Description
This paper focuses on Afro-Jamaican rural working-class women who engage in craft trading in the formalised craft markets in Jamaica’s urbanised resort towns. Drawing on primary data from ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with craftspeople, I argue that craft markets as a site of work and as a living community is sustained by women’s work, that is, both work done predominantly by women as well as their social reproductive strategies. In the context of an infrastructure of containment and capture, which I define as the quotidian structures that condition and organise re/productive labour in the spatially-specific resort towns such that value is available for elite capture, it is the everyday labour of women that navigates and resists this infrastructure and maintains craft markets as sites of life-work (Mullings, 2021). The paper draws on feminist political economy’s concept of ‘the Everyday’ and historicises it via Caribbean political economy’s plantation thesis to highlight how Black rural women workers extend the historical logics of the plot in their everyday practices of negotiation, survival, claims-making and economic mobility under new modes of dependent (racial) capitalism. My analysis underscores the ongoing labour of Afro-Jamaican women in responding to the uneveness of Jamaica’s ‘development project’ across scales.