Material Objects as Sites of Critical Re-memorying and Imaginative “Knowing”

Abstract

This article first explores the layers of meaning woven into the intricate and colorful doilies handcrafted by Caribbean women immigrants to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, revealing the importance of these everyday material objects in Caribbean women’s critical practices of self-making in an often hostile racist environment. The author, the child of this generation of women, then proceeds to re-use these objects in her own critical re-reading and re-memorying practices, revealing the complex intersections and ambiguities of gender, race, class, nation, and empire in the post-war politics of “women’s work” in Britain.

Keywords:

• crochet
• re-memorying
• migration
• women’s work
• Caribbean
• material culture

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank her former colleagues in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University for their feedback on an earlier version of this article presented as a department talk. In particular, David Crawford-Jones, Simone Drake, Ken Goings, Anthonia Kalu, and Ryan Skinner, whose feedback and ideas as well as sharing of their own experiences of their diverse childhood experiences of front rooms in the USA and Nigeria was so enriching and helpful to her analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Denise Noble

Dr Denise Noble was born and raised in London of Jamaican parents. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University. Prior to that and from 2010 she was an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University, following several years of teaching Sociology, Media and Cultural Studies at a number of London universities. Denise Noble’s current book project Feminizing Freedom: A Caribbean Genealogy (Palgrave McMillan, forthcoming) is a social and cultural history of the British black-Caribbean woman as a subject of British liberal rule and freedom from emancipation in 1838 to the present.

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