Dr Imaobong Umoren SAR G.04

This course is available on the MA in Asian and International History (LSE and NUS), MA in Modern History, MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in History of International Relations, MSc in International Affairs (LSE and Peking University), MSc in International and Asian History, MSc in International and World History (LSE & Columbia) and MSc in Theory and History of International Relations. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

In the wake of slavery, debates about the intersecting politics of race, gender, and reproduction arose in the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanic Caribbean. This module explores the ways in which formerly enslaved Africans as well as former planters, imperial officials, newly indentured labourers from South Asia, philanthropists, medical professionals, and welfare workers contributed to and shaped colonial social welfare, health policies, and ideas surrounding racial uplift colonialism, race consciousness and equality. Students will engage in comparative intellectual and social history by drawing on primary and secondary sources to consider the influence of European and American imperialism in the Caribbean. A range of topics will be explored including post-emancipation population decline; infant mortality; illegitimacy; venereal disease; birth control; inter- and extra regional migration; and eugenics.

20 hours of seminars in the MT.

There will be a reading week in week 6 of the MT.

Students will be expected to produce one essay (1,500 to 2,000 words) in MT.

Bourbonnais, Nicole, Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Briggs, Laura, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

De Barros, Palmer, Steven and Wright, David (eds.), Health and Medicine in the Circum-Caribbean, 1800-1968 (New York: Routledge, 2009).

De Barros, Juanita, Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender and Population Politics after Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Findlay, Eileen, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1902 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

Macpherson, Anne, From Colony to Nation: Women Activists and the Gendering of Politics in Belize, 1912-1982 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

Renda, Mary, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Palmer, Steven, Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

Putnam, Lara, The Company they Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1969 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Essay (85%, 5000 words) in January.
Class participation (15%) in the MT.