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Imperialism was, from its commencement, a racially and sexually gendered reality and the power differential among masculinities emerged in the master/slave relationship that characterized Empire. Hegemonic masculinity generated by the white conquistador birthed a resultant subordinate masculine identity that came to signify the non-White man – initially slave and, later, the free African laborer – in the New World. The subjectification of this non-White man, this Other, proved to be fundamental to the constitution of masculinity along racialized and sexualized frames, complementing how related ideologies functioned in a primarily economic enterprise underpinned by greed as the catalyst for the Conquistador’s actions. The impact? Almost indelible gender identity ramifications on the enslaved African and his offspring across the Caribbean diaspora. This chapter seeks to explore Empire-resultant and Empire-resistant constructions of masculine identity in Olive Senior’s “The View from the Terrace” and Paule Marshall’s “Barbados.” The overarching aim is to underscore that, in the postcolonial Caribbean, as the Afro-Saxon’s proclivity for all things White crumbles, the Afro-Creole man’s own emerging, defining and robust sense of self and masculine identity becomes visible.

This introduction by the volume editors discusses the multiple ways in which visibility and erasure of gender are manifested in social life. Following that discussion, the 12 chapters included in this volume are grouped in ways that demonstrate the relationships among them and are briefly summarized.

This chapter sets up the national event of Carnival in Trinidad as a contested space of liberation and tradition. It explores the intersections of gender and race for a group of young Indian Trinidadian women and highlights the ways in which agency, articulated as sexual liberation and ‘free-up’, is enabled and disabled in relation to mas¹ performance.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Trinidad in 2011 (Raghunandan, K. (2014). The Dougla poetics of Indianness: Negotiating race and gender in Trinidad. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds), this chapter draws on a selection of interviews conducted with a group of young Indian Trinidadian women between the ages of 18 and 25.

The binaristic positioning of modern, morally destructive masquerader vis-à-vis the traditional non-participant is an inadequate approach and this has, to a significant extent, dominated media representations of Indian women which draw on these monolithic stereotypes. There are many ways of ‘doing’ gender and race. Playing mas is only one of them.

These findings are in no way representative of the entire Indian descent population, nor can the young women’s talk be regarded as wholly representative of their lives. Rather, these are a snapshot of their discursively produced subjectivities within a particular time and space.

By problematising the mixed and multicultural image of Carnival, this chapter makes a contribution to Carnival scholarship in its analysis of Indian Trinidadian women’s voices which do not typically feature in Carnival literature. In its drawing upon these voices as epistemological sources, it makes a contribution to wider discourses of race, gender and the nation in the Trinidadian context.

Gender distinctions were central to the ideological and discursive construction of ‘freedom’ in colonial plantation societies, but so too were ethnicity and national identity. This article examines the contested nature of masculinity in the making of free citizens in post-emancipation Jamaica through an analysis of government and missionary sources, popular petitions, public speeches, and newspapers from 1834 to 1865. Close readings of the tensions within these public texts and their official reception demonstrate how freed men worked within and against the dominant discourses of Christian liberalism and masculine individualism as the bases for national citizenship. The key argument is that in laying claim to a Christian and British identity, African-Jamaican men constituted their freedom not so much through a seclusion of women in a private domestic role, but more importantly through an exclusion of indentured East Indians who were negatively defined as ‘foreign’ heathens.

The aim of this paper is to focus on the transition from slavery to wage workers in the American South and British West Indies, and the corresponding nature of the reporting and control procedures that were established in both venues, in order to create a disciplined workforce, and establish regular relations between employees and employers. It seeks to explain the differences in labour control practices between the two regions and to discuss the impact on these practices of accounting and other quantitative techniques c.1760-1870. In particular, it aims to consider the central role played by government in the process.

The study forms part of an archival research project, in which the authors have consulted archives in four Southern States (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina), three Caribbean island nations, formerly British colonies (Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica), and record repositories the length and breadth of Great Britain. The records of the Freedmen ' s Bureau (FB), located in the National Archives, Washington, DC, have been likewise visited. These primary sources have been supported by the extensive secondary literature on slavery and its aftermath.

In the USA, accounting for labour in the transition from slavery was typically ad hoc and inconsistent, whereas in the BWI it was more organised, detailed, and displayed greater uniformity – both within and across colonies. The role of the British Colonial Office (BCO) was crucial here. A range of economic and political factors are advanced to explain the differences between the two locations. The paper highlights the limitations of accounting controls and economic incentives in disciplining labour without the presence of physical coercion in situations where there is a refusal on the part of the workers to cooperate.

There is a relatively small volume of secondary literature comparing US and BWI slavery and its legacy. Likewise, the accounting implications of labour-control practices, during the transition from slavery to freedom, are largely understudied. The research also points to a need to assess the decision-influencing capabilities of management accounting systems in other transitional labour settings.

The purpose of this paper is to complement and extend accounting studies on gender and post-colonialism by examining the interrelationship between accounting, gender and sexuality within an imperial context.

Archival materials enable the construction of an accounting knowledge of how ideas of masculinity and sexuality shaped both female and male participation in distant British colonies.

By exploring the manner in which accounting may be implicated in micro-practices through which gendered/sexualized relations are produced in societies the paper finds that empire’s colonial project on Indian indentured workers, the constitution of their identities, and the translation of abstract policies into practice were facilitated by accounting instruments for management and control.

Original research based on archival studies of British colonial documents.