commercial Importing
- Chapter 3. Caribbean Alter(ed) natives: An Auto-Ethnographic Quilt
- Chapter 4. Uptown Women/Downtown Ladies: Differences among ICIs
- Chapter 5. Inside and Outside of the Arcade: My Downtown Dailies and Miss B.’s Tuffness
- Chapter 6. Shopping in Miami: Globalization, Saturated Markets, and the Reflexive Political Economy of ICIs
- Chapter 7. Style, Imported Blackness, and My Jelly Platform Shoes
- Brawta. Written on Black Bodies: ICIs’ Futures
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index