Producing/contesting whiteness: rebellion, anti-slavery and enslavement in Barbados, 1816

The increasing attention paid by geographers to white identities represents a welcome corrective to research on race and ethnicity that focused on non-white subjectivities and promises to deconstruct the purportedly `normal' or `unremarkable' status often afforded to whiteness. Such work is a vital part of a critical geographical agenda. This paper seeks to contribute to such an agenda by responding to Bonnett [Area 29 (1997) 193, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives, Prentice Hall, 2000] call for a historical geographical engagement with `white studies'. To do so, it begins by considering how such a critical geography might be spatially and theoretically framed. It then introduces a specific context for such an engagement––the revolt of 1816 by enslaved people of African origin in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados. Reading this not as a single event but as a locus of multiple and conflicting narrations, each linked to particular assertions and contestations of whiteness, the paper argues that geographies of white identities must emphasise struggles between `white' subjects, as well as the role of subaltern acts and representations in white racialisation. This is important if postcolonial, and therefore critical, geographies of white identities are to be produced.