This book traces the powerful discourses and embodied practices through which Black Caribbean
women have been imagined and produced as subjects of British liberal rule and modern freedom.
It argues that in seeking to escape liberalism's gendered and racialised governmentalities
Black women's everyday self-making practices construct decolonising and feminising
epistemologies of freedom. These in turn repeatedly interrogate the colonial logics of
liberalism and Britishness. Genealogically structured the book begins with the narratives of
freedom and identity presented by Black British Caribbean women. It then analyses critical
moments of crisis in British racial rule at home and abroad in which gender and Caribbean women
figure as points of concern. Post-war Caribbean immigration to the UK decolonisation of the
British Caribbean and the post-emancipation reconstruction of the British Caribbean loom large
in these considerations. In doing all of this the author unravels the colonial legacies that
continue to underwrite contemporary British multicultural anxieties. This thought-provoking
work will appeal to students and scholars of social and cultural history politics feminism
race and postcoloniality.
