Abstract
The legacy of legal dispossession and dislocation as well as the marginalisation of the masses has been longstanding. This begins with land law that has never been updated to empower the people and moves through social or public order laws that are meant to protect the public by keeping order along the lines of Hobbesian and Lockeian thinking. If we look closely at a number of laws and political structures in the postcolony in the Anglophone Caribbean, we find that the legacy of Britain remains entrenched. This has both direct and indirect effects on the masses. The direct effect is Bahamians finding it harder to succeed in their own country than most international persons; and the indirect effect is violence and dispossession. This legacy and indirect effect lead to what has become referred to as a culture of violence, not because people see the violence they live with, but because they respond to the violence through violence they create and then become famous for. When a former subject, now a citizen in the postcolony, locked in a body and a space with few opportunities and access to those opportunities is frustrated by the legal and political economic systems, this working-class subject (like so many others) responds by resisting this oppression. Meanwhile, these laws continue to exact a heavy price.
Highlights
As Disney buys up over 1000 acres of a Bahamian island, and offers 120 local jobs, other sales are declared null and void in a court in the state of Florida where people have been buying and selling the same land many times over
The language of social exclusion and legal separation through disempowerment has changed since the 19th century, but the effects have changed little since the move towards a more equitable representation in The Bahamas
Such is the politics of land in the 21st century Bahamas. The old laws such as the Quieting Titles Act (1959) can be used by those in power to disempower or dispossess those less fortunate. Those who have toiled in the post-emancipation, deeply segregated tourist economy of “A Nation for Sale” (Hiaasen & McGee, 1984), watch as their human rights, birth right and access to the commons disappear, they are often unaware of this erasure and dispossession
Summary
As Disney buys up over 1000 acres of a Bahamian island, and offers 120 local jobs, other sales are declared null and void in a court in the state of Florida where people have been buying and selling the same land many times over. Given the breadth of scope of the Vagrancy Act (1939) and its continued life, this paper argues that the criminalising of bodies, especially in this case, Black male and in different ways female bodies, coincides with a bifurcation of power dynamics that allows bodies to be criminalised and the spatial control to be levied through the legal system to zone spaces within the postcolony.
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