Straw craft, imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as tightly braided sites of gender production in Haiti and Curaçao

Abstract

Woven straw work produced in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century represented a small but sustainable percentage of the region's exports. Following the US occupation in Haiti (1915–1934), handicrafts were promoted as economic ‘development’: commodified folklore fashioned for the delight of visiting tourists. Up until 1946 in Curaçao, as a strategy of the Catholic church's civilising mission, young women trained to plait the so-called ‘Panama hat’ at technical schools (Römer, 1977); the products of their labour were often exhibited at international expositions and exported for sale in Europe and the United States. This article argues that missionary education that claimed to modernise, industrialise and revalue local handicraft skills to the benefit of local populations in Haiti and the Dutch Caribbean has instead perpetuated colonial gendered and racialised divisions of labour that prepare and discipline students for factory work in the global textile industries. I use straw artefacts and photographs from the collection of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures as a starting point to trace the entanglements between imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as sites of gender production. Drawing on Jean Casimir's concept of contre-plantation (2001), I explore how histories of indigenous craft knowledge during specific periods of resistance in Haiti have nurtured disidentification with a gendered logic of labour exploitation and racial capitalism.