This book traces the creation of the ethnic groups in the nineteenth century and its ultimate impact on the colony’s political constituencies in the run-up to independence. The Construction of the nation in the post colonial period is approached through an analysis of crocket, trade unions and women traders in the late 1970s and early 1980s in an effort to identify patterns in Guyanese nation building. British and US Government documents illuminate the decolonization process, establishing the extent, form and timing of Anglo-American complicity in the events of 19961-64, and indication their impact in ethnic power relations. 

Guyana 1838-1985: Ethnicity, Class and Gender combines the methodologies of history and sociology to reassess the history of Guyana. It advances two principal arguments. First, that ethnicity as a historical relationship can be understood as a social experience if it is viewed as part of a set of overlapping identities which include class and gender. Second, that ethnicity in Guyana was created in colonial times and deployed as a toll for dominance which has reconfigured itself to function effectively in postcolonial times. 

This volume, with its interdisciplinary approach, will add significantly to the literature on Guyana. 

Contents

1. Reflections on Class and Gender Relations
2. Ethnicity as a process 
3. Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Colonial British Guiana
4. Unionization, the Changing Labour Market and the Birth of the Multiethnic Nationalist Movement, 1916-1953
5. The Premature Death of a Nationalist Movement: Ethnopoliticization and in-communal violence, 1953-1968
6. The Geopolitical Stakes of Decolonization and its Impact on the Ethnicization of Conflict
7. The Social and Economic Stakes of the Postcolonial State, 1964-1985
8. Traders, Freeders and Cheerleaders of the Nation: Women in Postcolonial Guyana
9. Cricket as a Transformative Domain
10. ‘Up with Food! Down with Race!’: The Articulation of Ethnicity, Class and Gender Relations in the 1983 Food Struggle
11. The GTUC Takeover: Ethnopolitical Interpretations

About The Author

Steve Garner is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology at the University of West England, Bristol. He lectures on racism and immigration, and is author of Racism in the Irish Experience (Pluto, 2003). He has also published on Guyana, theories of ethnicity, immigration in Europe and whiteness. He is currently researching white identities in the UK, as well as engaging in other projects on the politics of immigration.