This book analyzes textual representations of Jamaican slave women in three contexts--motherhood, intimate relationships, and work--in both pro- and antislavery writings. Altink examines how British abolitionists and pro-slavery activists represented the slave women to their audiences and explains not only the purposes that these representations served, but also their effects on slave women's lives.

Taking Jamaica as its focus of study, this book analyzes three debates about slave women in the period 1780-1838 which were central to the competing discourses of slavery and abolition: motherhood, marriage and flogging.

Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780-1838 examines how British abolitionists and pro-slavery activists represented the slave women to their audiences and explain the purposes that these representations served. Henrice Altink shows how the representations were linked to plantation practices, slave laws, and metropolitan discourses, and that they exerted both positive and negative effects on slave women's lives.

This volume makes a welcome contribution to the scholarship on discourses of slavery and abolition, embedding them within their metropolitan and colonial contexts, and showing how they were varied, changing and inconsistent.

Informed by critical race theory and based on a wide range of sources, including official sources, memoirs, and anthropological studies, this book examines multiple forms of racial discrimination in Jamaica and how they were talked about and experienced from the end of the First World War until the demise of democratic socialism in the 1980s. It also pays attention to practices devoid of racial content but which equally helped to sustain a society stratified by race and colour, such as voting qualifications. Case studies on the labour market, education, the family and legal system, among other areas, demonstrate the extent to which race and colour shaped social relations in the island in the decades preceding and following independence and argue that racial discrimination was a public secret - everybody knew it took place but few dared to openly discuss or criticise it. The book ends with an examination of race and colour in contemporary Jamaica to show that race and colour have lost little of their power since independence and offers some suggestions to overcome the silence on race to facilitate equality of opportunity for all.

For decades, France has been considered one of the world's first and most fully formed nation-states--providing a global model of state-centered modernity. Events in recent years, however, such as the long-term presence of France's North African population, the growth of Islam as France's second-largest religion, the development of anti-centrist regional movements, and growing debates about French sexual and social identities have endowed the theme of borders with a special resonance in French studies. This exciting interdisciplinary collection presents a series of perspectives on French border identities in the context of globalization, locating "border" situations in a variety of contexts--geographical, social, cultural, and sexual--that challenge preconceptions about the centrality of the nation-state as the foundation of contemporary French identity.