Reena N. Goldthree,

Contact Info:

Office Location:	During the 2009-10 academic year, I will be at Dartmouth College.
Email Address:

Education:

Latin American and Caribbean Studies Certificate	Duke University	2006
MA	Duke University	2005
BA (magna cum laude)	Columbia University	2003

Research Interests: Nationalism and Social Movements in Modern Latin America and the Caribbean

Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight for the Allies in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from all ten colonies in the region, served in the newly-formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Official appeals to patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns, as well as the fevered postwar commemoration movement, linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad, the two Caribbean territories that contributed over seventy percent of the troops for the BWIR, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, colonial identity, and imperial loyalty. Foregrounding the social and political trajectories of BWIR soldiers—as well as their female partners and children—my dissertation draws upon archival documents, military recruitment materials, oral histories, legislative records, and biographical accounts to examine how the dislocations of World War I transformed colonial identity and imperial policy in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago during the first four decades of the twentieth-century. Departing from previous works on the BWIR, I hypothesize that the experiences of racism and discrimination soldiers faced overseas did not fully discredit British rule in the Caribbean; but rather, led to new racial and gendered loyalties and heightened sociopolitical claims-making on the imperial state during the postwar period.

Curriculum Vitae

Participant, "Interogating the African Diaspora" International Graduate Student Seminar, African New World Studies Program, Florida International University, Summer 2005