Subject to labor: Racial capitalism and ontology in the post-emancipation Caribbean

Abstract

Racial capitalism is often understood as a process that acts upon subjects that are already racialized, facilitating their exploitative incorporation into capitalist processes. In this article, I push past that definition to argue that racial capitalism is a fundamentally ontologizing process by which subjectivity is produced. I advance this point through an analysis of the central role of labor in the foundation of post-emancipation Caribbean subject formation . I argue that in crossing the Atlantic in the service of colonial capital, enslaved Africans, and later indentured Indians, underwent a process that undid previous senses of identity, thus demanding new ontological moorings rooted in plantation labor. The practice and conditions of labor experienced by both groups after emancipation provided a common basis of ontological orientation. Thus, racial capitalism through the instrument of labor, has fundamentally structured the terms and definition of Caribbean identity.