The Caribbean “market woman” is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs—who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica.

Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global economies. Gina Ulysse carefully explores how ICIs, determined to be self-employed, struggle with government regulation and other social tensions to negotiate their autonomy. Informing this story of self-fashioning with reflections on her own experience as a young Haitian anthropologist, Ulysse combines the study of political economy with the study of individual and collective identity to reveal the uneven consequences of disrupting traditional class, color, and gender codes in individual societies and around the world.

Gina Ulysse is assistant professor in the departments of anthropology and African-American studies at Wesleyan University.       
 

“Gina Ulysse is the first anthropologist to zoom in on the far-ranging internationalization of Caribbean market women, and her analysis clearly and compellingly illuminates the historical depth, cultural intricacies, and political and economic stakes involved in their work and their self-making. There is no other synthesis and original research like this on socioeconomic agents who have emerged in response to historical shifts in Jamaica’s place within the global economy in the past thirty years.”

"An engaging and thoughtful ethnography of the symbolic and material meaning of globalization for female entrepreneurs. . . . Downtown Ladies will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, women and gender studies scholars and others studying women, work, and globalization. Ulysse's experimental ethnographic narrative style will be essential reading to any course on feminist theory, field methods, and ethnography that troubles the notion of the 'native anthropologist.'"

"An accessible and theoretically astute read for both undergraduates and graduate students. Because Ulysse consistently ties transformations in self-making to broader processes of change both locally (nationally) and globally, and because she interrogates consumption in relation to a political economy of racialization, the book should be of interest not only to Caribbeanists but also to those anthropologists more generally concerned with globalization and subjectivity."

"Graduate students and professionals alike will find [the book] extremely beneficial and inspiring for its competent tackling of some of the most challenging conundrums in contemporary gender theory, critical race theory and cultural anthropology."