Straw craft, imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as tightly braided sites of gender production in Haiti and Curaçao

Woven straw work produced in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century represented a small but sustainable percentage of the region's exports. Following the US occupation in Haiti (1915–1934), handicrafts were promoted as economic ‘development’: commodified folklore fashioned for the delight of visiting tourists. Up until 1946 in Curaçao, as a strategy of the Catholic church's civilising mission, young women trained to plait the so-called ‘Panama hat’ at technical schools (Römer, 1977); the products of their labour were often exhibited at international expositions and exported for sale in E... Mehr ...