From Colony to Nation: Women Activists and the Gendering of Politics in Belize, 1912 – 1982

Abstract

Anne Macpherson’s From Colony to Nation intends to recuperate the critical if not always consonant roles that working- and middle-class women played in labor organization, ethnic mobilization, and the forging of an antiracist, anticolonial, incipiently feminist nationalist movement in Belize (formerly British Honduras) during the six decades preceding independence in 1981. The author usefully situates these local struggles within the broader sweep of analogous movements elsewhere in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the British Empire. In so doing, she underscores how the race- and gender-inclusive anticolonial popular culture of Belize informed the nationalist movement as it emerged within a broader wave of strife that swept through Britain’s colonies in the 1930s. The resulting reform policies, characteristically dedicated to containing social unrest and directing political evolution in the late British colonial era, paradoxically created new space for working- and middle-class women to act upon that process in innovative (if sometimes contradictory) and previously unacknowledged ways, a process this book proceeds to theorize.The monograph is based upon a thorough reading of a variety of archival sources together with published primary and secondary materials, and over one hundred ethnographic interviews with political actors, NGO staff, and social commentators, all carried out by the author as a participant-observer during repeated fieldwork installments over the period 1988 – 96. The author bases her assessment of the evidence in a broad, indeed illuminating knowledge of historiographic, anthropological, cultural studies, postcolonial, and feminist theory.Macpherson crafts a meticulous and creative interrogation of the pertinent documentary evidence and ethnographic material to present a comprehensive account of women’s roles as political actors in the emergence of an independent Belize. While clearly written and agreeably jargon free, From Colony to Nation is too exhaustively documented for the casual reader, the undergraduate course, or the graduate seminar; indeed, a more judicious editing for length would not have detracted from the author’s overall argument. This title will primarily interest the comparative social historian, cultural theorist, political sociologist, or scholar of Belize.From Colony to Nation draws upon salient feminist and postcolonial historiography, using new evidence from Belize in comparative fashion to address prevailing debates on the nature of popular political mobilization in Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond. Macpherson crafts a careful reinterpretation of Belizean history. She does not hesitate to critically engage the Belizean canon (e.g., Peter Ashdown, Cedric Grant, Nigel Bolland, Assad Shoman), even as she extends the insights of antecedent feminist anthropology carried out there (e.g., Peta Henderson and Ann Bryn Haughton, Virginia Kerns, Irma McLaurin, Richard Wilk).Macpherson argues that gender, understood as “a power relationship between men and women as well as a field constitutive of race and class hierarchies and political, particularly state, power” (p. 6), is structured by the matrix of social relations even as it acts upon it. She also demonstrates how working-class women, and black women in particular, played a fundamental role in conditioning the ultimate failure of colonial hegemony in Belize. As elsewhere in the British Caribbean (and contrary to claims made by subaltern studies scholars of Africa and Asia), “The gendered moralism of the colonial state in Belize and other modern colonies . . . and not its intrinsic colonial character, is most salient in explaining the failure of its hegemonic project” (p. 14). Colonial officials were invested in prevalent notions of gendered, sexualized, imperial European racism, which imputed an irascible resistance to domesticity that in turn rationalized the denial to women of full popular political participation. While a proud notion of black womanhood emerged in Belize at least by the time of political crisis in the 1930s, paradoxically, Macpherson argues, black women were those primarily responsible for creating the multiracial, incipiently nationalist coalition from which the small white minority in this ethnically diverse polity was largely excluded.Belizean political history and emergent nationalism are thus revealed as explicitly gendered processes in which women have been central, deliberate, and determinant actors. Macpherson shows subaltern women activists to be adept at adapting to, negotiating with, reframing, manipulating, and resisting colonial power, while middle-class women, recruited to the government’s reformist program, organized to exert their own mediating influence upon the unfolding political process in the run-up to independence.Macpherson steers adeptly between easy tendencies to idealize, to make heroic the political resistance of subordinated actors, or to discount them as largely indifferent to politics. Likewise, the author rejects a polarized view of middle-class women activists as either uncritically complicit in the colonial project or dedicated to its radical reform. In the spirit of Philippe Bourgois’s landmark Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation, Macpherson brings an innovative, unapologetically revisionist perspective to her project, offering the first work to theorize the political subjectivities of women in Belize and thereby significantly raising the theoretical stakes of the historiography of Central America’s understudied Caribbean coast.