Racial Capitalism and Racial Intimacies: Post-Emancipation British Guiana in David Dabydeen’s The Counting House

Abstract

Racial capitalism is, among other things, a “technology of antirelationality”, one that reduces collective life to a set of relations that benefits neoliberal capitalism (Melamed, 2015). Colonial capitalism, undergirded by racialization, similarly thrived on the annihilation of collective life. In the context of British plantation colonies in the Caribbean this took the form of instituting plans and structures of governance that created friction among racialized labour populations. Turning a critical eye on the colonial production of antirelationality between Indians and Africans on post-Emancipation Caribbean sugar plantations, this essay asks how we might learn about its effects on these racialized groups. In contrast to the official record, literary fiction can serve as a productive site that engages with the quotidian manifestations of colonial policy, especially from the perspective of those who rarely find a voice in such records. Further, it has the freedom to imagine alternative ways of being in the colony that chafe against the colonial blueprint for racial management. This essay argues David Dabydeen’s The Counting House (1996), set in nineteenth-century British Guiana, does both of these effectively. It explores the consequences of British colonial plans for racial separation in terms of the conflict it generated between Indians and Africans. More importantly, it tracks moments of empathy and intimacy among these communities. To this end, the novel speculates about the affective and potentially political solidarities they may have cultivated under shared historical conditions. Reading the novel appositionally with nineteenth-century accounts of plantation life and archival documents, this essay centres a narrative of intimacy and potential solidarity between Indians and Africans that has been rendered invisible not only by the colonial archive, but also by later cultural theory, which has tended to study these diasporic groups as separate, insulated units.