Publications

An Educated Sint Maartener? National Belonging in a Primary School on Sint Maarten
Jordi Halfman
Globalisation, Societies and Education (2019), pp. 1-13.
ABSTRACT Both in academia and in everyday discourse, the belief in the (re)production of national ideology and related civil culture(s) within state schools has remained strong. This idea(l) has also become salient among a growing number of educational specialists, anti-colonial activists and policymakers on Sint Maarten, the Dutch or southern side of the bi-national, Caribbean island St. Martin. Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork I show how the different elites’ imaginations of the nation were remade and unmade by the teacher and pupils in a sixth-grade classroom in a public school. Lingering colonial relations, ongoing migration and popular culture challenged a well-bounded, shared imagination of the educated Sint Maartener.

Keywords Education, national belonging, mobility, popular culture, Sint Maarten, Caribbean thought
Sharing an Imperfect Struggle
Jordi Halfman
Etnofoor Vol. 31(1)
​Friendship (2019), pp. 131-136
In conversation with the articles in the etnofoor issue on Race-ism (2018), Jordi analyzes various ways of racialization including those she encountered during her fieldwork on Sint Maarten.
All-Inclusive Resorts in Sint Maarten and Our Common Decolonial State: On Butterflies That Are Caterpillars Still in Chrysalis.
Francio Guadeloupe & Jordi Halfman
In Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism (2019) (edited by Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen).
The contributors to Sounds of Vacation examine the commodification of music and sound at popular vacation destinations throughout the Caribbean in order to tease out the relationships between political economy, hospitality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Drawing on case studies from Barbados, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, and Saint Lucia, the contributors point to the myriad ways live performances, programmed music, and the sonic environment heighten tourists' pleasurable vacation experience. They explore, among other topics, issues of authenticity in Bahamian music; efforts to give tourists in Barbados peace and quiet at a former site of colonial violence; and how resort soundscapes extend beyond music to encompass the speech accents of local residents. Through interviews with resort managers, musicians, and hospitality workers, the contributors also outline the social, political, and economic pressures and interests that affect musical labor and the social encounters of musical production. In so doing, they prompt a rethinking of how to account for music and sound's resonances in postcolonial spaces
Tarzan komt uit de tropen, ik niet.
Francio Guadeloupe
​De Gids 1 (2017)
ABSTRACT Tarzan is de wilde man uit de tropen die zowel het beste van het Westen als het veronderstelde inheemse van het niet-westerse belichaamt. Een wilde man met het juiste culturele kapitaal. Maar Tarzan omarmen als oplossing van het 'probleem' van culturele diversiteit, draagt in het geheel niet bij aan het ontmantelen van de koloniale raciale orde. 
APPRECIATING CALLALOO SOUP: St. Martin as an expression of the compositeness of Life beyond the guiding fictions of racism, sexism, and class discrimination.
​Francio Guadeloupe & Erwin Wolthuis
Revista Brasileira do Caribe, São Luís - MA, Brasil, v. 17, n. 32, 2016,  (jan./jun.) p. 227-253
ABSTRACT Callaloo soup is both a Caribbean and outernational dish. Different wherever and whoever prepares it, Callaloo can be understood as an invitation to appreciate the different interconnected worlds that our collective experience of western colonialism and resistance has brought about. It can simultaneously be understood as the composite nature of the world and the dynamic of Life that the triad of racism, sexism, and class discrimination seeks to obfuscate and yet unwittingly strengthens. Taking the Callaloo soup as a guiding metaphor, the authors highlight new ways of undoing practices of self and other oppressions on the island of Sint Maarten. Their self-reflective and self-reflexive exercises are fed by their experiences of doing fieldwork among students attending a secondary school. The authors envision this text as an open invitation to rethink Saint Martin & Sint Maarten (St. Martin) as both a separate broth with multiple cultural ingredients (persons and their expressions), and as an emerging element in the Callaloo soup that is the world. 

Keywords St. Maarten & Saint Martin, cultural diversity, Callaloo, Schools
Slavery and Human Rights Lesson plan
Developed in cooperation with the Iselinge University of Applied Sciences, The university of Saint Martin, The University of Amsterdam, Dr. Wayne Modest and the University of Utrecht.
​Main architects: Tanja Lenderink, Imke Snijders, Sien te Grotenhuis and Sabine Kempers, supervision: Dr. Alake-Tuenter, Dr. Guadeloupe, Drs. De Visser-Lemstra, Mrs. Bryson-Pantophlet, Jordi Halfman.
In short We here present you with the lesson plan that was developed on the relationship between trans-Atlantic slavery and the birth of Human Rights. It is a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, USM, the National Museum for World Cultures in the Netherlands and the Isselinge University of Applied Sciences. These lesson plans were created on Sint Maarten by students engaging with local teachers and intellectuals on the impact of slavery. These lessons will be taught in schools on Sint Maarten as well as in the Netherlands and the wider Dutch Caribbean.

​Note The lesson plan was created in Dutch and will hopefully be translated to English shortly.
Imagining the Nation in the Classroom: Belonging and Nationness in the Dutch Caribbean
Yvon van der Pijl & Francio Guadeloupe
European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Explorations, no. 98 (2015) April, pp. 87-98.
ABSTRACT This Exploration focuses on ideologies of belonging and feelings of nationness on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Sint Maarten and Sint Eustatius. The new constitutional framework that came into effect within the Kingdom of the Netherlands on 10 October 2010 conferred a new political status to these islands, thereby affecting the complexity of political subjectivity, nationness and belonging within the context of Caribbean nonsovereignty. The article presents primary schools as important ethnographic sites to study the (re)construction of ideologies of belonging and senses of nationness. Here susceptible minds can be moulded into internalizing ideologies, through which children might be socialized into dividing their fellow citizens or citizens-to-be into those who belong and those who do not. Preliminary to extensive ethnographic field research, the authors assume transmigrancy and diasporic religion respectively as central features that might challenge current fictions of modern secular sovereignty.

Keywords belonging, nationness, Dutch Caribbean, nonsovereignty, classroom ethnography, children.
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