You are warmly invited to the following seminar to be held at the Institute of Education on Wednesday 25th November:

 

Rochelle Rowe (Essex University) 'Parading the Creme de la Creme for the National Good: Beauty Contests, Feminine Spectacle and New Masculinities in Barbados, 1959-1966'

 

Venue: Institute of Education - Nunn Hall, Level 4, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAL

Time: 5.30pm

 

Abstract:

 

This paper examines the emergence of the beauty contest in Barbados, against the backdrop of the ‘crisis of decolonisation’ that shook the British West Indies through the mid-twentieth century. It considers the beauty contest as a parade of racialised femininities, a space for making and remaking paradigms of ideal womanhood, from which a new iconography of nationhood would emerge as Barbados left the British Empire in 1966. 

The Caribbean beauty contest, immersed in the “business of feminine spectacle”, played a central role in essentialising a Caribbean glamour. This paper considers the role of the Jaycees, a youth movement favoured by socially aspirant men, in organising the contests, pairing business sponsors to beauty candidates. How was the making of male citizenship bound up with production of the parade of racialised, class-bound femininities on the beauty contest stage? The paper also considers the effects when this process was seen to lapse, as in the “Miss Ebony” beauty competition of 1964. It draws upon the testimony of three former contestants of Barbadian beauty shows, “Carnival Queen”, “Miss Independence” and “Miss Ebony”, and considers the competing allurements and pressures of participating in the beauty contest for female candidates, posited the “crème de la crème” of Barbadian womanhood. 

 

Bio

 

Rochelle Rowe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on the changing representations of femininity amidst the cultural ‘wars’ of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century Anglophone Caribbean. She is the author of "Glorifying the Jamaican Girl": The "Ten Types - One People" Beauty Contest, Racialized Femininities, and Jamaican Nationalism, Radical History Review 2009(103): 36-58 (2009)

 

 

The seminar is part of the Caribbean Seminar Series run by the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. 

 

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