From Colonial Subjects to Black Nations: Racializing the Caribbean within Global Blackness
In this talk, Dr Jamella N. Gow will examine how global racial hierarchies rooted in histories of racialized Black labour under capitalism define Caribbean nations as Black. Tracing the global historical processes of colonialism, imperialist underdevelopment, and neoliberalism in the Caribbean, she will show how these processes then inform racist policies that target nations and their migrants by relying on tropes of both Black criminality and exploitability now reproduced on a global scale.
School of Social and Political Sciences; College of Social Sciences Hub
Date: Tuesday 21 October 2025
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Venue: Online
Category: Public lectures, Academic events, Student events, Staff workshops and seminars
Speaker: Dr Jamella N. Gow
Chaired by: Dr Aaron Winter, Lancaster University
In collaboration with Sociology at Lancaster University
16.00-17.30pm BST / 11.00am-12.30pm ET (Online)
In this talk, Dr Jamella N. Gow will examine how global racial hierarchies rooted in histories of racialized Black labour under capitalism define Caribbean nations as Black. Tracing the global historical processes of colonialism, imperialist underdevelopment, and neoliberalism in the Caribbean, she will show how these processes then inform racist policies that target nations and their migrants by relying on tropes of both Black criminality and exploitability now reproduced on a global scale. Through a comparative case study of both Haiti and Jamaica, Dr Gow will argue for how both nations become positioned within local and global racial hierarchies reliant on global Blackness, and how they and their diaspora redefine themselves through their own iterations of Black nationalist identity.
Read the Identities article: ‘From colonial subjects to Black nations: racializing the Caribbean within global Blackness’