What the Caribbean Teaches Us: The Afterlives and New Lives of Coloniality

Abstract

AbstractIf the Caribbean was (and remains) central to modern processes of extraction, labor organization, and racial hierarchy, and if it has also been a space of conceptual mining, then it is worth asking about the status of the Caribbean (in anthropology) today. As anthropologists continue to reorient the field away from “coloniality” (Wynter 2003) and toward something like “radical humanism” (Jobson 2020), what might research in the Caribbean teach us? In this essay, I will focus on recent work on sovereignty emerging from ethnographic research in the region in order to argue that focusing on the ephemeral, the performative, and the affective charts sovereignty as something that is constantly in process, something that emerges through dialogue and practice. In doing so, contemporary ethnographies raise questions about the afterlives, and new lives, of imperialism and slavery, and about the potential for reparation and repair.