Recent scholarship on black transnationalism and diaspora in the early twentieth century has largely focused on migration to the urban centers of the US North and Western Europe. “Mapping the Global Black South: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora” revises this discourse by exploring the movement of people, cultural practices, and ideas between the US South and the Caribbean as an alternative network of African diasporic affiliation. According to Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant, “the Plantation system” created a “rhythm of economic production” and a “style of life” that links the US South to the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. Building on Glissant’s geographic frame, this dissertation establishes the plantation—a fundamentally modern form of labor organization—as the figural and literal organizing principle of “the global black south”: a matrix of diasporic articulation, subject formation, and knowledge and cultural production. Through close readings of works by Booker T. Washington, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Price-Mars, this study examines how African American and Caribbean writers and intellectuals mobilized aesthetics—literature, music, photographs, and performance—to imagine alternative futures within and against the legacy of the plantation. By drawing on theories of the plantation in Caribbean and New Southern Studies, “Mapping the Global Black South” makes critical interventions in the field of African American Studies, where the plantation is almost exclusively regarded as a metonym for slavery and anti-modernity. In Caribbean Studies, by contrast, scholars have proposed a more nuanced rendering of the plantation as the genesis of black modern life and culture, and in New Southern Studies, it has been reconceived as the link that tethers the US South to the global south (based on similar patterns of underdevelopment). Through an interdisciplinary and multimedia methodology, then, this study interrogates the paradox of the plantation as at once local and global, fecund and barren, static and fungible—as a site of agricultural production that animates the flow of global capital, on the one hand, and a modern technology of power that exploits the land and the bodies forced to work it, on the other. In so doing, it establishes the plantation as a matrix of global black south cultures that revises traditional understandings of black modernity and creates new systems of connectivity and legibility for contemporary scholarship. Moreover, in reconsidering the plantation as a crucible of black modernity, “Mapping the Global Black South” reconstructs the historical significance of the Tuskegee Institute—a former plantation turned industrial school—as a nodal point of black diasporic affiliation and a model for resolving one of the fundamental predicaments of New World blackness: the problem of free labor. Given that slavery was a system of coerced and exploitative labor, the greatest challenge of emancipation throughout the global black south was transforming a mass of formerly enslaved persons into autonomous workers. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, black artists and intellectuals from across the region began to embrace (and adapt) Booker T. Washington’s vision of an agrarian and industrial future (by way of Tuskegee) as a strategy for racial uplift and self-determination. Whereas Washington’s reformism is commonly reduced to a foil for W.E.B. Du Bois’ radicalism, this dissertation resituates Washington within a hemispheric framework to reconsider how his theories contribute to a more capacious epistemology of the “plantation” in African American Studies. “Mapping the Global Black South” is thus organized around two interrelated concerns: the plantation as an alternative framework of black transnationalism and a site of cultural production that evinces the persistence of black life within structures of social death; and Tuskegee’s significance as a symbol of modernity and a nodal point of diasporic articulation at the turn of the twentieth century. In so doing, it illuminates how the plantation shaped the new futures that emerged in the US South and the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery.

This thesis uses a contextual case study approach covering the period 1985 to 2011 to examine the construction of Trinidad and Tobago's ICT4D policy as discourse. The guiding theory of method is contextualism as described in Pettigrew (1990), according to whom a contextual analysis can be characterised as: processual, by emphasising the evolution of actions embedded in specific contexts (structural and otherwise) over time; multi-stakeholder, by recognising the competing viewpoints of reality perceived by actors at different levels; longitudinal, by considering both historical and contemporary views of actions and events. Consistent with this approach a framework has been adopted here that views policy as an iterative process involving the generation of texts from events, the translation of texts into narratives, and competition between alternative narratives resulting in institutions, which, in turn, enable and constrain events. This framework facilitates understanding interactions between actors at multiple levels across time. There are three original contributions to knowledge made in this thesis. Firstly, I have proposed an analytical framework that integrates three separate bodies of literature. The discursive model of institutionalization of Phillips, Lawrence and Hardy (2004) and the ‘policy as discourse' approach of Shaw & Greenhalgh (2008) and Shaw (2010) are integrated by way of a bridge, the ‘trading zones' concept of Galison (1997) as extended by Collins, Evans, & Gorman (2007). Thereby, I developed a series of analytical constructs that can be used for contextual policy research, especially in developing countries where dominant policy narratives constrain and moderate discursive exchange when those policy narratives - which were originally articulated in advanced economies - are subsequently transferred into developing countries. Secondly, I have empirically applied the framework to the study of ICT4D policy construction in Trinidad and Tobago, generating new insights in the process. In so doing I critically examined the process of constructing policy as discourse with the aim of identifying ways in which policy could be done differently. A key finding is that the process of discursively transferring previously existing policy narratives into new contexts can result in one of three outcomes: no change - if the introduction of policy narratives had no impact whatsoever on institutions (either by creating new ones, or disrupting existing ones); the construction of policy pidgins (semi-specific yet incomplete proto-languages that mediate discursive transfer) - when discursive transfer, imitation and assemblage of narratives partially occurs; or the construction of policy creoles (full-fledged languages that facilitate not only discursive transfer, but social action) - if the discursive transfer is complemented by translation, editing and social embedding. Thirdly, I developed a model of policy creolization through which the two main factors that influence the emergence of policy pidgins and, eventually, policy creoles (both viewed as particular forms of institutions) in a setting of discursive construction were identified, namely:  The length of the temporal window over which policy actors have an opportunity to develop interactional expertise to transfer, imitate and assemble narratives, and eventually to translate, edit and embed those narratives into social actions;  The degree of intentionality of the discursive action, and subsequently the social action, that policy actors engage in, noting that there are three categories of social action: o Intentional action – which deliberately conveys particular ideas through texts. o Consequential action – which is generated as a by-product of ongoing dialogue among actors during which they may draw on broader narratives. o Emergent action – which arises through discursive contestation and struggle in ways that were not necessarily intended or predicted. This highlights that both intentionality and time are required to bridge the knowledge gaps present between the different contexts, and even so, that the policy construction process in the new context requires practitioners to develop non-trivial levels of interactional expertise. This thesis has implications for policy practice on two fronts. Firstly, the framework can be employed to assist policymakers in creating policy creoles through coordination and interaction between external mainstream narratives and alternative narratives, including those that are locally derived. In doing so, policymakers and policy analysts can unpack the conceptual constructions of their subject domain, learn how to engage with new domains (and thereby gain interactional expertise) and uncover the latent power dynamics that are reinforced by lack of critical analysis. Secondly, application of the framework provides a means of assessing institutional dynamics. This is important because of the powerful normative, cognitive and regulative functions institutions play on the development of new institutions, and ultimately on social action.

This study considers the social and economic lives of free women in Jamaica from 1760 to 1834. Throughout the period studied Jamaica was Britain's most important imperial holding. The colony's slave economy, driven by the labour of hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women, generated incredible wealth. Still, Jamaica was the deadliest place to live in British America. Due to the endemic nature of tropical disease and atrocious mortality rates, neither the enslaved population nor the white population maintained itself naturally prior to emancipation. However, an environment characterized by death and demographic crisis engendered heightened opportunities for women to take part in tropical enterprise and to shape the futures of their families. Inheritance norms were weakened by the omnipresence of death, precipitating more generous inheritance bequests for women and a greater role given to wives and daughters-both white women, and those of mixed-race descent-in tropical commerce. Additionally, as slave ownership was not limited by gender or race, free women of all races took part in the slave economy. Free women's visibility in the island's formal as well as informal economies, and the wealth accumulated by some, was unsurpassed in a British American context. However, in this slave society, free women's prosperity rested upon the exploitation and oppression of others. In contrast to familiar historical trajectories that have presented Caribbean participation in Atlantic markets of slavery and capital as male-driven ventures, this study argues that free women of all races were vital participants in the slave economy and principle beneficiaries of plantation profits. This project moves beyond previous studies on women in colonial Jamaica by revealing how women's enterprise and relations with one another shaped the nature of this economy and society, including the commercial, familial and kin networks that bound it together. In doing so, it enhances our understanding of this colony and the operation of race and gendered power within it.

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