Straw Craft, imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as tightly braided sites of gender production in Haiti and Curaçao

Hammond, Charlotte ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5383-7486 2023. Straw Craft, imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as tightly braided sites of gender production in Haiti and Curaçao. Journal of Material Culture 28 (4) , pp. 515-538. 10.1177/13591835231210689

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Abstract

Woven straw work produced in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century represented a small but sustainable percentage of the region’s exports. Following the US occupation in Haiti (1915-1934) handicrafts were promoted as economic ‘development’: commodified folklore fashioned for the delight of visiting tourists. Up until 1946 in Curaçao, as a strategy of the Catholic church’s civilising mission, young women trained to plait the so-called ‘Panama hat’ at technical schools (Roemer, 1977); the products of their labour were often exhibited at international expositions and exported for sale in Europe and the United States. This article argues that missionary education that claimed to modernise, industrialise and revalue local handicraft skills to the benefit of local populations in Haiti and the Dutch Caribbean has instead perpetuated colonial gendered and racialised divisions of labour that prepare and discipline students for factory work in the global textile industries. I use straw artefacts and photographs from the collection of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures as a starting point to trace the entanglements between imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as sites of gender production. Drawing on Jean Casimir’s concept of contre-plantation (2001), I explore how histories of indigenous craft during specific periods of resistance in Haiti has nurtured disidentification with a gendered logic of labour exploitation and racial capitalism.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Modern Languages
Publisher:	SAGE Publications (UK and US)
ISSN:	1359-1835
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 October 2023
Date of Acceptance:	12 October 2023
Last Modified:	23 Jan 2024 15:53
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/163186

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