Melsia Tomlin-Kräftner
- mkraftner at bournemouth dot ac dot uk
- PhD Researcher
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Biography
A Mixed Methodology study of the socio-economic roles of free mixed heritage women between 1750-1850 in British Colonial Jamaica. I am focusing specifically on two parishes - St. Elizabeth and Manchester where during slavery, St Elizabeth had the most mixed-heritage people, second only to Kingston. The study explores these women as rational microeconomic actors in a macroeconomic environment controlled by the white plantocracy.
Over several generations through concubinage and consanguineous relationships, their posterity moved through the colour continuum from black to legally white having moved away from their black African heritage to the desired white European heritage, thus affording vertical social mobility and some wealth.
Conferences
- Tomlin-Kräftner, M., 2008. An Auto-ethographic Journey of Reconciliation, Shame, Pride and celebration of Identity on reflections of the Bicentenary. In: Thurston, T., ed. Discourses of Resistance: Culture, Identity, Freedom & Reconciliation 5-9 December 2007 Montego Bay, Jamaica, West Indies. Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies SLAVERY: ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT (2007), 29 (4), 543-713 Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Theses
- Tomlin-Kräftner, M., 2020. Colonial matriarchs in the British slavery economy: exploring the socioeconomic landscape of mixed-heritage women in Jamaica from 1750 - 1850. PhD Thesis. Bournemouth University, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences.