The Politics of Disjuncture, or Freedom from a Caribbean Point of View

Abstract

This essay offers a critical discussion of Yarimar Bonilla's Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015). It argues that Bonilla's account of labor politics in the French Department of Guadeloupe provides us with new ways of thinking about freedom and about politics in the Caribbean more broadly. The Caribbean region has been characterized as a place of political tragedy, in the wake of the repeated failures of revolutionary projects of national independence. Bonilla's ethnography of labor activism in Guadeloupe suggests that a different kind of politics may be emerging in the region, one that decouples the idea of freedom from the idea of national independence and territorial sovereignty. This new political possibility is rooted in what Beckett calls the politics of disjuncture, that is, in the political action that emerges from moments of discontinuity and rupture.