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The coloniality of citizenship in the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean

University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus

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.

Key Words: elite domination • heteronormativity • nationalism • patriarchy • postcolonial state • tourism

References

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• M. Jacqui Alexander, `Not just (any)body can be a citizen: the politics of law, sexuality and postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas ', Feminist Review (No. 48, Autumn 1994), p. 11.
• I would like to thank Chris Searle, himself one of the foremost British radicals who worked for the revolutionary government, for this insight. For Searle's work on Grenada, see Chris Searle, Words Unchained: language and revolution in Grenada (London, Zed Press, 1984).
• I borrow the phrase `apologists for local and global apartheid' from Sidney Lemelle, `The politics of cultural existence: pan-Africanism, historical materialism and Afrocentricity', Race & Class (Vol. 35, no. 1, 1993), p. 108.
• On the simplest level, this transition resulted in Caribbean people becoming citizens of a nation state rather than subjects of an empire.
• Walter Rodney, `Contemporary political trends in the English-speaking Caribbean', The Black Scholar (September 1975 ), pp. 15—21.
• Percy Hintzen, `Rethinking democracy in the postnationalist state', in New Caribbean Thought, op. cit, p. 105.
• Percy Hintzen, `Reproducing domination: identity and legitimacy constructs in the West Indies', Social Identities (Vol. 3, no. 1, 1997), p. 48.
• See especially Percy Hintzen, `Afro-Creole nationalism as elite domination: the English-speaking West Indies', in Charles P. Henry, ed., Foreign Policy and the Black (Inter)National Interest (New York, State University of New York Press, 2000).
• Hintzen, `Rethinking democracy in the postnationalist state', op. cit, pp. 105, 121.
• Percy Hintzen, `Creoleness and nationalism in Guyanese anticolonialism and postcolonial formation', Small Axe (No. 15, 2004), p. 113.
• Percy Hintzen, `Democracy and middle-class domination in the Anglophone Caribbean', in Carlene J. Edie, ed., Democracy in the Caribbean: myths and realities (Westport, Connecticut, Praeger, 1994), p. 13. Hintzen cites Max Weber's observation that `once it is established, bureaucracy is among the social structures which are the hardest to destroy', with clear resonances for the contemporary predicament.
• Ibid, p. 14.
• Ibid, p. 17.
• Jamaica (1962), Trinidad (1962), Barbados (1966) and Guyana (1966) achieved their independence in this decade, while associated state status, which meant local self-government with Britain retaining control of foreign affairs and defence for the territory, came to Antigua, Dominica, Grenada and St Lucia in 1967. Full independence came to most of these territories in the 1970s and early 1980s: Antigua (1981), the Bahamas (1973), Belize (1981), Dominica (1978), Grenada (1974), St Kitts and Nevis (1983), St Lucia (1979) and St Vincent (1979).
• Hintzen, ` Afro-Creole nationalism as elite domination', op. cit, p. 200.
• Ibid, p. 106.
• Hintzen, ` Reproducing domination', op. cit, p. 63.
• Ibid, p. 70.
• Ibid, p. 70. My italics.
• Percy Hintzen, `The Caribbean: race and Creole ethnicity', in David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos (eds), A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002), p. 493.
• On the racial state, see David Theo Goldberg, `Racial states ' in Goldberg and Solomos, op. cit., and his The Racial State (Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 2002). This global elite is hegemonically white but far from solely so, as it is perfectly willing to admit members who possess European cultural capital and a neoliberal capitalist ethos or what Walter Rodney, among others, once called the comprador elite of the Third World.
• By other regimes in the West, I refer here to the United States and the debacle of the 2000 election, particularly the result in the state of Florida where there is little doubt now that systematic discrimination and disenfranchisement took place directed especially towards black voters. See `Black election 2000', The Black Scholar (Vol. 31, no. 2, Summer 2001 ).
• The title of a 1998 Chris Cozier exhibition. The `medal' refers to the acknowledgement given routinely to citizens deemed to have given good service to the nation and routinely comes in the form of knighthoods, `crowns of merit' and other such colonial titles.
• Percy Hintzen, `Race and Creole ethnicity in the Caribbean', in Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (eds), Questioning Creole: creolisation discourses in Caribbean culture (Kingston, Ian Randle, 2002), p. 92.
• Hintzen, `The Caribbean ', op. cit, p. 477.
• Ibid, p. 478.
• Hintzen, `Reproducing domination ', op. cit, p. 55.
• Quoted in Kathy McAfee, Storm Signals (Oxford, Oxfam Publishers, 1991), p. 3.
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), p. 123.
• See Clive Thomas, The Poor and the Powerless: economic policy and change in the Caribbean (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1988); Tennyson Joseph, ```Old expectations, new philosophies'': adjusting state-society relations in the postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean', Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies (Vol. 22, no. 4, 1997), pp. 31—67; Percy Hintzen, `Structural adjustment and the new international middle class', Transition (Guyana, 24 February 1995), pp. 52—74.
• The rise of tourism is linked to the fact that Caribbean countries, beset by a legacy of underdevelopment that necessitates the importation of a large amount of food and manufactured goods, have consistently needed large flows of foreign exchange to stabilise their economies. As Polly Patullo points out, `for two decades tourism has distinguished itself as the only steady growth sector for the region'. Polly Patullo, Last Resorts: the cost of tourism in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica, Ian Randle Press, 1996), p. 12.
• The purest versions of the tourism economy in the Caribbean can be found in Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados and St Kitts. St Lucia, Grenada and most other Anglophone Caribbean islands are trying desperately to emulate the patterns these islands have established. Tourism in Jamaica is more specific to particular locations within the island. Trinidadian tourism is mainly linked to carnival, resulting in a somewhat different set of circumstances to what I discuss above. In 2000, the numbers of long-stay tourists (one night or more) and the populations of the respective islands were: Antigua (206,871 tourists; 71,800 population); Barbados (544,696; 267,500); St Kitts and Nevis (73,149; 40,400); St Lucia (269,850, 156,000). `Country Visitor Analysis' (Caribbean Tourism Organization, 2000).
• In Barbados in the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century, heated debate revolved around the government's decision to remove a statue of Horatio Nelson from the central square in the capital. While much of the debate was between the white elite and conservative blacks versus local pan-Africanists, one of the arguments that gathered most force and was frequently repeated in the newspapers was that British tourists (the major market) liked the statue, which should be reason enough to retain it. Indeed, there were reports in British newspapers (notably, the Guardian) about the controversy and travel agents reported that British tourists had asked if they were not welcome in Barbados any more. As of April 2007, the statue remained in place. Similarly, in Barbados in 2003, comments were made in the press that the proposed introduction of breathalyser tests might harm the tourism industry.
• Hilary Beckles notes this in his book Corporate Power in Barbados: the mutual affair (Bridgetown, Barbados, Lighthouse Publications, 1989).
• Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: from Arawaks to Zombies (London, Routledge, 2003).
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: multiculturalism and the media ( London, Routledge, 1994), p. 56. Emphasis added.
• Patullo, Last Resorts, op. cit., p. 63.
• Ibid., p. 62.
• Ibid., p. 89.
• Kamala Kempadoo, ed., Sun, Sex and Gold: tourism and sex work in the Caribbean (Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999 ); Kamala Kempadoo, `Freelancers, temporary wives and beach boys: researching sex work in the Caribbean', Feminist Review (No. 67, Spring 2001), pp. 39—62.
• Julia O'Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, `Fantasy islands: exploring the demand for sex tourism', in Kempadoo, ed., Sun, Sex and Gold, op. cit., p. 37.
• Ibid., p. 37. A discussion of sex work in the Caribbean raises the far more intricate question of the extent of agency that sex workers have in their work and lives and I would certainly disavow any analysis that sees them merely as helpless victims of western imperialism. Nonetheless, this does not diminish the fundamental coloniality of the desires that create a market for their services in the tourism industry.
• Alexander, `Not just (any)body can be a citizen', op. cit, p. 19.
• Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: meditations on feminism, sexual politics, memory and the sacred (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2005), p. 193.
• Kamala Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean: gender, race and sexual labor (London, Routledge, 2004), p. 3.
• Patricia Mohammed, `Midnight's children and the legacy of nationalism ', Small Axe (No. 2, 1997), pp. 19—37.
• Natasha Barnes, `Reluctant matriarch: Sylvia Wynter and the problematics of Caribbean feminism', Small Axe (No. 5, March 1999), p. 34.
• Tracy S. Robinson, `Fictions of citizenship, bodies without sex: the production and effacement of gender in law', Small Axe (Vol. 4, 2000).
• Ibid, p. 25. Emphasis in original.
• Tracy Robinson, `Beyond the Bill of Rights: constituting Caribbean women as citizens', in Eudine Barriteau, ed., Confronting Power, Theorizing Gender: interdisciplinary perspectives in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica, University of the West Indies Press, 2003), p. 240.
• Trudy Simpson, `Jamaica teen pregnancy controversy heats up, cooler heads prevail', Panos London (17 December 2003); Robert Best, `Controlling sex results', Daily Nation (Barbados, 5 August 2003); Deborah Thomas, `Public bodies: virginity testing, redemption songs and racial respect in Jamaica', Journal of Latin American Anthropology (Vol. 11, no. 1, 2006), pp. 1—31.
• Alexander, ` Not just (any)body can be a citizen', op. cit, p. 6.
• Ibid., pp. 7, 10.
• Ibid., p. 13.
• These lines deliberately pun Hortense Spillers' well-known opening paragraph in `Mama's baby, papa's maybe: an American grammar book', Diacritics (Vol. 17, no. 2, 1987), p. 65.
• Bernard Babb, `Prison appeal', Daily Nation (Barbados, 15 February 2001).
• Ibid.
• C.L.R. James, `The West Indian middle classes', in Party Politics in the West Indies (San Juan, Vedic Enterprises, 1962).
• Hintzen, `Structural adjustment and the new international middle class', op. cit, p. 52.
• James, ` The West Indian Middle Classes', op. cit, p. 161.
• Meeks, Radical Caribbean, op. cit; Gray, `Predation politics and the political impasse in Jamaica', op. cit
• Gray, ` Predation politics and the political impasse in Jamaica', op. cit, p. 76.
• Ibid, p. 74.
• On the `coloniality of power', see Aníbal Quijano, `Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America', Nepantla (Vol. 1, no. 3, 2000), pp. 533—580.
• See Holger Henke, `Freedom ossified: political culture and the public use of history in the Anglophone Caribbean', paper presented at the 25th Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association, St Lucia, 29 May—3 June 2000.
• I should make it clear here that I do not refer to a `failure' in the same sense of the contemporary neoliberal discourse on `failed states'.
• Quoted in Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth-century America (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 49.
• Earl Lovelace, Salt (London, Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 257.
• Nelson Maldonado-Torres, `Thinking from the limits of being: Levinas, Fanon, Dussel and the cry of ethical revolt', doctoral dissertation, UMI no. 3050932 ( Brown University, 2002).
• Quoted in Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, op. cit., p. 49.

Race & Class, Vol. 49, No. 2, 20-40 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0306396807082856


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