Private Lives, Public Histories

Rachel Corr is professor of anthropology at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University.Jacqueline H. Fewkes is professor of anthropology at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University.

Resulting from a 2018 panel held for the American Anthropological Association, this collection presents seven case studies from different geographical loci spanning five continents. The editors and contributors (trained as cultural anthropologists or archaeologists) have gleaned information from public domains to shed light on the private lives of women who lived or worked in diverse settings (homes, factories, plantations, or markets). The authors employ methods primarily from ethnohistory (and sometimes ethnology and archaeology) to assess such sources as public records, personal journals, correspondence, public performances, material culture, and the built environment, extracting information about the blurred dichotomy of public/private lives. Although the women subjects came from varied backgrounds (including enslaved persons, textile mill workers, tea processors, and British colonialists in South Asia), by focusing on the concept of agency, these studies document the private/public connections across colonial and capitalist contexts, such as the slave trade diaspora and cultural/ethnic heritages. Exposing elitism, sexism, racism, and inequality, the contributions illustrate how friendships and marriages transcendedethnic, class, economic, and religious boundaries. These thoughtful essays inform readers about potentially flawed assumptions of a presumed public/private divide and the relationships between personal and civic ideologies. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

• Introduction: Intimate Interdependencies: Colonization, Capitalism, and Impositions of Public and Private, by Minette Church 1.Affect and the Memorialization of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Spontaneous Expressions of Synchronic Global Black Consciousness in the Visitors’ Books at Elmina and Cape Coast Castles-Dungeons, Ghana, by Jean Muteba Rahier 2.Behind Closed Doors: Rethinking Public and Private in the Ulster Plantation, by Audrey Horning3. “Bible, Bath and Broom:” Constructing Race Womanhood in The Chicago Defender, by Anna S. Agbe-Davies4.The Warmth of the Hearth: Andean Domestic Life among Colonial Textile Mill Workers, by Rachel Corr5.Friends of the Family: Gender, Kinship, and Elite Colonial Networks in Early 20th Century North India, by Jacqueline H. Fewkes6.Gendering Cosmopolitanism: Intersectional Visibility in Taiwan’s Colonial Public Spheres, by Melissa J. Brown7.Public, Private, and the Politics of Information in Late Colonial Gambia, by Niklas HultinConclusion: Reading the In