Endorsements

Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence Imagining Caribbean womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. Imagining Caribbean womanhood traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean between 1929 and 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation. The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and eroticised. The lively discussion surrounding beauty competitions, examined in this book, reveals that beauty was used to bring into being a sense of Caribbean modernity, citizenship and the desire for political and economic freedom. Within this period Caribbean beauty competitions changed from the private parties of the white-creole elite into mass public events that promoted new visions of Caribbean nationhood based on brown and black femininity. This volume explores the intense competitive rivalries shaped by enduring colonial social hierarchy that played out through beauty contests. It examines the perspectives and motivations of female beauty candidates. It also examines the responses of Caribbean feminists, including Jamaican poet and nationalist Una Marson and Trinidadian-born, Harlem-raised communist activist Claudia Jones who founded a new beauty competition for Caribbean settlers in postwar London. This cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions will be of value to scholarship on beauty, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, 'race' and racism studies and studies of the body.