Imagining Caribbean womanhood: Race, nation and beauty competitions, 1929–70

By Rochelle Rowe

Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation.

The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and subtly eroticised. The lively discussion surrounding beauty competitions, examined in this book, reveals that femininity was used to shape ideas about Caribbean modernity, citizenship, and political and economic freedom. This cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions will be of value to scholarship on beauty, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ‘race’ and racism studies and studies of the body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111265

Rochelle Rowe

Rochelle Rowe teaches at the University of Exeter

Book preview

The early ‘Miss Jamaica’ competition: cultural revolution and feminist voices, 1929–50

Introduction

The first ‘Miss Jamaica’ beauty competition took place in 1929 and was sponsored by the national newspaper the Daily Gleaner , then closely aligned with planter-merchant interests. The Gleaner’s editor was Herbert G. de Lisser, the most dominant figure in Jamaican literature and publishing, whose reign at the paper extended from 1904 to 1944. ‘Miss Jamaica’ represented an attempt to mark the cultural and racial supremacy of the white-creole planter-merchant class over the rest of Jamaica. This campaign was shaped by de Lisser and sustained through his literary and journalistic publications.

The ‘Miss Jamaica’ beauty contest developed in the 1930s, a decade that witnessed a surge in anticolonial activity: popular uprisings, feminist development, the formation of political parties, and an artistic and literary cultural awakening. However, the ‘Miss Jamaica’ beauty competition did not emerge as part of this cultural revolution, but in resistance to it. The competition became the pre-eminent social gathering among the elite, even as the tumultuous 1930s unfolded around them. However, it also aroused the contempt of middle-class nationalists, including taboo-breaking feminist, poet and playwright Una Marson. Marson attacked the beauty competition and, as her anticolonial position developed, began to interrogate the politics of feminine beauty brought to light by the mood of resistance to British colonialism and the advance of American consumerism in the island. Through an analysis of de Lisser’s dedicated construction of idealised white femininity and Marson’s and her contemporary Amy Bailey’s feminist-nationalist critique of Jamaican national identity, this chapter establishes the context for the origins of a Caribbean beauty competition before the Second World War. Finally it considers the new beauty competitions which emerged immediately after the war and only for a short time: ‘Miss British Caribbean’, and ‘Miss Kingston’. These new competitions projected modified formulations of femininity, through the performance of cultured, modern beauty by women of colour that would signal the islands’ emergence from colonialism.

The Jamaican labour uprisings and political formation

The British civilising mission that sought to mollify the lower classes in post-emancipation Jamaica was only partially successful and the lower classes continued to organise and resist the colonial regime as the twentieth century dawned. However, attempts to organise labour were most successful in the decades between the wars. This period saw the return of ex-servicemen to the island, disillusioned with the black experience at home and abroad, the onset of global economic depression that forced the return of thousands of migrant labourers, and still other migrants leaving rural areas for Kingston in search of work. The unemployed and underemployed converged on the capital’s slums and shanty towns. The city rapidly doubled in size, growing from 117,000 to 237,000 between 1921 and 1943.1

Radical black leader Marcus Garvey, having formed the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston in 1914, and seen it grow throughout the region and in the United States, returned to Kingston from the US in 1927 as a deportee. The UNIA spread rapidly amongst working people, and became a catalyst for their politicisation and organisation. Garvey won a seat on the Kingston and St Andrew Council, a public representative body, and formed the People’s Political Party, but was unable to breach the Legislative Council in the elections of the following year.2 In addition to Garveyism, other forms of race-conscious nationalism were growing among middle and lower-class blacks. Ethiopianism was an international anticolonial movement, also present in the US and South Africa, which saw free-governed Ethiopia as an affirmative vision of black Africa. Ethiopianism in Jamaica emerged from the anticolonialism of the black churches in the nineteenth century, formerly the basis for missionaries’ model societies.3 Also present in interwar Jamaica was Rastafarianism, formed after the coronation of Ras Tafari as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia in 1930. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 became an important element in anticolonial protest in both Jamaica and Trinidad.4

Jamaican labour protests began on the north coast in 1935 with striking banana workers in St Mary and dockers at the port of Falmouth, protesting against low wages. In the following year the Jamaica Workers and Tradesmen Union (JWTU) was formed among rural peasants and catalysed protests in the countryside. Its leaders were Allan Coombs and Hugh Buchanan, both the sons of rural peasants. Coombs was a former policeman and had served in the West Indian Regiment during the First World War. Buchanan had likely been radicalised in the UNIA.5 By 1937 workers were in open and spontaneous rebellion, with major riots and strikes in Kingston and ‘rolling’ strikes throughout the country.6 This rebellion, reported in the British press, was a major embarrassment to the colonial government, who were increasingly in competition in the region with American imperial interests and sought to appear as benevolent rulers.7 The rebellion provoked a Royal Commission, headed by Lord Moyne, into the causes of poverty and underdevelopment in Jamaica and the wider British West Indies. However, with the outbreak of war, the publication of the report of the Moyne Commission was postponed to