Decolonizing and Feminizing Freedom

Abstract

This partial, sociohistorical and biopolitically situated Caribbean gene- alogy of liberal freedom offers a narration of a particular experience of Black Britishness and Caribbean womanhood, beginning from the per- spectives of women of Caribbean descent living in London. This book transnational perspective attends closely to the politics of location, both geographically and discursively, which construct the intersectionalities of heterosexual Black femininity. This inevitably must include attention to how the formation of the free African-Caribbean woman has emerged in relation to other categories of Blackness, Caribbean identity and woman, engaging with the local, regional and uneven global flows ofthe diasporic, the transnational and the global. The writing of this book has principally been informed by my own location as a Black British-born scholar of African-Jamaican descent, and my own frustration and yearning to find a way of analysing the politics of race, ethnicity, gender and racism in Britain in ways that can take seriously their conjunctural global and local historical formations. These histories reappear in the national and transimperial legacies, which, in their interactions with the neocolonial formations of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, constituted the condi- tions of possibility framing twenty-first-century postcolonial Britain. Understanding the contemporary politics of race and ethnicity in Britain outside this analytical frame is to perpetually misdiagnose the times in which we live and the people whom Britain claims to be.