Caribbean Politics Research Articles

Book Review of George Padmore’s: Black Internationalism by Rodney Worrell

The publication of Rodney Worrell’s work on the political ideas and practical politics of George Padmore is a monumental contribution to global Pan-African scholarship. The book is a major contribution to the fields of Africana Studies, Pan-Africanism, Caribbean Political Thought, Black radicalism and Marxist historiography. One strength of the book resides in the author’s training as a historian and political scientist. The book benefits from Worrell’s disciplined use of the methods of historical research combined with the analytical insights of political science relevant to the production of a work devoted chiefly to the study of the ideas and political activism of a major twentieth-century political actor, of Caribbean origin, George Padmore. His serious and detailed treatment of Padmore’s Pan-Africanism, which, perhaps for marketing purposes, he now refers to as “black internationalism”, has now undoubtedly cemented his place as a leading authority on the subject.

Indigenous Erasure and Resistance in the Caribbean

Indigeneity has, for the most part, been absent in literature on the Caribbean, even in de-colonial writing. Writing on the Caribbean has often portrayed Indigenous people as extinct and thus as irrelevant to contemporary life in the Caribbean. Yet Indigenous peoples have played and continue to play a central role in Caribbean politics.
 This essay discusses how and why Indigenous people have been erased from discourse on the contemporary Caribbean. I argue that Indigenous erasure is a longstanding colonial tactic that is still used to justify the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the case of the Maya peoples’ struggle for land in Belize, I describe some of the ways that Indigenous people continue to resist colonial and capitalist violence. Having identified and historicized the myth of Indigenous erasure in the Caribbean, I begin to sketch possibilities for shifting the discourse on the Caribbean such that it highlights rather than ignores the historical and ongoing contributions of Indigenous communities to the Caribbean. I suggest that diaspora and entanglement are two concepts that may be helpful for clarifying the Caribbean’s complex colonial histories in a way that underscores the importance of Indigenous peoples to the Caribbean.

Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time

Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time

Contributors

Contributors

Grenada Revolution: Investigating the Ambitions and Shortcomings of a Radical Caribbean Political Experiment

In March 1979, the New Jewel Movement (NJM) transitioned into the People’s Revolu- tionary Government (PRG) through a bloodless coup that for a time revolutionized the structure of governments in the Com- mon-law Caribbean. This policy review seeks to consider the success of the revolution based on: its aim of developing and sustaining a grassroots democracy, emphasis on mass education and its expansion of agribusiness initiatives as a part of broader industrialization efforts. Through an investigation of some of the critical events, ideological frameworks and ambitious political objectives that briefly transformed Grenadian society from 1979 to 1983 this review illustrates the complexity of the political experiment undertaken by the People’s Revolutionary Government and argues that despite its short time span, the Grenada Revolution remains one of the most critical examples of revolutionary potential and radical self-rule in the twentieth-century Caribbean.

Abduction and the Grounds of Caribbean Reasoning

This review essay engages with Aaron Kamugisha’s 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition by focusing on its methodological commitment to seeking Caribbean answers to Caribbean political and social problems. The author argues that Kamugisha powerfully offers something other than a methodology through which the circulation of Caribbean geographies, politics, epistemologies, and its people’s lived experiences moves outward to provide analytical and conceptual service for metropolitan centers, even if for ostensibly decolonial purposes. The essay demonstrates how by turning to two of the Caribbean’s major thinkers, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their far-less-studied Caribbean writings, Kamugisha takes seriously the centering of Caribbean thinkers in their own histories of political becoming. The essay ends with sustained focus on Kamugisha’s elaboration of two of Wynter’s conceptualizations: indigenization as an alternative to creolization and abduction as a kind of theorizing out from Caribbean reasonings.

Exploring the Political Dynamics of Non-Governmental Organizations and the State in Trinidad and Tobago From a Postinternational Framework

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the state contribute considerably to the unique state of Caribbean politics, yet their relationship is turbulent, which prevents effective policymaking. Specifically, the problem this study addressed is the turbulent relationship between NGOs and the state in Trinidad and Tobago from a postinternational framework. The purpose of this research was to provide an explanation of the NGO-state relationship through the postinternational concepts of turbulence and distant proximities using a qualitative research approach.

ENVIRONMENT AND THE SOMATIC BODY IN CHERRÍE MORAGA’S HEROES AND SAINTS AND EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S THE FARMING OF BONES

The paper offers a cross-cultural literary analysis of Chicana Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992) and Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) and compares the play and the novel on the basis of their shared thematic link of interwoven environmental and racial violence directed against marginalized people of color. Despite the works’ geographically distant contexts—set in the US Southwest and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, respectively—and the differing collective traumas of genocide the texts dramatize, both narratives foreground the motif of violated nature as a primary critical lens to unveil and critique the ongoing practices of colonialism permeating twentieth-century US and Caribbean politics. The interlocking images of women-of-colors’ disfigured bodies and the environmental devastation caused by (post)colonial violence underline the pervasiveness of harm done to both the earth and the somatic body.

Who Owns Haiti? People, Power, and Sovereignty ed. by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman

Reviewed by: Who Owns Haiti? People, Power, and Sovereignty ed. by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman Andrea Steinke Who Owns Haiti? People, Power, and Sovereignty. Edited by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. ISBN- 13: 9780813064598. US $19.95, paperback. Inspired by the symposium "Who Owns Haiti? Sovereignty in a Fragile State, 2004–2014," held in Washington, DC, in May 2014, this volume gives an excellent overview of the myriad actors challenging and undermining the independence and sovereignty of the Haitian nation, past and present. In a total of ten contributions, the authors uncover the contestations to Haitian sovereignty running a throughline in the country's history. The essays analyze recurrent aid interventions in a country home to the first postwar development project, far-reaching economic structural adjustment programs, and foreign military occupations, all but facilitated by the elite of a predatory Haitian republic capitalizing on the oppression of the majority of the population.1 Edited by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman, Who Owns Haiti? is a timely contribution to a series of contemporary examinations on sovereignty in the context of Caribbean emancipation, including Yarimar Bonilla's Non-sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015) and Karen Salt's Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (2019). Its chapters revolve around a notion of sovereignty that goes beyond purely legalistic definitions of a nation in control of its borders and its monopoly on violence to include such concepts as selfhood, agency, justice, and ownership. The volume at hand proves this approach particularly useful in examining the complexities of contested sovereignties. Assembling authors from a variety of disciplines such as history, anthropology, political sciences, economics, and development studies, Who Owns Haiti? includes a plurality of scholarly perspectives examining the relationalities of Haiti to the world. Historian Laurent Dubois, for example, elaborates on Jean Casimir's concept of the counter-plantation as "a system of engagement that is based on an absolute commitment to maintaining autonomy and dignity" (26), deriving from vivid memories of the colonial atrocities symbolized by the plantation system. Robert Fatton Jr. then uses the world-system approach to describe Haiti as situated at the "outer periphery," subjected to international tutelage and trusteeship, especially with regard to the many aid interventions the country has been forced to succumb to in the past seventy years. In a similar vein, Robert Maguire analyzes US aid to [End Page 309] Haiti during the past decade, focusing on post-2010 earthquake funds, and ends with the grim yet not necessarily unexpected conclusion that the "vast majority of aid ultimately remains in control of non-Haitian entities" (99). Political scientist François Pierre-Louis Jr. offers a take on the role of the Haitian elite, especially in electoral processes, attesting to their lack of will to "govern the country in the interest of and to the benefit of all" (63). The chapter also explores the unfortunate role that the United States, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the United Nations stabilization mission to Haiti, MINUSTAH, have played, particularly in the rise to power of former Haitian president Michel Martelly. Pierre-Louis's contribution also sheds light on the current political crisis in Haiti. Ricardo Seitenfus, the former OAS representative in Haiti, analyses the Brazilian contribution to the UN mission MINUSTAH. The mission to Haiti marked not only a turn from peacekeeping toward stabilization but also a regional turn in UN engagement. The majority of boots on the ground came from Latin American countries. Seitenfus's article depicts Brazil's foreign-policy evolution from "non-interference" to a thirteen-yearlong intense engagement with UN intervention. Throughout the mission, Brazil provided not only the Force Commander but also the largest contingents. The article further shows how "Haiti became a preferential client of the UN Security Council" (82). Who Owns Haiti? concludes with three anthropological contributions. Karen Richman's essay historically analyzes the religious field in Haiti, critically engaging the contested spiritual landscape after Douz Janvye. Scott Freeman and Chelsey Kivland then take a deep dive into ethnographic descriptions of Haitian acts of resisting and appropriating (un)deliberate attempts to undermine...

On the Origins and Legacies of Really Existing Capitalism: In Conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt

On the Origins and Legacies of Really Existing Capitalism: In Conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt

Kleist and Haiti: The Haitian Revolution in Heinrich Von Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo

This article revisits the question of how to interpret Heinrich von Kleist’s short story “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”. While Kleist specialists have tended to insufficiently relate the story to the developing field of Haitian studies, scholars more attuned to the literary history of the Haitian revolution have only inadequately understood the characteristic textual ambivalences of Kleist’s style and politics. In trying to bridge the gap between these two reading modes, the article discusses Kleist and his short story in a double context of Prussian and Caribbean politics.

Inherited “Ancestors’ Collections” of a Devoted Curator: The Museum of African Heritage in Georgetown, Guyana

This essay traces the development of the Museum of African Heritage (MAH) in Guyana, which opened in 1994. The vision for the Museum, however, emerged over a decade earlier within contexts of decolonial cultural nationalist movements in the circum-Caribbean and African diasporic world at large. Exploring particular histories and contemporary functioning of this museum reveals insights into cultural politics of Guyana’s postcolonial nationalist formations, as well as into ways in which museums navigate their often-incongruous political and cultural roles in societies. Museum Director, Jenny Daly, has since the MAH’s inception been the main force behind this institution. Understanding this Museum’s past and current relationships to cultural-nationalist struggles is instructive for historians of Caribbean politics, Africanist scholars, and museologists more generally. Noting how Daly describes her own professional and personal growth realized through relationships forged with artists, their works, and their various communities of engagement can be illuminating. Daly recalls how art served as an effective medium through which she began to engage meaningfully with aspects of her own ancestral heritages, recognizing a profound correspondence between her involvement with the arts and with local Guyanese iterations of African-derived religiosity. Performing and visual arts provide conceptual and practical bridges between African-inflected expressions of devotion, which are generally marginalized in Guyanese society, and positive self-conceptions among African Guyanese individuals and communities. Through didactic means, art holds potentials to demystify stigmatized culture. The MAH is especially well-situated to harness such educational capacities of art, making African Guyanese histories and cultural expressions more accessible to all.

Towards a Caribbean Political Theology of Emancipation and Decolonization: A Comparative Analysis of Four Caribbean Theologians

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the contributions of four Caribbean theologians to the disciplines of theology and anthropology, and human rights conversations. Jean-Bertrand Aristide (Haiti), Idris Hamid (Trinidad), Noel Leo Erskine (Jamaica), and D.H. Kortright Davis (Antigua and Barbuda) articulate a common vision of a Caribbean theology of emancipation and decolonization. Arguably, their political theological discourse is an attempt to engage the Caribbean experience within the framework of the postcolonial life and anti-imperial reason. There exist substantial convergences and confluences, as well as ideological parallels and connections in the political theology and contextual theology of freedom and hope in the work of these four thinkers who emerged from four different geographical corners of the Caribbean. Finally, we will make some connections to the revolutionary ideas and political theology of Fidel Castro. Caribbean theology of emancipation, decolonization, and hope emerges out of the labyrinth of European slavery and colonialism, American imperialism, White supremacy, and globalization.

Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment by Yarimar Bonilla

Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment by Yarimar Bonilla

The Work of Disappointment

This essay engages Yarimar Bonilla's Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015) by considering one of its key throughlines: the idea of disappointment as a motivator of politics, especially non-sovereign politics. Through an ethnography of Guadeloupean labor activism, Bonilla critiques modern notions of national sovereignty as the only and inevitable product of decolonization. Provocative as it is, her account challenges the methods, periodization, and habits of Caribbean history and highlights the blind spots of European studies. But more broadly, this essay argues for the broadest application of the book's insights, which, when extended, ask whether sovereignty is a useful category for understanding the contemporary and globalized world. This is a question that remains only too timely as populist movements around the world rail against globalization in the name of national sovereignty.

Contributors

Other| July 01 2017 Contributors Small Axe (2017) 21 (2 (53)): 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4156942 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Small Axe 1 July 2017; 21 (2 (53)): 209–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4156942 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSmall Axe Search Advanced Search Greg Beckett is an assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. He has published articles in Small Axe, the Journal of Haitian Studies, American Anthropologist, Social and Economic Studies, Reviews in Anthropology, and PoLAR. His main areas of interest are political theory, existential anthropology, and the history of ideas. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the lived experience of crisis in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.Yarimar Bonilla is an associate professor in the departments of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Anthropology at Rutgers University. She specializes in social movements, colonial legacies, and questions of race, sovereignty, and citizenship across the Americas. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015) and is currently completing a second monograph on the politics of annexation in Puerto Rico.Chenee Daley, the second-place winner of the 2016... Issue Section: Contributors You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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.

Freedom, Sovereignty, and Other Entanglements

Anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla responds to Greg Beckett and Christienna D. Fryar's engagements with her Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015). In responding to the questions raised, Bonilla lays out the conceptual and methodological orientations of the work as well as its analytical targets. The essay situates Non-Sovereign Futures within a larger problem-space of political disenchantment, argues for the need to deprovincialize the Caribbean, and brings into question perduring scholarly entanglements with the traditions of Western political thought.

Postcolonial Development, (Non)Sovereignty and Affect: Living On in the Wake of Caribbean Political Independence

AbstractThis paper sets out a new research agenda for work on postcolonial development, sovereignty and affect. It examines how ideals of postcolonial independence play out through the more heterogeneous affective atmospheres that disrupt neat paradigms of sovereign control and non‐sovereignty in everyday life. The example employed is everyday life in a Caribbean government office, but the paper develops a wider set of new conceptual tools and ethnographic approaches so as to facilitate research in postcolonial studies and affect more generally.

Reprising the Past, Imagining the Future

In 2014, the author published a volume of essays, Critical Interventions in Caribbean Politics and Theory, which Small Axe editor David Scott proposed might form the basis for a discussion around Meeks's work and its broader contribution to debates surrounding contemporary Caribbean politics and society. Obika Gray and Maziki Thame contributed review essays, tackling many of the issues explored in the book, including the Caribbean black power movement, the Grenada Revolution and its demise, the contemporary state of Jamaican politics, Caribbean intellectual traditions, and the possible directions for Caribbean politics in the near future. While largely sympathetic to many of their comments, Meeks engages with Gray specifically around what Meeks considers Gray's minimalizing of the distinctions between radical activists of the 1970s and contemporary “Dons,” the role of Cuba in the Grenada Revolution, and Gray's underestimation of the importance of the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s for contemporary Caribbean social sciences and the humanities. Meeks then engages with Thame's proposal that there is potential for renewal in what Meeks describes, in Critical Interventions and elsewhere, as a moment of hegemonic dissolution. Meeks argues that this notion must be handled with care, since there is no easy road back to renewal and recovery from a genuine state of societal collapse.