Moving beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora
Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora By Karen Flynn (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2011) (301 pages, $60.00 cloth; $27.95 paper)Karen Flynn's study focuses on the lives of Caribbean and Canadian born Black professional women who were born between 1914 and the late 1940s. These women worked as nurses in Canada after training in hospital apprenticeship programs in Britain, the Caribbean, or Canada. The basis of her study, which is situated in nursing and labor history, rests on oral testimonies of 35 of these women; but the analysis is broadened by theoretical perspectives gleaned from postcolonialism, feminism, intersectionality, and diasporic Black studies. The book argues that Black women developed multiple subjectivities during their life course and underscores how these women "navigated the transition from childhood to adulthood" (p. 4) Their subjectivities and identities, first forged within the context of childhood, were then shaped and reshaped through migration, nursing education, and their different social roles as wives, single mothers, and community activists. The study highlights "the role of the interviewees as social actors in their own right" (p. 12).The author organizes the book along the life course paradigm the age graded life patterns that are influenced by trajectories of family and working life. A life course perspective "while attentive to social structures, allows us to see commonalities that the interviewees for this study share with women of other cultural and racial backgrounds" (p.5) We follow the life course of the interviewees through three interrelated frameworks of family, nation, and the political economy of work.Chapter 1 focuses on the primary socialization of the interviewees. The family "emerged as the central force for preparing the women to make the transition to adulthood" (p. 41) and it emerged as crucial to the formation of their psyches. Chapter 2 discusses the secondary socialization that took place in the school and the church. Flynn uses Althusser's concept of ideological state apparatuses, which constitutes subjects by interpellation to explain the influence of these institutions on the Black women's identities. According to Flynn, both institutions were imbricated in subjectivity and identity formation in ways that were both empowering and repressive. Schools provided an education and enabled friendships but contributed to how gendered selfhoods evolved and were characterized by racism. The church encouraged the young people to be competent individuals, although it also reinforced gendered hierarchies. Chapter 3 demonstrates that people do not migrate only for socioeconomic reasons. Instead, the interviewees provided multiple explanations for why they leftthe Caribbean. Flynn characterizes emigration as a luminal period in their lives: being separated from their families as young women caused much uncertainty but was also liberating.