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Hispanic American Historical Review 83.2 (2003) 377-379



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Slavery, Freedom, and Gender: The Dynamics of Caribbean Society. Edited by BRIAN L. MOORE, B. W. HIGMAN, CARL CAMPBELL, and PATRICK BRYAN. Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. Notes. xv, 297 pp. Cloth.

The 13 essays of this collection, introduced by Brian L. Moore, were delivered under the auspices of the Elsa Goveia Memorial Lectures at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, between 1987 and 1998. Previously published separately, they sample several topics that have concerned Caribbean historians, including the influence of the scholar in whose honor the lecture series was established. Professor Goveia was born in Guyana in 1925 and educated at the University of London. Appointed to what was then the University College of the West Indies in 1950, she was the first woman to become a professor there when she was offered a chair in West Indian history in 1961. Her pioneering publications include Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1965), and she influenced an entire generation of outstanding students before her death in 1980.

The lectures are grouped into two sections, the first entitled "In Slavery and Freedom," and the second devoted to "Gender Paradigms"; the final chapter serves as an epilogue. Together they show the persistence of several themes in Caribbean historiography, and several lecturers referred to Goveia's influence. One of her ideas, examined by B. W. Higman in "The Invention of Slave Society," was that the "slave society"—meaning the interrelationship between all component groups in the society—was a coherent whole, despite its obvious inequalities and conflicts. This view recognized the central influence of slavery, while encouraging the study of other aspects, including the free people of color and non-slave-owning whites, in order to understand the society as a whole. Higman argues that she also gave "the impetus to a related yet different model, the idea of creole society" (p. 60), which aspired to "a new sense of community," in Goveia's words, that could come from [End Page 377] understanding both changes and continuities in "the thoughts, habits, and institutions of a whole society."

In "Slavery and the Transformation of Society in Cuba, 1511-1760," Franklin W. Knight describes the genesis of Cuban society, which, until the late eighteenth century, was a predominantly free-labor society with "a remarkable pluralism" that including Indians, Africans, Europeans, and various mixtures (p. 86). Only after the growth of the sugar industry in the late eighteenth century, which brought a massive increase of enslaved Africans and rigid racial distinctions, did Cuba become a slave society. Colin A. Palmer's "Africa in the Making of the Caribbean: The Formative Years" points to ways that "early African peoples laid the cultural foundations of the contemporary Caribbean" (p. 54), and Monica Schuler, in "Liberated Africans in Nineteenth-Century Guyana," describes how, in a later period, newly arrived Africans reinforced African cultural traits in Guyanese society. Douglas Hall's "Planters, Farmers, and Gardeners in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica" shows that the horticultural activities of free blacks and slaves were not confined to production for export. Woodville K. Marshall's "The Post-Slavery Labour Problem Revisited" examines debates about the postslavery period and concludes that there were continuities in labor relations and the cultivation and marketing of provisions.

Lucille Mathurin Mair adds the gender dimension in "Women Field Workers in Jamaica During Slavery," showing the importance of women's labor in the cane fields and of their subsequent withdrawal from estate labor into the domestic economy. Hilary McD. Beckles expands on this in "Freeing Slavery: Gender Paradigms in the Social History of Caribbean Slavery," which focuses on the construction of gender roles and identities in relation to work and sexuality. She asserts that "gender resided at the core of concepts and discourses of slavery and freedom in modernity" (p. 225). Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and Memories in the Narratives of African American Women" assesses the psychological costs of oppression for...

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