ABSTRACT
Resistance is no stranger to Jamaica. Neither is “refusing development,” particularly that purported by hegemonic groups, from colonizers to globalizers. Rooted in a historical tradition of struggle against British slavery, colonialism, and the plantation system, this small island-nation, the largest in the English-speaking Caribbean, is now permanent resident to openly violent opposition as well as “hidden transcripts,” embodied in “everyday forms of peasant resistance” (see J. C. Scott 1985, 1990). Emerging historical studies aimed at rethinking Afro-Caribbean politics of resistance during and after slavery are increasingly recognizing women as having played a critical foundational role in slave resistance, the labor movement, diffuse community mobilizations and organization as well as various modes of contemporary cultural resistance. This innovative historico-theoretical recasting powerfully illustrates how despite extraordinary sexism and racism, aimed at silencing and excluding them from the “bourgeois” public sphere, Afro-Caribbean women catapulted themselves to the foreground of collective struggles and cultures of resistance by turning everyday activities into sites of resistance and ordinary spaces into theaters for collective action (Reddock 1995; Shepherd, Brereton, and Bailey 1995; Wilmot 1995; Momsen 1996; Sheller 1997).
