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The islands forgotten

24/11/2019

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A promiment question in my work is to ask how we can we think the nation differently. Would we then, still think the nation after all? Working with theories of political anthropology in the Caribbean often results in an akward misfit of concepts and empirical data. Somehow, the world as we read about it does not apply in the Caribbean. Yarimar Bonilla (2015) explained this epistemic inadvertence to the assumption of national sovereignty as the norm. She argues that Caribbean islands are rarely the topic of scholarly work on political sovereignty, precisely because the reality of these islands undermines dominant notions of what sovereignty is. They are often reduced to being political aborations, all the while Caribbean islands have been a type of paragon of global processes, an argument made many times before by fellow scholars (Glissant 1997, Hansen & Steputtat 2001, Guadeloupe 2008) Such works urge us to ask: what possibilities are there when we reject the illusionary character of the sovereign nation? 
Now lets be truthful in pursuing this quest. There is no denial here, or in the mentioned works about the real world effects of thinking the sovereign nation. Agamben (1989) already explained that while the ideal of sovereignty and its relation to the concept of bare life is fallible and treacherous, it is also an idea that remains to deliver real world effects, such as racism, xenophonia, genocide and mass incarceration. 
Quite recently Yarimar Bonilla made a contribution to a MoMa event in a video shared on Facebook. Responding to the question if dependancy theory is a colonial myth/manipultation, Bonilla returned the question, asking, who is actually dependant on who? “After all, why does the United States have colonies?” This question reminded me of a statement James Baldwin once made about the constuction of the Other, the exception to the norm. An outsider that represents Agamben’s bare life, specifically framed as the idea of the black person. Baldwin famously spoke:
 
“The question you gotta ask yourself … is why was it necessary to have a Negro in the first place. Because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it. And you gotta find out why. The future of the country depends on that.” 
 
To say “give me liberty or give me death” is a claim that Baldwin said was not accessible to all citizens of the United States. Considering the global political climate, to whom does the exception of this claim belongs today? The answer to that question reveals to us the access, or lack of it, to a political community that grants us ‘human’ rights. We should thus ask ourselves: how can we imagine that community differently? 

(this post was also featured in the december 2018 issue of the Caribbean Studies Association newsletter.)


Works cited: 
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.
Bonilla, Y. (2015). Non-sovereign futures: French Caribbean politics in the wake of disenchantment. University of Chicago Press.
____  Facebook video
Hansen, T. B., Stepputat, F., Adams, J., & Steinmetz, G. (Eds.). (2001). States of imagination: Ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state. Duke University Press.
Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation. University of Michigan Press.
Guadeloupe, F. (2008). Chanting down the new Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and capitalism in the Caribbean. University of California Press.
 
_____     https://dezignark.com/blog/dependency-moma-rd-salon-29-moma-live/
_____ https://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-james-baldwin-from-the-negro-and-the-american-promise/

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No human is Alien

20/11/2019

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As an increasing number of asylum seekers attempts to reach the shores of Caribbean islands, such as Curacao, in hope of a life in safety, i write this. In that same moment of writing thousands of people from Central America are in despair and hope at the same time and for weeks now, have been walking across state borders to demand their right to asylum. In that same moment of writing this is not a national problem. It is a problem of the world. No matter how goverments try to exclude themselves from the legal responsibility of welcoming those who fled the atrocities of their former home, it remains a problem of our global society. It seems almost to tempting to discuss the obvious hypocrisy of the United States towards the caravan and migrants from Mexico in general. But as I stated: too obvious. 
 
Another noteworthy example to discuss here is the case where people from Venezuala are seeking asylum in Curacao, an autonomous island state in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Approximately eight years ago in 2010 the Dutch Antilles was dismanteld and Curacao became an autonomous state within the kingdom. Within this recent constellation the Hague retains responsibility for defense affairs, including the monitoring of all borders in the kingdom and for foreign affairs.
 
Over the past two years, the Dutch State has come under critique about the handling and treatment of refugees and the asylum policy by the Kingdom. Curaçao has indicated on several occasions that they are not capable of obviating the issue without assistance from the Kingdom. Representatives of Interior and Kingdom Relations, and Foreign Affairs replied that the Dutch state should not have any involvement in the handling of refugees: it was argued to be a national affair and not a kingdom matter. 
 
Although asylum is a human right as declared in article 14 of the Human Rights Declaration of the UN[i], the reality is that few are granted this right. It is a common, but threathening reality that for many turns violent as it subjects them to the most vulnerable elements of xenophobia.[ii]
 
How come the fundamental grounds for what came about as the notion of popular sovereignty - our common understanding of democracy – seems to always contradict the reality of democracy in the reality of the contemporary moment?[iii] The truth is that the contradiction is not one of the contemporary moment, but something always already present in the complexity of the relation. To understand what is going on within the contradiction it is essential to understand that the contradiction is exactly what we need to be able to acknowledge instead of understand.[iv]  
 
Asylum is a right. No human being is illegal. 

(This post was also featured in the newsletter of the Caribbean studies Association, november 2018 issue.)


[i] http://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf

[ii] https://www.amnesty.nl/content/uploads/2018/09/AMN_18_45_rapport-Curacao_WEB.pdf?x93624

[iii] Kauanui, J. K. (2017). SOVEREIGNTY: An Introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 32(3), 323-329.

[iv] Derrida, J. (2012). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. Routledge.
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