White Gloves, Black Nation - (Gender and American Culture) by Grace Sanders Johnson (Paperback)

About the Book

"This transnational history of gender and radical politics during and after the US occupation of Haiti follows a cohort of Haitian women from Haiti through the Caribbean to the United States, Canada, and the Belgian Congo. Grace Sanders Johnson uses this group of women to explore how gender, national, and racial identities were forged among elite and middle class women"--

Book Synopsis

This ambitious transnational history considers Haitian women's political life during and after the United States occupation of Haiti (1915-34). The two decades following the occupation were some of the most politically dynamic and promising times in Haiti's modern history, but the history of women's political organizing in this period has received scant attention. Tracing elite and middle-class women's activism and intellectual practice from the countryside of Kenscoff, Haiti, to Philadelphia, the Belgian Congo, and back to Port-au-Prince, this book tells the story of Haitian women's essential role as co-curators of modern Haitian citizenship.

Set in a period when national belonging was articulated in philosophies of African authenticity, revolutionary nostalgia, and working-class politics, Grace Sanders Johnson considers how an emerging educated and professional class of women who understood themselves as descendants of the Haitian Revolution established alternative claims to citizenship that included, but were not limited to, suffrage and radicalism. Sanders Johnson argues that these women's political practice incorporated strategic class performance, extravagant sartorial sensibilities, and an insistence on self-promotion and preservation that challenged the exceptional trope of the martyred male revolutionary hero. Bringing her subjects vividly to life, she reveals their politics of wayfaring, moving deliberately if sometimes ineffectively through the radical milieu of the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

"Sanders Johnson's examinations of the intersections of class, gender, sexuality, and race in the lives and work of LFAS women and their representations of Haitian womanhood make a significant contribution to the existing scholarship on the LFAS as well as to scholarship on Haitian and Caribbean feminisms and women's movements in Haiti, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Sanders Johnson is in dialogue with a broad range of interdisciplinary scholarship, including literary studies and Haitian women's fiction. Her skillful analyses and judicious use of sources make White Gloves, Black Nation an essential resource for scholars and students of Haitian studies, Black Diaspora studies, and women's and gender studies."--Journal of African American History

"A much-needed addition to the canon of Haitian history and the history of women's activism. . . . Deeply researched and persuasively argued, the work nuances and elaborates on the practices of the activists and intellectuals in a time of possibilities. . . . [V]aluable for students of Haitian, Black, Caribbean, and Latin American feminists, as well as students of complexities of activist work."--American Historical Review