Juanita De Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $32.95. ISBN 978 1 4696 1605 6.
Juanita De Barros's Reproducing the British Caribbean offers a detailed investigation into the ways that non-white British Caribbean people would be assessed, measured, intricately tracked and marked as bodies needing medicinal and societal control in order to reproduce ‘properly’ and healthily. Although men would be targeted in these reproduction strategies and campaigns, women were the typical recipients of these initiatives. De Barros's work also highlights the ways that white British women and some Caribbean women of colour promulgated these causes, often twining the maternalist rhetoric that circulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with notions of scientific racism. Through this examination, De Barros unveils a wide-ranging web of influence, appropriation and racial conspiracy that drew nurses, midwives (both from Caribbean islands and the British isles), doctors, colonial officials and community members into policy making around reproduction and maternal and welfare practice in the afterlife of slavery and emancipation in the British Caribbean. …
