“Ah look afta de chile like is mine’: Discourses of Mothering in Jamaican Domestic Service, 1920-1970” in Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, 79-96
This groundbreaking book brings together two key themes that have not been addressed together previously in any sustained way: domestic service and colonization. Colonization offers a rich and exciting new paradigm for analyzing the phenomenon of domestic labor by non-family workers, paid and otherwise. Colonization is used here in its broadest sense, to refer to the expropriation and exploitation of land and resources by one group over another, and encompassing imperial/extraction and settler modes of colonization, internal colonization, and present-day neo-colonialism. Contributors from diverse fields and disciplines share new and stimulating insights on the various connections between domestic employment and the processes of colonization, both past and present, in a range of original essays dealing with Indonesian, Canadian Aboriginal, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Islander, African, Jamaican, Indian, Chinese, Anglo-Indian, Sri Lankan, and ‘white’ domestic servants.
Michele Johnson is a professor of history and Associate Dean Students in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University.
Other publications from this author include:
- “In Slavery and Freedom: Domestic Service in the Caribbean” in Slavery, Resistance and Abolitions: A Pluralist Perspective, 197-214 (2019)
- “‘Mi have to work’: La domesticité des enfants en Jamaïque, 1920-1970” in Situations Contemporaines de Servitude et d’Esclavage: Anthropologie et sociétés, 41 (1), 147-177 (2017)
- “‘The Spear is Black with a pure gold point’: Articulations of ‘Blackness’ in Toronto during the 1970s” in Exploring Dimensions of African Diasporas, 180-215 (2014)
- “‘. . . to ensure that only suitable persons are sent’: Screening Jamaican Women for the West Indian Domestic Scheme in Canada” in Jamaicans in the Canadian Experience: A Multiculturalizing Presence, 36-53 (2012)
- “They Do as They Please”: The Jamaican Struggle for Cultural Freedom After Morant Bay (2011)
- “‘Problematic Bodies’: Negotiations and Terminations in Domestic Service in Jamaica, 1920-1970” in Left History (Special Issue: Domestic Service), 12 (2), 84-112 (2007)
- “Women’s Labours in the Caribbean” in Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal / Revue d’etudes sur les femmes, 32 (1), 2007. (2007)
- Neither Led Nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920 (2004)
- UNSETTLING THE GREAT WHITE NORTH: BLACK CANADIAN HISTORY ()