"Glorifying the Jamaican girl": The "ten Types - One People" beauty contest, racialized femininities, and Jamaican nationalism

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 103, 2009, Pages 36-58

  Rowe, Rochelle ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 64249130924     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2008-039     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. Theodore Sealy, "How We Celebrated Our First Independence: A Personal Recollection," Jamaica Journal 46 (1982): 2-13.
2. The "Ten Types" competition began in 1955 and resumed in 1959 until its demise in 1963. The Gleaner claimed that six thousand women had their photographs taken for entry into the competitions ("LaYacona Takes Top Award in Photo Competition," Gleaner, July 29, 1985). It is likely that the figure of six thousand participants relates to the number of women attracted to the pageant over its entire lifetime from 1955 to 1963. Hereafter, the "Ten Types - One People" beauty contest is referred to as "Ten Types." Thanks to the Arts and Science Research Council.
3. I make reference to "white," "colored" or "brown," and "black or "Negro" people throughout this essay. These were the contemporary color identifiers used in Jamaican society, where white referred to British expatriates and the descendants of European settlers including Sephardic Jews, colored referred to racially mixed people of a variety of complexions, though they were usually light-skinned, and Negro referred to dark-skinned Jamaicans of predominantly African descent. It is also noteworthy that to some extent the predominant white-colored-black social matrix absorbed certain "immigrant" identities such as Jewish, Indian, or Chinese insofar as these individuals acquired wealth and status or intermarried with members of the white-colored-black matrix. Racial terminology was (and is) unstable and varied according to context, both in the Jamaican vernacular and in print; however, the term colored refers mostly to a racially mixed, light-skinned, and usually middle-class identity, therefore carrying both class and color connotations. Unlike in the United States, the term colored was used less frequently as an umbrella term for all African-descended people. Coloredness or brownness was a broad social category a degree, or a number of degrees, removed from that of dark-skinned African Jamaicans at this time, depending on whether the individual in question was particularly light-skinned and/or wealthy or darker brown in complexion and lower middle-class, respectively. However, it is also apparent from the historical source material that the term black was imprecise in printed material and was used on occasion to refer to all people of African descent regardless of skin color. This reveals historical dynamism in racial terminology and quite possibly marks the influence of North America - where binaries of black and white predominate - on the Caribbean.
4. Eudine Barriteau has discussed the postwar developmental program of Caribbean nations in terms of its reproduction of patriarchal systems without reference to a critique of the liberal ideology of the European Enlightenment that framed colonialism. Barriteau, "Theorising Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean," Feminist Review, no. 9 (1998): 186-210.
5. Belinda Edmondson, introduction to Caribbean Romance: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Edmondson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 2. There are many possibilities for further historical inquiry into the differences between and the similarities of articulations of gender, race, and nation in different locations. The following cultural critics have initiated important discussions in this regard: Patricia Pinha, "Afro-Aesthetics in Brazil," in Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 266-89;
6. Rita Barnard, "Contesting Beauty," in Senses of Culture: South Afirican Culture Studies, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Chery-Ann Michael (Oxford University Press, 2000),343-62;
7. Zimitri Erasmus, "Hair Politics," in Nuttall and Michael, Senses of Culture, 380-92. Goldstein specifically suggests that a "colour-blind erotic democracy" has persisted in Brazil, which masks racism (Donna Goldstein, "'Interracial' Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil: Twin Concepts?" American Anthropologist 101 [1999]: 563-78).
8. For more of Natasha Barnes's discussions of beauty contests, see "Face of the Nation: Race, Nationalisms, and Identities in Jamaican Beauty Pageants" in The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader, ed. Jennifer Scanlon (New York: New York Universitv Press, 2000), 355-71,
9. and Cultural Conundrums: Gender, Race, Nation, and the Making of Caribbean Cultural Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
10. This study draws on examinations of mass consumption and specifically of the culture of the beauty industry, including Kathy Peiss's work on the growth of the mass beauty industry in the United States, Sarah Banet-Weiser's study of Miss America as a platform for shaping and articulating national ideals, and Maxine Craig's work on the African American beauty contest tradition as a means of antiracism campaigning and "racial re-articulation." It takes up a feminist treatment of the beauty contest seen as the assertion of community or national ideals delivered through feminine performance, that is, through those learned skills and practices that enact femininity. See Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar. The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan, 1998);
11. Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
12. Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
13. and Deborah L. Madsen, "Performing Community through the Feminine Body: The Beauty Pageant in Transnational Contexts," home.adm.unige.ch/-madsen/Zurich¶geants.htm (accessed August 11, 2007).
14. Additionally, it is influenced by a wider background of feminist theory on the body, including black and postcolonial feminist criticism, which has examined the construction of black bodies and black sexuality as Other and has confronted this both within feminist criticism and in mass culture. See bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (London: Turnaround, 1992);
15. Susan Willis, "I Shop Therefore I Am: Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in Commodity Culture?" in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997).
16. Elisabeth Wallace, The British Caribbean: From the Decline of Colonialism to the End of Federation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 85-91.
17. Trevor Munroe, The Politics of Constitutional Decolonisation: Jamaica, 1944-62 (Kingston: Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1983), 75-95.
18. Ibid., 1.
19. For discussions of the roles of women in political activism and of attempts to exclude women from Jamaican politics, see Joan French, "Colonial Policy towards Women after the 1938 Uprising: The Case of Jamaica," Caribbean Quarterly 34 (1988): 38-61;
20. and Linette Vassell, "Women of the Masses: Daphne Campbell and 'Left' Politics in Jamaica in the 1950s," in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995), 318-36.
21. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the international United Negro Improvement Association, contested the 1930 elections but did not win a seat.
22. Deborah Thomas, Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 29-57.
23. Munroe, Politics of Constitutional Decolonisation, 102-5.
24. Thomas, Modern Blackness, 52.
25. Howard Johnson, "The 'Jamaica 300' Celebrations of 1955: Commemoration in a Colonial Polity," in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26 (1998): 120-37.
26. Ibid., 193-24.
27. "'Miss Pomegranate," 'Miss Lotus' Prizewinners," Star, November 19, 1955, 1.
28. Jennifer Morgan, Labouring Women: Reproduction and Genderin New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 49, 47.
29. Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003), 111.
30. Ibid., 128. Cooly was the derogatory term for an Indian-Caribbean indentured laborer.
31. Lucille Iremonger, Yes, My Darling Daughter (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1964), 65.
32. "Types of English Beauty," Planter's Punch 3 (1933-34): 4.
33. Lucille Parks and Rita Gunter, "English and Jamaican Society - Two Views," Planter's Punch 4 (1938-39): 57.
34. Natasha Barnes's discussion elaborates on the appearance of the white beauty queen in the Caribbean as marking a new departure for a colonial elite feeling its hegemony impinged on by the transition to self-government. The parade of white femininity veils a more masculinist impulse to assert the primacy of white masculinity over the colonial enterprise (Barnes, Cultural Conundrums, 50-70).
35. Una Marson, "Kurrent Komments," Cosmopolitan, April 1931, 20.
36. "Editorial: Beauty and Federation: The Meaning of Post's Miss British Caribbean Contests," Caribbean Post, May-June 1948, 2.
37. See Aimee Webster, "My View of It," Vanity, Summer 1961, 40-41;
38. Webster, "My View of It," Vanity, Summer 1960, 13.
39. "Miss British Caribbean" ran from 1947 to 1950 and appears to have dwindled in 1951. Webster wrote later that she passed the "Miss British Caribbean" franchise to another manager in Trinidad who allowed it to lapse by the mid-1950s.
40. "West Indian Nebulae: Phyllis Wong of Trinidad, no. 11," Caribbean Post, February 1948, 19.
41. Betty Bachus, "A Good Queen," Caribbean Post, July 1948, 10.
42. Betty Bachus, "Carib, Spanish, and Negro," Caribbean Post, 1949, 10. Please note that the National Library of Jamaica's holdings of the Caribbean Post are incomplete and in a poor state of repair. The publication was short-lived and increasingly sporadic. I have provided all available information for the issues that appeared intermittently from 1949 on.
43. Barnes, "Face of the Nation," 358.
44. "One Hundred Percent for Dark Girls," Caribbean Post, 1950, 12-13.
45. Johnson, "Jamaica 300," 122;
46. "Our Girls," Star, December 6, 1955.
47. "Miss Jamaica," Gleaner, December 5, 1955.
48. Sealy took issue with the image of the peasant "woman m the donkey," the market woman of colonial imagery that had been popularized by the United Fruit Company on postcards as an emblem of untbreatening and compliant black peasantry. This image of the black peasantry contended with a nationalist ideology that romanticized a Victorian patriarchal model of the peasant family and identified the peasantry with independence, not colonial subjection. For a further discussion of the woman-on-the-donkey imagery, see Krista Thomas, "Black Skin, Blue Eyes: Visualizing Blackness in Jamaican Art, 1922-1944," Small Axe 8 (2004): 1-31.
49. "Every Lassie Has an Equal Chance," Star, September 1, 1955.
50. "Star Beautv Caravan Taking the Country By Storm," Star, July 29, 1955.
51. French, "Colonial Policy," 50-53;
52. Linette Vassell, "Voluntary Women's Associations in Jamaica: The Jamaica Federation of Women" (MPhil diss., University of West Indies at Mona, 1993), 158.
53. See "Black Beauty," Spotlight, December 1959, 32;
54. "Rules," Star, September 1, 1955;
55. "Glorifying the Jamaican Girl of All Types," Star, July 23, 1955. The lack of an audience for the final judging could have been a money-saving measure. Discourses of racialized othering had, for instance, historically cast African women as excessively muscular and as lavishly proportioned, indications of their fitness for plantation labor and of their reproductive capacities.
56. "Miss Jamaica 195.9 - Ebony Year," Star, May 19, 1955. In fact, only five of the intended ten competitions took Place after the relaunch: "Miss Ebony" in 1959, "Miss Mahogany" in 1960, "Miss Satinwood" in 1961, "Miss Golden Apple" in 1962, and "Miss Apple Blossom" in 1963.
57. This is with the notable exception of the PNPs earlier attempts at organizing the local Kingston competitions mentioned before.
58. Brownskin was the African American euphemism for light-skinned women, used to describe the women who increasingly appeared in the postwar era as models and occasionally as actresses, including Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne. For a discussion of the rise of the brownskin model, see Laila Haidarah, "Polishing Brown Diamonds: African American Women, Popular Magazines, and the Advent of Modeling in Early Postwar America," Journal of Women's History 17 (2005): 10-37.
59. The Star, racier than its sister paper the Gleaner, reported the success of "Abu La Fleur," a topless Jamaican dancer named Jeeni Sherman who, while working in London, had managed to secure the role of lead dancer in a popular variety show, Toujours l'amour. "Black and White," Star, May 15, 1959.
60. Haidarali, "Polishing Brown Diamonds" 10.
61. "Black Beauty," Spotlight, December 1959, 32.
62. Barnes, Cultural Conundrums, 93.
63. See "Black Beauty," 33;
64. "Black Shadow over 'Paradise Isle,"' Newday, June 1961, 19-21;
65. "A Man Called Spotlight," Spotlight, December 1956, 32-35.
66. "Black Beauty," 33.
67. Lola Young, "Missing Persons: Fantasizing Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks," in The Fact of Blackness, ed. Alan Read (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996), 87-97;
68. Michelle Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 124-35.
69. "Black Beauty," 12, 33.
70. "Should Follow the Star," Star, September 5, 1955;
71. UNIA (Jamaica Chapter), press release, October 10, 1960, National Library of Jamaica.
72. "Ten Strikes against the 'Miss Jamaica Contest," Newday, June 1961, 36.
73. Ibid.
74. Alva Ramsay, "Miss Jamaica 1962," Gleaner, July 13, 1962.
75. "Portland Beauty Chosen for Nyasaland," Gleaner, June 8, 1964.
76. Thomas, Modern Blackness, 266.
77. Love quoted in Belinda Edmondson, "Public Spectacles: Caribbean Women and the Politics of Public Performances," Small Axe, no. 13 (March 2003): 1;
78. Garvey wrote "The Black Woman" from prison in 1927 (reprinted in Jamaican Housewife, Spring 1965, 17).
79. For more on the African American context, see Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 205;
80. Craig, Ain't I a Beauty Queen, 45-64;
81. Noliwe Rooks, Ladies Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture that Made Them (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 16-29.
82. Megan E. Williams, "The Crisis Cover Girl: Lena Horne, the NAACP, and Representations of African American Femininity, 1941-1945," American Periodicals 16 (2006): 200-218.
83. Edward Scott, "Beauty Contest of a 'Revolutionary Quality,"' Gleaner, August 10, 1955.
84. Peter Abrahams, Jamaica: An Island Mosaic (London: Stationary Office, 1957), 198-99.
85. "Jamaica - Skin Deep," Time, November 28, 1955.
86. "Jamaica's Tourist Industry Seen as an Aid to Racial Understanding," Star, November 30, 1955.
87. "Suriname: Multiracial Paradise at the Crossroads," Ebony, February 1967, www.buku.nl/ebony.html.
88. "Travel News," Spotlight, October 1955, 6.
89. "Sheila's Big Break:" Newday, June 1959, 73.
90. "Senegal," Vanity, Spring 1966, 41.
91. Frank Hill, "Jamaica: Its People and Institutions," Sunday Gleaner, July 28, 1962.
92. Sealy, "How We Celebrated," 4.
93. "Jamaica's Motto Will Be: Out of Many - One People," Gleaner, April 4, 1962.
94. Norman Washington Manley, "Second Autobiography," June 6-July 21, 1969, unpublished manuscript, National Library of Jamaica.