Downtown Ladies from Massey's Satellite

Ulysse's description of the experience of the ICIs in Miami provides an excellent example of a complicated rethinking of place, especially "small places." Downtown Ladies captures the minutia of ICI daily interactions from their homes, to their local markets, to Miami, using individual lives to exemplify how the experience of "time-space compression" is influenced by race, class, and gender. There is no place, no people that exists in a vacuum, requiring "a sense of place, an understanding of 'its character', which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond," (Massey 9). Ulysse excels at producing this concept of a place that is "absolutely not static...do not have boundaries in the sense of divisions which frame simple enclosures...do not have single, unique 'identities'...none of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place...continually reproduced, but not a specificity which results from some long, internalized history," (Massey 8). This is in part due to her highly mobile subjects of study, which require her to analyze the local and the global, but moreso do to her determination to include her own experiences as part of her study, and consideration of the larger forces at play (racism, classism, sexism) that determine various performances of both the ICIs and herself (tuffness, wardrobe). Ulysse's assertion that, "On a daily basis, local-global relations are nothing but intersubjective encounters that are in a constant state of flux," may as well have been paraphrased directly from Massey (Ulysse 212). This agreement of Ulysse and Massey reminded me of Kincaid's Small Place, and her characterization of Antigua as somewhat stagnant, stuck in the legacy and fantasy of "England", still enslaved to the history of emancipation like it happened yesterday, watching events as they happen. On the one hand, Kincaid captures Antigua's collapse of time and space through its continued relationship to other places through tourism and corruption; on the other, it rejects this flux through the characterization of the tourist's Antigua and that of the Antiguans, and in particular, the Antiguans' apparent lack of mobility physically and historically.