Endurance vile: Bodies, punishment, and discipline in Barbados and Jamaica, 1834--1900

Delineating the body as both subject and object, this dissertation looks at the exercise of punishment in nineteenth-century Barbados and Jamaica to argue that ideas about the body and bodies influenced both the foams and functions of punishment in these two territories. It argues also that bodies were not passive entities, in spite of the ways in which ideas about gender, race, class, and ethnicity were projected onto them in an effort to delimit their place within the plantation economy.;In arguing for this relationship between bodies and punishment, this dissertation places itself squarely between two camps: one that responds to the popularity of "body studies" and theories about the body in contemporary scholarship, and a second camp that recognises the increasing importance of discourses of punishment in Caribbean historiography and in contemporary Caribbean society. The result of this marriage between theory and history is an analysis that contributes to the extant scholarship on the post-emancipation Caribbean, while at the same time demonstrating that our story can be told from multiple standpoints and in a variety of ways.