What the Caribbean Teaches Us: The
Afterlives and New Lives of Coloniality
By
Deborah A. Thomas
Universit y of P ennsylvania
Abstract
If 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. [sovereignty,
affect, afterlives of imperialism, coloniality, repair]
Resumen
Si el Caribe fue (y sigue siendo) central en los procesos modernos de extracción, organización laboral y jerarquía racial, y si también ha sido un espacio de búsqueda conceptual, entonces vale la pena preguntarse sobre la situación del Caribe (en la antropología)
hoy. A medida que los antropólogos continúan reorientando el campo lejos de la “colonialidad” (Wynter 2003) y hacia algo como el “humanismo radical” (Jobson 2020), ¿qué
nos puede enseñar la investigación en el Caribe? En este ensayo, me enfoco en trabajos
recientes sobre soberanía que emergen de la investigación etnográfica en la región, para
argumentar que centrarse en lo efímero, lo performativo y lo afectivo traza la soberanía
como algo en constante desarrollo, algo que emerge a través del diálogo y la práctica. Al
hacerlo, las etnografías contemporáneas plantean preguntas sobre las vidas posteriores
y las nuevas vidas, del imperialismo y la esclavitud, y sobre el potencial de reparación.
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 00, No. 0, pp. 1–20. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN
1935-4940. © 2022 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12578
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Introduction
Thirty years ago, Michel-Rolph Trouillot published an essay in the Annual Review of Anthropology titled “The Caribbean: An Open Frontier” (1992). In that
essay, he identified the region as one with “notoriously fuzzy” boundaries, as “a
sort of no man’s land where pioneers get lost, where some stop overnight on their
way to greater opportunities, and where yet others manage to create their own
‘new’ world amidst First-World indifference” (19). Trouillot’s argument was that
the Caribbean—a region he described as inescapably heterogeneous, historical,
and colonial—could tell us something important about the discipline of anthropology as a whole: its conceits, its limitations, and its opportunities. Inspired by
this assertion, Karla Slocum and I later suggested that a focus on the Caribbean
“allows us to trace the global in the local” (2003, 553), and therefore troubles common scalar binaries, as well as those that are foundational to a liberal humanist
anthropology more generally—those between nature and culture, between modern and “primitive,” and between self and other. We were writing in the wake of
the critique of area studies, and in our focus on the conceptual interventions developed through ethnographic research in the region—such as those having to do
with creolization, diaspora, transnationalism, globalization, and the cultural politics of race, class, and gender—we cautioned against throwing the baby out with
the proverbial bathwater. We concluded that “although anthropological concerns
and theories found their way into particular research areas, anthropology continually is built ‘from the ground up.’ In other words, the production of a theoretical
canon within anthropology as a discipline always has been and continues to be
dialectical” (2003, 561).1
If 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 as a whole away from
the structures of “coloniality” that continue to differentially mark the value of personhood along racial lines (Wynter 2003), and toward something like a “radical
humanism” (Jobson 2020), what might research in the Caribbean teach us? How
might insights from the Caribbean create portals through which we might move
beyond the liberal binaries that inhere in the notion of a knowable subject, and
toward a research praxis grounded in equality and collaboration? How can critical
engagements with Caribbean contexts offer up models of liberatory imagination
that take us outside of frameworks that privilege nationalism and other Western
understandings of belonging and community? And in what ways might a healthy
respect for opacity (Glissant 1997) allow a productive blurring of the domains of
sexuality and spirituality, politics and being? In this essay, I will attempt to address
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these questions by focusing on recent work on sovereignty emerging from ethnographic research in the region. I focus in this way not merely because I have also
been concerned with sovereignty (Thomas 2004, 2011, 2019) but because current
reformulations of personhood, relation, and repair are emerging across the disciplines in and through a critique of Western notions of sovereignty, and because
some of the most dynamic social movements globally are advocating the refusal
and abolition of state power, calling for what Savannah Shange has described as a
“messy breakup” with the state, a “rending, not reparation” (2019, 4).
Though sovereignty has become something of a disavowed category within
US-based Black Studies, it remains conceptually and materially pertinent for Black
people across many locations, as it also does for Indigenous communities throughout the Americas and beyond, though sometimes in different ways (Coulthard
2014; King, Navarro, and Smith 2020). Many of us are obsessed with sovereignty
and with what sovereignty feels like, but this obsession is not one that is framed
by the state, or within the parameters of its institutions. For those of us oriented
in this way, the point of elaborating the “changing same” (Jones 1967) of conquest
and dispossession, while also reaching beyond the frames of land and labor that so
dominate understandings of settler colonialism and imperialism (King 2019), the
reason to bear witness to state violence (and other forms of violence), and to create different archives and affective relationships to violence, is to chart new terrain
upon which sovereignty can be radiated. We are always imagining something that
feels like sovereignty, and if it seems out of reach, we are compelled to reach toward
it anyway. This sovereignty is not grounded in masculinist modes of revolution and
human-ness, and it cannot be disavowed as either false consciousness or ontological impossibility. It is not measurable through developmental metrics, or calculable
in relation to the presence or absence of debt. It is not an event; there is not a moment when we will be able to point to something and identify its achievement. It is
instead, as Laura Harjo (2019) reminds us, a relational and iterative practice that
is future-oriented yet enacted in the day to day, one that is grounded in decolonial
love and what Avery Gordon would call “response-ability” (2008).
While the sovereignty to which I am referring is therefore broader than politics,
it is also true, of course, that the question of formal political sovereignty across the
region is hardly resolved or univalent. As Yarimar Bonilla (2012) reminds us, the
Caribbean boasts a wide range of political statuses, from republics, to independent
states within the British Commonwealth, to overseas territories or departments
of one or another European state or kingdom, to unincorporated or incorporated
territories of the United States. New political statuses have been developed within
the Caribbean, and particular territories have also changed status from one moment to the next. In part, this diversity is due to the (shifting) colonial history of
the region. But it is also indicative of the changing landscape, over the past five
centuries, of the relationships between political and economic organization, and
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of the global geopolitical arrangements that have shaped these relationships. Ultimately, for Bonilla, it is the space of the “nonsovereign” that provides fertile ground
for theorizing about futurities, both in and beyond the Caribbean (2015). This is
a nonsovereignty that does not merely obtain in the French overseas departments
of Martinique or Guadeloupe, or in the associated state of Puerto Rico, or in the
Caribbean outposts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is, instead, a regional
condition that is ecological as much as it is material (DeLoughrey 2019; Sheller
2020). It is a condition of being that is both enacted and refracted in and through
the realms of the spiritual and the erotic, and so it is mapped through relations
built across time and space. Because the refusal of nonsovereignty and the reach
for sovereignty in this iteration of the conceptual and material landscape is constantly in process, both internal and communal, the scholars I will discuss here
privilege the ephemeral, the performative, the affective, the nonlinear and unexpected ways something that feels like sovereignty circulates and is transmitted from
one to another.2 In doing so, they raise questions about the afterlives, and new lives,
of imperialism and slavery, and about the potential for reparation and repair.
Spheres of Sovereign Engagement: The Territoriality of Islands
Michelle Stephens notes that the very concept of island-ness fits the Caribbean region into the “geopolitical imagination of early modern Europe” (2013, 14). “For
European settlers and mainlanders,” she writes, “islands become the early visual
tropes of the utopic, insular features of the sovereign state” (14). These tropes, for
Stephens, tamed what she sees as the region’s “archipelagic relationality” (12), a
relationality that is rooted not in the landmasses that dot the Caribbean Sea and
Atlantic Ocean but in these very water masses themselves. This is a relationality
that is also suggested by Kamau Brathwaite’s classic injunction that “the unity” of
the Caribbean region is “submarine” (1975). David Scott (2013) sees this intervention by Brathwaite, first iterated at a conference in 1973, as a humanist incursion
into a Caribbean Studies that had been, to that point, predominantly social scientific. This incursion was meant to displace the centrality of both structuralist and
Marxist interpretations of plantation economies, and to reorient critical attention
from top-down analyses of the problems of the postcolonial state to bottom-up
engagements with popular action and worldviews. Scott writes:
One way of thinking about the Caribbean 1970s is to think of the decade as, in a
sense, re-activating the possibility of a radical subaltern resolution to the problem
of social-cultural division—the possibility that seemed for all intents and purposes
foreclosed by the neocolonial compromises of formal independence in the 1960s.
And partly, anyway, what this re-activation demanded was a cultural (not merely a
social or economic) idiom in which to think about what was shared as opposed to
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what was not—the ways we were culturally interconnected from below rather than
the ways we were socially and politically separated from above. (2013, 5–6)
These reorientations of the space of the Caribbean from territory to the “terraqueous” allow us to configure sovereignty as a process and practice that can be
disentangled from entities understood as states, and tethered instead to the microand metastate spheres through which people engage their liberation struggles.
Consider, for example, Chelsea Kivland’s work on history and subjectivity in Haiti. Kivland is interested in the dynamics of the relationships between
sovereignty and performance, and her contention is that lessons learned from her
Haitian interlocutors—young men and women in the neighborhood of Belair in
Port au Prince, Haiti—can provide insights into the broader processes of neoliberal governance and the intensifying inequalities that currently confront people
everywhere. In Street Sovereigns: Young Men and the Makeshift State in Urban Haiti
(2020), Kivland analyzes how people articulate sovereignty and attempt to “make
the state” in the face of various overlapping forms of insecurity. Street Sovereigns
takes the baz—neighborhood groups that mediate the construction of personhood, belonging, and governance—as the foundation of political analysis. Statemaking here is processual and performative, as much about grabbing contracts as
about creating displays of “good feeling” (such as beach outings) constituted in
and through engagements with nonstate actors, and state power is constantly both
eluded and embraced.
Kivland follows as people make claims on various political and nongovernmental actors, developing their own authority and leadership in the process of attempting to extract accountability from those outside the community in positions
of power. The baz is the place to defend, the origin of both members’ militancy
and their sense of community, their spiritual and political center and the space of
respect. But the baz is also a space of contradiction. As much as strong leaders in
the baz are able to extract benefits from the state, these benefits also create the conditions for jealousy and corruption both within the baz, and between one baz and
another. In other words, Kivland shows us, Belairians’ efforts to stem their insecurity by bringing the state into being also create and regenerate insecurity. It is
this paradox that interests her, especially because these “street sovereigns” might
be said to represent outliers within a region otherwise saturated by a lack of faith
in the potential for institutions of governance to make meaningful differences in
the lives of citizens.
Ultimately, Kivland’s focus on the baz as the center that mediates personhood
and governance allows her to develop a number of theoretical interventions. First,
she builds on work that has sought to destabilize cultural explanations for poverty
and violence, work that roots people’s insecurity in individual choices and behavior rather than in historical and structural processes. Second, Kivland elaborates a
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theory of history as a spiral in which material, affective, and spiritual infrastructures create archives and memories that both repeat and overlay—and sometimes
counter—other moments, placing them into dialogue with the present. In this respect, she builds on other Caribbeanists’ conceptualizations of time as repeating
or palimpsestic, but here with a Haitian spin, referencing Spiralism, a local art
movement predominant during the 1950s.3 Third, she builds a processual theory
of subjectivity and sovereignty that diverges from both essentialist and constructivist positions to instead understand the self as a narrated reality, and therefore as
modular, as expressing multiple desires, trajectories, and aspirations for different
audiences and different moments. In this way, Kivland challenges liberal suppositions of subjectivity, and she does so without positioning multiplicity (of desires,
of audiences, of temporalities) as a form of fragmentation that requires teleological resolution or the privileging of Western rationality. What Kivland shows us
is that sovereignty is processual, both within and outside the context of a revolutionary state. Where Haiti has been seen as antipodal to those French colonies
that maintained departmental relationships to the hexagon, this kind of approach
places Haiti in a different relation to, for example, Guadeloupe.
I mentioned Yarimar Bonilla’s emphasis on the “nonsovereign” earlier, but I
want to delve more deeply here into how she pushes us to conceptualize forms of
political mobilization that do not aspire to formal decolonization. Bonilla (2015)
chronicles the processes and actions of labor activism in Guadeloupe, leading up
to (and through) the massive strikes of 2009. She is interested in these events not
only in relation to broader political and economic questions of nationalism and
independence, unemployment and consumerism, and social and racial discrimination, but also with respect to the kinds of historical and conceptual frames that
people develop—like marronage—in order to bring into being political and social
subjectivities that refuse liberal modes of self-determination. In doing this, Bonilla
both historicizes and gives flesh and grit to the seeming contradiction of people’s
choice to remain part of the French Republic and their simultaneous dissatisfaction
with the terms of that relationship.4 Additionally, she shows how activists mobilize history—and the particular history of racial slavery—in order to generate both
attention to their demands and a sense of belonging.
Bonilla’s work in Guadeloupe, and more recently in Puerto Rico, helps us to
reorient the framing of nonsovereign Caribbean territories, often seen as somehow aberrant—their nationalist movements “failed,” or never materialized in the
first place, their consciousness muted, or their identities and aspirations turned too
fully toward Europe or the United States. She demonstrates instead that the contradictions facing states around the world are not necessarily transcended by political independence; rather, in the postcolonial, post–Cold War period, we are all
in a similar position vis-à-vis developmental patterns globally, and this similarity
is rooted in liberal promises of nationalism, promises that could never have been
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realized given the conditions within which liberalism arose—imperialism, slavery,
and settler colonialism. The everyday performative practices of activists in Guadeloupe, however, offer glimpses of alternative “containers” for sovereignty, forms of
community formation and sociality that counter what has otherwise been an extremely high (foreign) consumerist orientation and a sometimes fraught political
landscape. While self-determination, in Bonilla’s contexts, is not defined in terms
of political participation within an autonomous nation-state, the work of her interlocutors suggests that there is something else that is possible and desirable, and
this might be a model for those territories that ostensibly enjoy something understood as political “sovereignty.” In both Kivland’s and Bonilla’s work, then, we see
that the state is not the immediate audience for sovereign claims. There is something more “local” at work in people’s imaginations of their futures. As generations
of Caribbeanists have shown us, however, the local is never disentangled from the
transnational, and it is this sphere that other recent ethnographies have tackled in
various ways.
Jovan Lewis’s Scammers Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020) analyzes how the young Jamaican men involved in the transnational process of capital extraction—otherwise known as lotto scamming—mobilized aspects of a new
technology (VOIP phones) to address their own lack of mobility and to advance
claims to sovereignty. For them, bilking American senior citizens out of retirement
savings became a form of reparations, a reversal of traditional power relationships
through the creation of wealth and the construction of new notions of belonging
and accountability.
Lewis shows us how forms of both licit and illicit autonomy flourished as neoliberal structural adjustment policies gained speed after 1989, when the state was
called to abandon its mandate to provide for its population. He argues that these
forms were not limited to the poor, but emerged up and down the entire economic
spectrum. As they emerged, they also built on already-existing modes of criminality, corruption, and wealth generation (including the originary dispossessions
generated by settler colonialism and plantation slavery). Throughout Scammer’s
Yard, Lewis wants us to see how the framework of reparations—as articulated by
the youth with whom he worked—positions their participation in the lotto scam
as heralding the death of liberal postcolonial parameters of respectability as the
means toward meaningful citizenship in Jamaica. Youth who participated in the
lotto scam, he asserts, had found a way—at least temporarily—to imagine their
futures in Jamaica (rather than needing to migrate in search of a better financial
situation). This is so important, because in undoing a familiar narrative related to
opportunity (both in terms of what it should take to build life in Jamaica, and in
relation to attempts to seek fortunes through the well-trodden paths to diaspora),
it reconfigures the parameters of what aspiration looks like today.
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Lotto scammers, Lewis argues, were not seeking an escape; they wanted to “live
fully where they were” (2020, 4). Their inability to make life through circuits of capital that were impenetrable and opaque to them led them to the lotto hustle, and
having worked in call centers, where they were trained in customer service, empathy, and problem solving, they developed the skills for scamming. Many of them
had also previously been trained within one or another of the vocational programs
on the island, and so they would have also gained experience in customer service
through local channels. Lewis limns their very sophisticated understanding of how
debt and credit work in the lives of those they are scamming, and argues that they
saw their work as a form of “structural readjustment” (68). In other words, Lewis
shows us that lotto scammers correctly identified their position within a global
landscape, they accurately diagnosed the origin of their position within imperialism and slavery, and they reframed the language of reparation to include White
America within the continuum of accountability, given the dominant position of
the United States in relation to global economies of capital extraction, accumulation, and debt. Building from the theoretical frame of his interlocutors, Lewis
argues that reparation must be seen as a process rather than an event, that it is necessarily cumulative, and that it has the potential to transform ontological Blackness into something of value. His interlocutors’ actions, and their claims regarding
reparations, however, also direct our attention to something else.
While we have long thought historically, relationally, and transnationally about
contemporary economic patterns, and while we have understood the Caribbean
(and the African diaspora more broadly) as having produced the possibility for
these patterns, we have ordinarily tracked them according to the spatial logics of
old imperialisms. This is as true for the ways we have charted the legacies of conquest and colonization as it is for how we have documented the migration pathways Caribbean people have followed.5 These are legacies and pathways we have
typically documented by mobilizing juridical lenses. How have different forms of
resource extraction shaped the movement of people and products across the globe?
How have new policies and technologies prompted movement toward one nationstate or another? To be sure, these modes of accounting have been critical to an
exegesis of contemporary inequality and dispossession, and to an analysis of people’s strategies for making life in difficult contexts. However, they are not quite capacious enough to attend to the kinds of reimaginations of personhood and value
that Lewis limns. Nor can they fully account for some emergent issues related to
fossil fuel industries and questions of maritime sovereignty—as in the recent “discovery” of substantial oil reserves off the Guyana coast (Bulkan and Trotz 2021;
Jobson, n.d.; LaBennett 2021; Vaughan 2020), or the intensification of Chinese
investment throughout the region.6 These contexts present a sovereignty that is,
on one hand, deterritorialized, not through migration but through the realm of
the “terraqueous” (à la Stephens). On the other hand, they compel us to think
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outside normative Western framings of liberal coloniality in order to consider
shifts in the experience of sovereignty and security that are occasioned by new
global articulations of political and economic power. They require a view of the
transnational that moves beyond the juridical. And they encourage us to see the
sphere of the transnational as a problem of racialized poverty, but also as a realm
for repair, though not in the usual ways.
Nostalgia: The Problem of the Past and the Crisis of the Present
The language that often emerges to describe the kinds of shifts I’ve discussed above
is the language of nostalgia. This nostalgia is oriented as much toward the certainties of former imperial relations as it is toward a version of community life
that preceded the turn toward neoliberalism. “People used to look out for each
other more” and “Everybody just working for himself nowadays,” are common
sentiments across the region, though in this iteration they were expressed to Edward Sammons in his exploration of neoliberalism in a rural Jamaican community (2014, 127). For those articulating this sensibility, a new selfishness, characterized by individualism and competition, has displaced earlier commitments to
mutual aid, collaboration, and public service. In this and other cases, the experience of neoliberalism produced not only an ethical shift but also a forgetfulness
about the histories of struggle and survivance that had previously undergirded
a sense of community. Ethnographers have documented the various ways actors
have striven to combat this forgetfulness. For example, the Guadeloupian activists
among whom Bonilla worked organized history walks during which they would
traverse the grounds of antislavery struggles, while also drawing attention to the
elements of the landscape (particular plants, e.g.) that helped them heal. These activists’ mobilization of the specter of slavery sought to generate what Bonilla calls
“historical intimacy” (2011), a deliberate attempt to link their own actions to those
of enslaved persons during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to
demonstrate how the past informs the present, and to create new archives through
which people can recognize themselves.
Hanna Garth shows us that nostalgia also shapes Cubans’ struggles for food
sovereignty. In Food in Cuba (2020), food acquisition emerges as a struggle for life,
family, decency, and adequacy, one that is contextualized in relation to particular historical moments—both in terms of Cuban political economy and a global
geopolitics—and to the affective spheres that are produced in and through these
moments. In this case, those moments include the war for independence from
Spain, the Revolution, and the Special Period. Garth is interested in memory and
nostalgia, and in how these coalesce around the intimacies generated and solidified through food. She argues that “contemporary understandings of decency and
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dignity are linked to history and nostalgia for remembered pasts, as Cubans struggle to pragmatically and ideologically contend with their faltering welfare state”
(80). And she shows how the uncertainty that permeates contemporary modes of
life in (still) socialist Cuba is also folded into their efforts to “consume particular
foods in particular ways” (18). What people want is a decent meal, and this quest
for decency is not only about adequate nourishment but also concerns the ability
to prepare and present a meal that is complete according to Cuban standards. A
complete meal, she argues, is one that is affordable and conveniently accessible; it
is fresh and varied, and it is both beautiful and tasty. It evokes a collective history
of struggle and self-reliance.
Aside from nostalgia, another language has also developed to chart the shifts
in moral economies that have been seen to accompany the millennial transition,
and this is the language of crisis. To be sure, crisis does not merely emerge as a
category in relation to sovereignty; it also indexes a conservative existential condition, one that is oriented toward stabilizing the status quo (Masco 2017). Crisis
was also, of course, a salient imperial category, typically mobilized in relation to
the security issues provoked by one or another colonial insurgency, or one or another capitalist contraction. But crisis, in recent Caribbeanist ethnography, has also
been oriented toward understanding the extent to which people feel it is possible to
imagine different futures. For example, in There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and
Death in Port-au-Prince, Greg Beckett (2020) takes a phenomenological approach
to insecurity, vulnerability, and disaster, conditions so often measured in relation
to political economy or some vague notion of Haitian cultural unassimilability to
Western, liberal norms. He takes this approach because he is interested in probing
the affective dispositions of crisis.
Throughout There Is No More Haiti, Beckett offers a Haitian account of crisis
that is grounded in “feelings,” in order to counter the narrative put forth by many
intellectuals, development workers, UN forces, and humanitarians that Haitians
are unable to create moments of something that might be understood as agency
and analysis in their lives, forms of meaningful action through language. Through
his interlocutors, we learn about the necessity and impossibility of looking for life,
about feeling like one is already dead, about Haitian moral economies grounded in
age- and status-appropriate forms of service and reciprocity (and their diminution
after the 2010 earthquake), about what personhood means, about the constancy
of various kinds of transnational ties and histories in the midst of stories that so
often seem to be “stuck” in small localities, and about the quotidian ways people remember and express their personal and communal/historical relationships
with the United States. We also learn about both the centrality and the “failure”
of Leta (the state), and about the multifaceted and multisited ways in which this
state—as an entity, practice, and process—is understood both as a container for
people’s aspirations, and the locus of their inability to realize them. In this way,
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he also questions the relationships between the state form and governance, both
locally within Haiti and transnationally, and allows us to see the quotidian ways
people navigate alternatives to these arrangements, while still struggling over the
terms of their own marginalization.
Beckett’s exploration of postearthquake Haiti is part of the broader direction
within scholarship that situates “natural” disasters as social, historical, and political, and that reads humanitarianism in relation to other liberal commitments regarding agency, ethics, and care, leading to a normalization of emergency. At the
same time, his use of crisis as a conceptual frame pushes us beyond the realm of
political economy and into phenomenology, and thus he is able to explore political
life through the language of affect in order to productively map a new terrain for
studying political maneuvering, dead ends and desires, utopias and dystopias.7
Crisis has also been at the center of a number of recent edited volumes and collections addressing devastating climactic events like earthquakes and hurricanes—
I’m thinking especially of Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales’s Tectonic Shifts (2012),
and Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol Lebrón’s Aftershocks of Disaster (2019)—and it
was the organizing rubric of a recent gathering sponsored by (and ultimately published by) the journal Small Axe (2020). These conversations highlight the limits
of the state (whether postcolonial or imperial) in the face of climactic challenge.
Sovereignty, here, emerges as a process of managing risk, though not ultimately to
the benefit of citizens. As Ryan Jobson argues in his introduction to the Small Axe
collection, “the state of climate crisis in the Caribbean is at the same time a crisis
in the state as an insufficient remedy for the existential threat of climate change”
(2020, 69). Beyond rebuking the persistence of “flag nationalism,” these scholars
also ask us to understand volcanic eruptions, floods, and hurricanes as revealing
palimpsests of earlier forms of dispossession and displacement, while also drawing our attention back to geographic circuits that are maritime and metaterritorial.
They also draw our eyes to other kinds of crisis, such as debt (Garriga-López 2020)
and violence (Welcome 2020; see also Forde 2018; Kerrigan 2018). The proliferation of states of emergency designed to contain the latter have also generated new
approaches to security, such as the speculative policing Rivke Jaffe discusses, an
“experimental, future-oriented form of policing that connects crime prevention to
other forms of negotiating urban risk and uncertainty” (2019, 448).
State sovereignty in crisis is incapable of innovative future thinking because,
as Adriana Garriga-López has argued, it is based on “the management of deviations from a Eurocentric mythical norm or idyllic ethnonational past” (GarrigaLópez 2020, 123). This sovereignty cannot accommodate an “antinostalgic human
and nonhuman assemblage,” assemblages like the collaborations currently developing between farmers and artists in Puerto Rico, that she understands as forms
of “decolonial resurgence” (2020, 124). Central to these forms in many contexts
is also a resurgence of “Indigenous” spiritualities, or at least a resurgence of
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elaborating sovereignty not only through the political realm but also through the
domains of spirituality and eroticism.
New Sovereign Futures: Spirituality and the Erotic
Carlota McAllister and Janet Napolitano have called for a “theopolitical analytics” (2020, 3) as an attempt to move beyond the tendency, within political anthropology, to separate the domain of the political from the domain of the spiritual.
Theopolitics, for them, recognizes the central place of the theological in the anthropology of power and terror, not merely materially but also sensorially. Their
launching point is Latin America, and thus also Catholicism, and thus also processes of “incarnation”—a tethering of Christian transubstantiation with Christly
kenosis. This assemblage enables them to think through how “the human and the
more-than-human come into both union and disunion in political formations”
(2020, 7). Sovereignty, within their theopolitical frame, is not a Leviathan; it is instead “a practice in and of movement, governed less by concepts and ideologies
than by rhythms and aesthetics, and always in provisional form” (6). Christian imperialism, therefore, never seamlessly or totally remakes the spiritual worlds of the
colonized, but forms part of a site of struggle in which Indigenous spiritualities
make claims and counterclaims on the constitution of the human itself.
For those students of Caribbean religious systems within contexts where
Catholicism has never been hegemonic, McAllister and Napolitano’s claims would
not be unfamiliar, and would be placed alongside interrogations of the spiritual
worlds that exist in parallel to material ones, and to the portals and passageways
between these (Forde and Hume 2018; Paton and Forde 2012). These claims would
also resonate with scholars who have investigated the relationships between embodied forms of ecstasy within both African and South Asian diasporic communities in the Caribbean and the colonial modernities they push against (McNeal
2011), and those who have explored how the preparation of sacred foods for practitioners of African-inspired religions across the Americas enacts embodied performances of historical memory (Pérez 2016). Indeed, scholar-artists like M. Jacqui
Alexander and Audre Lorde have long argued that the political, the spiritual, and
the erotic are ineluctably entwined and embodied. Just as the sovereign violence of
conquest enacts a colonization of both land and bodies, what Ana-Maurine Lara
would call “body-lands” (2020), the forms of life people create in spite of and in
relation to this violence must also necessarily fashion new embodiments.
For N. Fadeke Castor, these embodiments transcend both normative divides
between the political and the spiritual, but also between the national and the
transnational. In Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power
to Ifá in Trinidad (2017), she focuses on Orisha/Ifá in Trinidad and Tobago, and
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on the ways practitioners reimagine belonging—to community, to a political territory, to a secular world. Throughout Spiritual Citizenship, Castor develops two
innovative argumentative strands. The first has to do with engaging the sacred as a
way to intervene within emerging debates about affect and political life. Here, she
encourages us to rethink classic Weberian conceptualizations of consciousness and
social life by taking readers through a careful historical and ethnographic analysis
that enables us to see the negotiations and collaborations between pragmatists and
romanticists, all the while directing our attention to the non-Western cosmologies
that challenge dominant paradigms about rights and responsibilities across time
and space.
In Castor’s recounting, transnational networks that build on earlier panAfrican circulations generate liberatory foundations for postindependence
sovereignties. She uses the example of Orisha in Trinidad to argue that while striving to approximate liberal Western modes of governance through processes of
creolization—as encouraged by former colonial powers—has not been able to accommodate a critical undoing of imperialism’s racial legacies, the valorization of
multiculturalism has. While it may seem ironic that this shift occurs under the
leadership of the first Indo-Trinidadian prime minister, Castor shows us that in
fact this is one dimension of the kinds of unlikely partnerships Orisha practitioners
have been able to work to their advantage in terms of recognition and legitimacy.
Her analysis, however, also destabilizes the often too-tightly drawn oppositions between Indo- and Afro-Trinidadians, both politically and socially. In addition, the
careful documentation she provides, both of the ways 1970s Black Power activists
moved African-Trinidadian spiritual practices to the center of new political possibilities and of the emerging Ifá movement, is in itself critically important to a
reframing of postcolonial politics throughout the region.
The second important argumentative strand in Castor’s book addresses the
ways alternative knowledge systems—developed through ritual practice—generate
new ways to imagine belonging to political, spiritual, and social communities.
At the same time, they tell us something about colonial and liberal sedimentations of class, racial, and gendered relations, while both critiquing and reproducing them. In this regard, it is not incidental that Castor is herself a complexly located insider/outsider. Her analysis of her own location and commitments as a
Trinidadian-American, as a Yoruba practitioner, and as an “outsider within” the
realm of the anthropological guild not only takes her into the domain of performance but is also part of a more general rethinking of the ways in which, and audiences for which, anthropological scholarship is relevant to the project of decolonizing, a point to which I will return below.
Brent Crosson, too, has found in Trinidad fertile ground for the examination
of the ethical political terrain that is built, challenged, and traversed by Indigenous religious practices. In arguing that religion is a race-making project, Crosson
What the Caribbean Teaches Us
13
(2020) situates his work in relation to the broader critical research on liberalism
and modernity, in which African descendants have been excluded from the category of the human (and therefore their worship-based practices have been excluded from the legible dynamics of “religion”). On one hand, we know that these
exclusions created the conditions of possibility for the constant reproduction of
state violence, but on the other hand, we also know that what is excluded always potentially undoes the dominant formation, even if (and perhaps especially because)
it is, like obeah, associated with violence. What Crosson argues in Experiments
with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad is that the practice
of justice that is obeah never solidifies into a set of identifiable, proscribed steps,
and therefore cannot be easily read through the normative assumptions regarding
religion.
Crosson argues for an understanding of obeah—and of Africanist religious
practice more generally—as a process of experimentation that disrupts the opposition between tradition and innovation in Western modernity. For the obeah practitioners among whom he worked, spiritual practice was grounded by an ethos of
experimentation rather than a process “of making individuals into the subjects of
an ethical tradition” (2020, 5–6). Experimentation, for them, was neither defined
by novelty nor the need to establish new traditional norms. Instead, experiments
with power were “repeatable practices that are defined, in part, by the norms they
invert” (74). Sovereignty, in Crosson’s text, thus emerges as a constant search by
ritual specialists for justice outside the normative realm of the juridical, one that is
performed to “contest the moral valence of power” (57). Indeed, the forms of future
justice enacted through spiritual workers often demanded the breaking of legal or
religious rules. In this configuration, rupture, conflict, and challenge are as critically important as cohesion and reproduction, if not more so. As Crosson argues,
“if religion is more than a set of beliefs, rules, ethical injunctions, commandments,
and guidelines—if it is ultimately about experimenting with more-than-human
power—then religion presupposes a sovereign violence that breaks the law” (83).
Both science and modernity appear here as “occult experimental projects” (204),
and obeah becomes what he calls a crossover art, one that can incorporate difference and divergence, thereby disturbing the binaries that are so central to liberal,
modern cartographies of both governance and belief.
The crossover arts Crosson describes, like the affective knowledge systems
Castor limns, are experienced sensorially and transcendently. In Erotic Islands:
Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (2018), Lyndon Gill also offers up the
realm of “sensoryscapes” as an organizing principle for his research into the ways
same-sex desiring Caribbean artists have attempted to make social and political
interventions in the worlds they inhabit. Some of Gill’s sensoryscapes are classic areas of study within Trinidad and Tobago—carnival and calypso—and others
are newer concerns, such as the attention to HIV/AIDS prevalence and activism
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in the region.8 Throughout Erotic Islands, Gill links historical consciousness and
erotic desire to mine these spaces for insights related to how a focus on practice,
rather than on identity, might tell us something about the complex imbrications
of the spheres in which he is interested. Unlike some contemporary chroniclers
of same-sex desire in the Caribbean, the focus here is not on the exclusions and
violence experienced by those identified as sexually nonnormative in the Anglophone Caribbean, but on what they make with this nonnormativity, both socially
and materially, and on what theoretical interventions we might glean from this
making.
Erotic Islands is as much a work of reclamation as it is of remapping. Gill is
interested in how we recognize same sex desire in the Caribbean (and its diasporas), and how this recognition might enable us to see more clearly the ways people
embody and enact the trinity, as it were, of sensual, political, and spiritual work in
order to make political life outside the bounds of liberalism. He argues that situating Black queer speaking subjects at the center of our analyses of diaspora must
foreground impermanence, dynamism, and practice, and must also position Black
queerness as an epistemic location. And finally, in sketching these kinds of geographies of Black queerness, Gill is able to reclaim performance and spirituality for
political action, and to therefore foreground a queer and feminist theoretical lens
toward the politics of sovereignty.
Lara also builds on queer feminist theorization of the relations among political, spiritual, and erotic sovereignty (2020). For her, sovereignty must begin with
the recognition of the deep interdependence between human and nonhuman life.
Lara is interested in the conditions that are necessary for the realization of queer
freedoms and Black sovereignties within the context of “arrivant states”—a term
she borrows from Jody Byrd, who herself borrowed it from Kamau Brathwaite—
referencing the processes by which people brought to the Caribbean region against
their will, who now form the majority of the population, nevertheless perpetuate
setter colonial forms of erasure and exclusion of Indigenous groups. Her ethnographic attention to “criollo traditionalists” and feminist and LGBT activists in
the Dominican Republic encourages us to pay attention to the ways both groups
disrupt not only Christian colonial hetero-normativities but also Enlightenmentoriented distinctions between nature and culture and liberal framings of individual
subjectivity.
For Lara, at the heart of these disruptions is the concept of “body-land,” which
seeks to understand the ways these are “mutually constituting subjects, where both
act upon each other to inform the woven density of being” (2020, 62). Sovereignty,
in this context, is as much a mode of ecological interdependence as it is of
anti-imperialist resistance. Central to its practice is what Lara calls a “zambo consciousness,” a dense modality of being and an epistemological and ontological
What the Caribbean Teaches Us
15
position “that could enable us to shift our gaze away from the Christian colonial
assumptions central to mestizaje and toward Afro-Indigenous solidarities manifest
through the erotic, desires, sex, faith, friendships, and through embodied and spiritual struggles for queer freedom: Black sovereignty” (21). We have thus returned,
again, to the trinity of the political, the spiritual, and the erotic in the enactment
of sovereign dreams.
The Possibility of Repair
In her beautiful essay “What the Sands Remember,” Vanessa Agard-Jones advances
sand as a metaphor for coloniality in the Caribbean. Sand, here, is that which sticks,
that which creates discomfort, that which loses form; it is messy, yet both invisible and ever-present. It constitutes a “repository both of feeling and of experience, of affect and of history,” and it is “‘saturated’ with the presence of people who
have walked on and carried it, but simultaneously ‘empty’ of the archaeological and
forensic traces that would testify to that presence” (2012, 325). Sand makes manifest and holds memories—in this case, queer memories—where the archive is thin
and where, because of climactic processes that are both eventful and slow, all that is
concrete eventually erodes into the sea. Agard-Jones is interested in how we identify queerness when it is so obscured in Caribbean sociocultural and geographical
landscapes, but we might extend her metaphorical register to add another dimension to Stephens’s oceanic and terraqueous formations with which we began.
The sand, the beach—like the shoals Tiffany King foregrounds (2019)—these
are the in between spaces that disturb the certainties of territory and mapping, the
colonial cartographies of sovereignty, and the divisions between Indigenous and
African futures. They are spaces, and frames, that might help us generate a “decolonial, rather than postcolonial, notion of sovereignty” (Bonilla 2017), one that
could contribute to the broader project of decolonizing anthropology as a whole,
insofar as decolonizing might be seen as a form of repair. I want to conclude this
essay by addressing this question of repair from two vantage points. First, I want
to return to the lotto scammers in Lewis’s ethnography. The scammers frame their
action in relation to an “ethics of seizure”; they understand their “crime” within
a reparative framework in which their own criminality is positioned in relation
to the long legacies of modern capitalism, legacies that have produced their own
“sufferation.” Seizure, in this case, emerges as the result of a “moral obligation to
recuperate debt for their colonial injuries” (2020, 20).
In this way, the lotto scammers reframe the normative juridical modes of reparation, in which accountability is tracked from a culpable injurer to an individual
(or sometimes collective) who is injured. Within the normative construction of
reparations, one must be able to make the chain of injury clear, and the reparation
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must come from the perpetrator (or their descendent) and it must go to the injured.
However, within the context of the lotto scam, capital is extracted from White
American senior citizens, not the agents of British colonialism (whether banks, or
merchant houses, plantation owners, or corporations), and payment is made not
to specific descendants of those originally injured, but to “random” youth. Nevertheless, youth felt that anything that mitigated the allure of the United States, and
allowed them to make life at home rather than trying their luck (with minimal formal skills) abroad, seemed to them to be a form of legitimate reparations for the
broad injury of coloniality and its afterlives. By telling this story, Lewis reminds
us that “a life lived within the deferral of reparations for slavery” (2020, 152) perpetuates not only imperial domination but also a sense of Blackness that remains
rooted in property relations:
In a troubling way, the United States owing African Americans, France owing
Black Haitians, and the United Kingdom owing Anglophone Caribbean Blacks
reinscribes colonial property logics back onto Black subjects in each geographic
context. . . . The scammer logic has made evident that a truly reparative, by which
I mean radical, means of repair, one that can accommodate the sheer weight of the
injury of Blackness, is one where Black people, as collectives but also as individuals,
can determine the value and thus the cost of their own repair. (Lewis 2020, 175)
Reparations, for Lewis, is the flipside of Caribbean debt, itself the flipside of
European theft.
This theft, however, is not merely material, as Lara reminds us. It is also existential. It is spatial but also temporal. For her, repair “must take place on spiritualreligious grounds that take seriously the theo-philosophical transformations” produced through colonial conflicts over land, religion, and embodiment (2020, 13).
How do we enact a reorganization of the worlds we know so radical as to bring into
being Black sovereignties and queer freedoms? How do we meaningfully challenge
Christian colonial concepts of freedom and sovereignty, concepts that emerge from
conquest and colonization? What Lara and the other Caribbeanist anthropologists briefly rehearsed here remind us is that sovereignty is not an event. As Lara
puts it, “there is no teleological progress toward salvation. Rather,” she continues,
“survival—freedom:sovereignty—is coterminous, palimpsestic, woefully interdependent across multiple registers of temporal-corporeality” (2020, 124).
The Caribbean teaches us, therefore, that sovereignty is embodied practice,
process, and dialogue. It teaches us that we must move beyond liberal juridicallegal definitions to embrace the relations among the political, the spiritual, and
the sensual; that the historicity Trouillot stressed should not be thought of as
static but as spiral; that belonging (to a department, to a state, to a transnational
community) cannot be reckoned through ever-greater adherence to Western
norms of discipline, progress, and respectable citizenship; that crisis, creativity, and
What the Caribbean Teaches Us
17
care are co-constituting; and that attunement to the affective dimensions of experience opens portals to more capacious considerations of the engagements that
might arise from overlapping histories of dispossession, and ultimately, to repair.
The Caribbean teaches us that a robustly reflexive decolonial praxis can challenge
the binaries of here and there, then and now, us and them, which should invite us
to build anthropology anew out of the crucible of coloniality.
Notes
1 This
concern echoed Kevin Yelvington’s, which was that purportedly “new” perspectives in anthropological theory have long been central to Afro-Americanists writ large, and that these perspectives
are new only if this scholarship is elided or erased (2001).
2 This is by no means intended as an exhaustive list of contemporary anthropological work across
the region, which is beyond the purview of this essay. Instead, I am interested in the ways certain questions seem to permeate particular strands of Caribbeanist research, and how attention to these questions
might broaden the scope of how we understand the Caribbean in the world.
3 For example, see Alexander (2005); Benitez-Rojo (1992); Glissant (1997). On Spiralism, see also
Glover (2010).
4 For a more historical exegesis of self-determination that is not grounded in state sovereignty, see
Wilder (2015).
5 Indeed, migration was the important earlier frame through which the frame of transnationalism
entered Caribbeanist anthropology. See, for example, Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992),
and Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc (1994).
6 See, for example, Green (2014, 2015, n.d.), Hearn (2016), Hu-DeHart (2015), Shibata (2013),
Thomas (2018). A number of graduate students (including Jordan Lynton, Indiana University) are
also currently conducting ethnographic research on various aspects of the intensified Chinese presence throughout the region.
7 This framing of crisis also suffuses Vanessa Agard-Jones’s research on pesticides and their impact
on human and nonhuman bodies, and the ways this generates new politics of intimacy (2013).
8 See, for example, the critically important work of anthropologist Moji Anderson et al. in this
regard (e.g., 2008, 2009, 2010).
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