Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society

The racial character of the anti-colonial discourse in the Caribbean had the effect of removing from centre stage the essential maleness of the targeted colonial historiography. This text focuses attention on women's location at the centre of a male-managed colonial world that simultaneously sought their "otherness" through objectified forms of discourse. The author seeks to comprehend the complex network of relationships that constitute gender domination, to expose how these relations determined the lives of women in slave societies, and to explore the effectiveness of women's agency in the search for autonomy, social justice and material improvement in their lives.