Anne S. Macpherson – författare

The first book on women's political history in Belize, From Colony to Nation demonstrates that women were creators of and activists within the two principal political currents of twentieth-century Belize: colonial-middle class reform and popular labor-nationalism. As such, their alliances and struggles with colonial administrators, male reformers, and nationalists and with one another were central to the emergence of this improbable nation-state. From Colony to Nation draws on extensive research and previously unmined sources such as almost one hundred interviews, colonial government records, the files of Belize's first feminist organization, and court records. Anne S. Macpherson examines the tensions of the 1910s that led to the 1919 anticolonial riot; the reform project of the 1920s, in which Garveyite women were key state allies; the militant anticolonial labor movement of the 1930s; the more ambitious reform project of the 1940s; the successful but nonrevolutionary nationalist movement of the 1950s; and the gender dynamics of party politics and both Black Power and feminist challenges to the party system in the 1960s and 1970s. From Colony to Nation connects to historiographies of racialized and gendered reform in colonial and other multiracial societies and of tensions between female activism and masculine authority within nationalist movements and postcolonial societies.

This collection brings together innovative historical work on race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean and places this scholarship in the context of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions regarding race and nation in the Americas. Moving beyond debates about whether ideologies of racial democracy have actually served to obscure discrimination, the book shows how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time across Latin America’s political landscapes.Framing the themes and questions explored in the volume, the editors'' introduction also provides an overview of the current state of the interdisciplinary literature on race and nation-state formation. Essays on the postindependence period in Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Peru consider how popular and elite racial constructs have developed in relation to one another and to processes of nation building. Contributors also examine how ideas regarding racial and national identities have been gendered and ask how racialized constructions of nationhood have shaped and limited the citizenship rights of subordinated groups.The contributors are Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, Lillian Guerra, Anne S. Macpherson, Aims McGuinness, Gerardo Rénique, James Sanders, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Barbara Weinstein.