States of Crisis, Flags of Convenience

Abstract

This essay serves as an introduction to the special section “States of Crisis.” Principally a meditation on political and ecological crisis in the Caribbean, this introduction revisits two concurrent events—the devastation of The Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian, and the arrival of the first oil production vessel in Guyanese territorial waters—and probes the contradictions between the extractive imperative of economic nationalism and the existential threat of Caribbean extinction. Engaging “flags of convenience” as a practice of merchant ship registration and a metaphor for the ideal of postcolonial sovereignty, this essay considers how climate crisis demands a refusal of the state form as the limit to a regional political horizon and a rejection of nationalist historiography as a basis for the project of Caribbean criticism.

What the Caribbean Teaches Us: The Afterlives and New Lives of Coloniality

“…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.…”

“…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?…”

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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.

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Trends, Trendsetting, and Shifting Trends in Caribbean Anthropology

“…On the other hand, the work also takes on the environmental specificities of the Caribbean region—such as extractive industries around energy; the disasters associated with hurricanes or volcanic eruptions; and reorganizations of plantation agriculture. For example, a 2019 symposium and subsequent special journal issue brought together eight anthropologists who, together, theorized and presented ethnographic cases demonstrating the place of nationalistic state policy crises in the making and managing of environmental crises from Guyana to Puerto Rico (Jobson, 2020b). Race is also central to much of the work in this area.…”

“…Caribbeanist anthropology where I see such trendsetting taking place: climate crises, reparations/repair, and the location of Caribbean anthropology. Unable to include all work in this area and choosing to follow critical disciplinary movements (led by Caribbeanists and Latin Americanists; see Jobson 2020a and 2020b; Smith and Garrett‐Scott 2021), I intentionally highlight work by Black anthropologists. Within US anthropology, it is Black Caribbeanist anthropologists who are in many respects, at the forefront of this work.…”