Marginality Or Activism The Black Male and The Family In Nineteenth-Century Jamaica

by Jenny Jemmott

This paper examines the role and significance of the Black male in the family in nineteenth-century Jamaica against the backdrop of the crucial issue of the “marginalization of the Black male” . The perspective that Black men were inconsequential/ insignificant as fathers, partners, and as family members generally, became thematic in the historical discourse. Errol Miller's marginalization thesis posited that the process of enslavement relegated men, even more than women, to a position of insignificance or marginalization generally, and for the purposes of this paper, in the context of the family. Emancipation, according to some, did not signal the end of the Black male's insignificance within the family and what had originated as marginalization environmentally imposed by the condition of enslavement became a behavioural characteristic of Black men. Because historians have written more about the Black female than the male in the familial environment during the pre and post-slavery periods, the Black male has also been subjected to what Hilary Beckles refers to as a “historiography of neglect”. This has reinforced the apparent marginalization of the Black male in family contexts. The paper provides evidence of male activism on behalf of family which challenges stereotypical assertions of the inactive, ineffective, insignificant or peripheral male in family contexts in the historical period. Such evidence locates him as an effective advocate for his family, as a significant and central husband/partner, father, grandfather, son and brother, both in terms of his image of self and in the activation of these familial roles. By highlighting the contributions of Black men to their families in freedom, this paper also addresses the “historiography of neglect”.