Enduring Legacies of Empire: A Case Study of a Preservice Teacher's Feminist Resistance

Abstract

 Drawing on lived experiences and recent literature, especially, research by Nurse, a University of the West Indies academic, this article shows how memory, experience, place and history can reveal continuities in the civilizing mission of colonial and imperial projects. In order to validate my major claims, I excerpt a vignette from my published memoir regarding personal experiences at a predominantly, male teacher’s college in Jamaica (1962-1965). 

At the college, I deliberately engaged in a complex set of oppositional and strategic performances which led to my becoming the student of the year when I graduated. In a larger context, such performances are strategies which assertive women may wish to adopt, in order to disrupt the hegemony of male dominated educational institutions in Canada and the Caribbean.