The coloniality of citizenship in the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean

Abstract

A common theme to the political crisis of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean is the denial of full citizenship to many persons in the nation state — not primarily in a legal sense but in the variety of practices, tropes of belonging and identity concerns that frustrate and deny the aspirations of many Caribbean people. This `coloniality of citizenship' is a complex amalgam of elite domination, neoliberalism and the legacy of colonial authoritarianism. Independence from British rule did not bring with it a break from existing forms of citizenship and middle-class nationalism left intact the underlying racial order. The consolidation of elite models of development and their concomitant exploitations can be seen in the Caribbean tourism industry, which demands sexual caricatures of the Caribbean similar to those of the colonial project. It can be observed, also, in the Caribbean state's patriarchal and heteronormative policing of gender and sexuality, carried out without any apparent awareness of the colonial provenances of such practices.