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

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.

Epiphenomenal suasion: Jehovah's Witnesses and the politics of preaching against the state

“…Theopolitics as such has recently garnered the interest of anthropologists (McAllister & Napolitano 2020; 2021; see also Mahadev 2022; Napolitano 2021; Norget 2021; Oliphant 2021; Thomas 2022: 246; and for the idea being taken beyond anthropology, see Schmiedel 2022), mostly stemming from McAllister and Napolitano's reading of Brody's work on Buber. What this growing body of anthropological literature points towards is both a shift in the anthropology of religion from ‘just ethics’ back to ‘politics’, but also a broader ‘humanist’ moment in the discipline (see Thomas 2022: 246), drawing on similar veins to the work that figures politics to be otherwise, whether that is the ‘non‐political’ (e.g. Candea 2011) or the ‘cosmopolitical’ (e.g.…”