Making Whiteness: White Creole Masculinity at the 18th-Cenutry Little Bay Plantation, Montserrat, West Indies

Summary

At the close of the 18th century, a planter’s dwelling overlooking the Caribbean Sea on the northwest coast of Montserrat was destroyed by fire, and never reoccupied. Archaeological excavations yielded an intimate portrait of the domesticity of British Empire materialized in fragments of everyday life. Ownership of Little Bay Plantation transferred through three generations of unmarried male relations, one of who inhabited the dwelling at its burning. As a white Montserratian-born colonial, or white Creole, the resident planter illustrated the relational and intersectional aspects of race and gender situated simultaneously in the 18th-century metropolitan masculine culture of taste and sensibility, and in the mastery and control of the plantation enslaved. This paper will examine the intersecting yet conflicting aspects of white Creole masculinity that was less about making English-ness than making whiteness reinforcing of racial hierarchy, and marked by a disjuncture between English material culture and Creole social practice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Masculine Materiality and Intersectionality   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 970