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

Abstract

This 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.But while there is little doubt that this sense of temporal concordance that once animated much postcolonial 1 radical thought has dissipated in the contemporary era,

Local Perceptions of Climate Change Impacts in St. Kitts (Caribbean Sea) and Malé, Maldives (Indian Ocean)

“…With work conditions involving day-to-day interaction with the environment and a nature-dependent livelihood, these results further support previous work indicating strong sensitivity of individuals working in agriculture or fishing to perceptions of climatic and environmental changes [97][98][99][100]. Further implications emerge from these gendered occupational roles.…”

Hearing voices: colonialism, outsider perspectives, island and Indigenous issues, and publishing ethics

“…He instead seeks to differentiate "between decolonization in terms of process and self-government in terms of the end result" (Pöllath, 2018, p. 235), in light of the negotiated forms of continued nonsovereignty and free association across the USA-affiliated territories in the Pacific. So far, this is in line with much of the current island studies scholarship (e.g., Baldacchino, 2010a;Grydehøj, 2016a;Hepburn & Baldacchino, 2016;Pugh, 2017;Veenendaal, 2015). Over the course of the paper, Pöllath (2018, p. 247) goes on to argue that, from the legal and constitutional perspectives of 'high politics', "decolonization has above all become a historical term and unfitting for the new relationships that have emerged in the Pacific since the 1970s.…”

Relationality and island studies in the Anthropocene

“…Is focusing upon climate change deflecting attention "away from underlying political conditions of vulnerability towards the nature of the physical hazard itself?" (Kelman, 2014, p. 120; see also Baldacchino, 2017;Powell et al, 2014;Pugh, 2017). On the one hand, perhaps it is somewhat inevitable that whilst today there are many critiques of resilience, these nevertheless still tend to stick with resilience itself as a key trope to be recovered, rescued and kept in play.…”