1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910782689203321

Autore

Ulysse Gina Athena

Titolo

Downtown ladies [[electronic resource] ] : informal commercial importers, a Haitian anthropologist, and self-making in Jamaica / / Gina A. Ulysse

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2007

ISBN

9786611966690

1-281-96669-X

0-226-84123-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (351 p.)

Collana

Women in culture and society

Disciplina

381/.18082097292

Soggetti

Street vendors - Jamaica

Women merchants - Jamaica

Informal sector (Economics) - Jamaica

Imports - Jamaica

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-315) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Toward a Reflexive Political Economy within a Political Economy of Reflexivity -- Chapter One. Of Ladies and Women: Historicizing Gendered Class and Color Codes -- Chapter Two. From Higglering to Informal Commercial Importing -- Chapter Three. Caribbean Alter(ed)natives: An Auto-Ethnographic Quilt -- Chapter Four. Uptown Women/Downtown Ladies: Differences among ICIs -- Chapter Five. Inside and Outside of the Arcade: My Downtown Dailies and Miss B.'s Tuffness -- Chapter Six. Shopping in Miami: Globalization, Saturated Markets, and the Reflexive Political Economy of ICIs -- Chapter Seven. Style, Imported Blackness, and My Jelly Platform Shoes -- Brawta. Written on Black Bodies: ICIs' Futures -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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 Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by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 1970's, 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.