ABSTRACT

While historians have increasingly examined inter-racial marriage, they have so far paid scant attention to intraracial marriage. This article tries to fill this gap in the scholarship by examining the practice of ‘marrying light’ in Jamaica from c. 1918 to 1980. Based on a wide range of sources, including memoirs and autobiographical fiction, it is particularly concerned with the motives for cross-colour marriage and the ways in which African-Jamaican children learned that ‘marrying light’ was an ideal to aspire to. It shows that colour, gender and class intersected in complex ways in ‘marrying light’ and that in most instances cross-colour marriages in Jamaica, like elsewhere, were a trade-off between one high-ranking variable and another. Due to the limitations of the source material, the article does not fully explore the extent of ‘marrying light’ and the quality of cross-colour marriages.

摘要

尽管历史学家越来越研究种族间的婚姻，但迄今为止，他们对种族间的婚姻很少关注。本文试图通过考察c中牙买加“嫁给光”的实践来填补奖学金的这一空白。1918年至1980年。根据广泛的资料来源，包括回忆录和自传小说，它特别关注跨色婚姻的动机以及非洲-牙买加儿童了解“嫁给光”是理想的向往的方式至。它表明肤色，性别和阶级在“嫁给光”中以复杂的方式相交，并且在大多数情况下，与其他地方一样，牙买加的同色婚姻是一个重要变量与另一个变量之间的权衡。由于原始资料的限制，