A01=Gina A. Ulysse
anthropology
archetype
Author_Gina A. Ulysse
autonomy
black women
blackness
caribbean
Category=JBSF1
Category=KCLT
economics
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender
globalization
government regulation
haiti
ici
identity
imports
independence
independent international traders
informal commercial importers
jamaica
kingston
market woman
merchants
nonfiction
political economy
public markets
race
saturation
self employment
self-fashioning
self-making
stereotypes
street vendors
tradition
Product details
- ISBN 9780226841212
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 2007
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, "Downtown Ladies" offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders - known as informal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.
Gina Ulysse is assistant professor in the departments of anthropology and African American studies at Wesleyan University.
