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.

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“Black Metamorphosis,” Sylvia Wynter's unpublished manuscript of the 1970s, is premised on the idea that the black experience of coloniality is crucial to comprehending the history of the New World. This essay traces the idea of black experience in “Black Metamorphosis” through the figure of the non-norm, a central category for Wynter throughout the manuscript. The black presence in the New World is subterranean but omnipresent, fugitive but hypervisible, condemned as the non-norm and nonperson but the foundation for the concept of free citizenship in the Americas. Black experience is crucial; without it the ideological fictions of the contemporary world order that consign the vast majority of its population to a subhuman status remain uncontested and grow every generation in weight and power.