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

• Autore: Ulysse Gina A
• Pubblicazione: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2007
• Edizione: 1st ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (351 p.)
• Disciplina: 381/.18082097292
• Soggetto topico: Street vendors - Jamaica; Women merchants - Jamaica; Informal sector (Economics) - Jamaica; Imports - Jamaica
• 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 Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders-known as informal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.
• Titolo autorizzato: Downtown ladies
• ISBN: 9786611966690; 1-281-96669-X; 0-226-84123-5
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910807135303321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
• Serie: Women in culture and society.