Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean: Ways of Being Non/Sovereign

By Francio Guadeloupe, Linden F. Lewis, Nikki Mulder and 10 more

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean is a collection of essays that explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, historical and media analysis, the study of popular culture, and autoethnographic accounts, the various contributions challenge conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty. While the book recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it opens a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life. Focusing on all six different islands and through a multitude of voices and stories, the volume engages with the everyday projects, ordinary imaginaries, and dreams of equaliberty alongside the work of independistas and traditional social movements aiming for more or full self-determination. As such, it offers a rich and powerful telling of the various ways of being in and belonging to our contemporary postcolonial world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978818682

Linden F. Lewis

Linden F. Lewis is associate dean of social sciences and professor of sociology at Bucknell University. He is editor of The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean and Caribbean Sovereignty, Development and Democracy in an Age of Globalization.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

FRANCIO GUADELOUPE AND YVON VAN DER PIJL

It is our postcolonial questions and not our answers that demand our critical attention.

—David Scott, 2002

Ooh no … crapaud smoke yuh pipe, as they say in the Caribbean. Vladimir Lucien has just gotten himself into trouble—and that on the very last day of the festival. Things were going so well for him during the St. Martin Book Fair, a literary fête that takes place annually on the binational island of Sint Maarten & Saint Martin. Vladimir, the up-and-coming author and critic from St. Lucia, who has been hailed throughout the festival for his ingenuity in combining academic postcolonial theorizing with his spoken word performances, has dared to question the striving for political sovereignty.

His critique of the current and past political leaders on his native island is welcomed. He informs the audience, made up of other invited artists from the region and a small pocket of consumers of literature, that the politicians on St. Lucia are examples of that social formation that the Martinican scholar-activist Frantz Fanon ([1961] 2004) termed a comprador bourgeoisie. The twist, Vladimir continues, is that this bourgeoisie has read Fanon and other decolonial and postcolonial authors at the University of the West Indies and the London School of Economics. As a result, they have a great ability to orate that jargon in contorted forms in public gatherings and can thus take the venom out of the critique of organic intellectuals. People in the crowd murmur approvingly that the same is the case on Sint Maarten & Saint Martin.

Vladimir’s last move—attempting to speak critically about Sint Maarten—however, turns out to be suicidal. He states that, to his knowledge, the Dutch side of the island has a good deal of autonomy within a transatlantic federation that needs some tinkering. The fact that he mouths the term Dutch side already raises disapproving looks among the independence fighters who have organized the event. When he goes on to say that, to his mind, seeking independence is still too complicit with a colonial mindset of independent countries that are sovereign yet under the power of the United States and Europe, and that the Caribbean should think through alternatives to this past political project, he is interrupted.

Rhoda Arrindell, a well-known freedom fighter on the island, who has been cordial with him up until now, shouts, You just stop right there. She lets him know that she does not appreciate him speaking about what St. Martiners should do. That is unacceptable. It is up to the people to decide, informed of course by their educated and dedicated daughters and sons of the soil, who are aware of the evil trickery of colonial powers like the Netherlands and France. She continues to pontificate that while St. Lucia struggles economically and still has to deal with the enslaving nations of the past, by which she means the North Atlantic countries, it is nevertheless a sovereign country and as such can take its place in the United Nations meetings in New York. St. Martin (not Sint Maarten & Saint Martin, as that is a colonial division), her island, in contrast, is still a colony. Her message is clear: there are still colonies in the world and still colonial masters who claim to represent colonized Caribbean peoples, like those of St. Martin, internationally. She ends by averring that, just like the former British colonies, St. Martin too has to become a sovereign nation.

The force of her intervention leads to a deafening silence. The moderator seeks to ease the tension by raising a new topic far more related to Caribbean aesthetics, but this effort is destined to fail: the proverbial cat is out of the bag. If the St. Martin Book Fair was meant to celebrate Caribbean unity and a coming together of authors pushing for political independence from former colonial masters, Vladimir Lucien’s interference and Rhoda Arrindell’s response reveal that this is (only) a unity based on the sovereign nation-state model, whereby every country has its people and its intellectuals who alone can speak for them. Still, it is telling that no other Sint Maarteners in the audience followed Arrindell. Perhaps this is because most Sint Maarteners continue to wish to remain connected to the (European) Netherlands and the other Dutch Caribbean islands, which is a public secret.

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Although Caribbean freedom struggles contributed to the formation of the sovereign nation-state model, this model was perfected by the United States and Western Europe, which to this day still wield disproportionate global power. The influential Caribbean theorists and revolutionaries Frantz Fanon and C. L. R. James never bought into this model. They stood more for federations of ex-colonial countries, where the nation-state model was but a step and a tool in a move toward the full demolition of the Western hegemony that lived on in the Bretton Woods Agreement. The dreams of Fanon and James, however, did not materialize. Full sovereignty in the Caribbean today, as it was at the time when many islands did gain political autonomy, is a fata morgana. On that final day of the St. Martin Book Fair, the Caribbean’s postcolonial predicament was revealed. David Scott’s (2004, 3) prescient insight that "it is our postcolonial questions and not our answers that demand our critical attention" rang true—and deserved, probably more than ever, to be followed and elaborated.

This collection of essays on the Dutch Caribbean seeks, in the spirit of Scott and Vladimir Lucien, to seriously interrogate the question of non/sovereignty and, related to it, the (highly politicized) issue of belonging.¹ Attentive to the polyphony of voices, the contributions attempt to historicize, deconstruct, or reformulate, each in its own way, the still existing though disenchanting postcolonial answers to the fundamental questions of freedom and equality; that is, they dare to question the idea(l)s of political independence, postcolonial sovereignty, and self-determination that are described by some progressive thinkers as futures past (Scott 2004; Bonilla 2010, 2015). They do so in a way that is respectful of the work of Rhoda Arrindell and other Dutch Caribbean activist-intellectuals who argue that colonialism is still alive and well.

DREAMS AND PROJECTS OF FREEDOM AND/WITH EQUALITY

Based on the eighteenth-century pillars of political modernity and the modern self-understanding of peoples, the ideal type of belonging to a nation whose telos is to be the sovereign ruler of a land is losing its legitimacy in today’s world of hypermobility, transmigration, transnational regulatory organizations, and intensified global capitalism. Still, as the opening vignette demonstrates, it would be wrong to argue that longings for sovereignty and national independence are completely disappearing. Hence, a critical interrogation is needed to truly understand and appreciate what notions like sovereignty and the sovereign nation signify for the people residing on the Dutch Caribbean islands, as well as for those who are referred to academically as the Antillean diaspora in the Netherlands. What imaginaries and imaginations of community are obfuscated by these notions and political credos such as national independence? To get a grip on these issues, scholars of the Dutch Caribbean increasingly follow an emerging insight in the wider field of Caribbean studies.

In her ethnography on the French Caribbean, Yarimar Bonilla (2015, xiv), for example, rightly observes that although it might seem as if the project of postcolonial sovereignty has led to a political dead end, many populations still find meaning and power in the right to nation and state. Jonathan Pugh (2017, 868), in agreement with her observation, suggests that, to understand this dynamic, postcolonial research needs new critical tools of analysis and new ethnographic approaches to unpack what this means for today. The first step is to historicize sovereignty as a normative ideal (and ultimately a provincial Western myth) and, as Bonilla and Pugh argue, acknowledge how this ideal undergoes change as it is taken up by people who have experienced Western colonization (Bonilla 2013, 2015, 2017a, 2017b; Pugh 2017; see also Trouillot 2003, 35ff.).

Conceptually, this means that sovereignty is far from a neutral category of analysis. It is our contention, however, that although it is necessary to situate sovereignty in these two senses of the term—namely, to present its Western provenance and study genealogically how it is taken up and plays out in the Dutch Caribbean—this is in itself insufficient, even if we explore and examine how ordinary people inhabit and blur the contours of sovereignty and non-sovereignty in their everyday lives, as Pugh (2017, 877), following Bonilla, proposes. One way or another, it is still about political life/lives. Bonilla’s ethnographic work on non-sovereign Guadeloupe, for instance, explicitly centers on activists contesting the French state and local authorities. In this collection, we award more space to an appreciation of other ways of being equal and free that Caribbean subalterns on the non-independent, non-sovereign islands are desiring, creating, and promoting within the hegemony of the nation-state model that connects them to their former colonial masters. Calibrated iterations of the nation, the state, and even sovereignty, which Pugh and Bonilla rightly theorize about, may not always be an adequate representation or stand-in for these other horizons of liberty and equality pursued outside the strictly political.

For activist-intellectuals like Rhoda Arrindell and other independistas, the move toward political independence and sovereignty is still, however, very much on the table. Studying how they conceive of non/sovereignty and how they go about securing it politically and culturally are indeed important parts of this study. Yet, as most of the chapters also demonstrate, there exist other dreams and projects of a liberty that is intimately wedded to a politics of radical equality—a matter that Vladimir Lucien was hinting at—that thrives relatively unencumbered by the question of the political non/sovereignty of the Dutch Caribbean islands. It is seductive to interpret this latter longing as an instantiation of what the French philosopher Étienne Balibar (2014, 20) terms equaliberty: Equality and freedom are contradicted in exactly the same conditions, in the same situation, because there is no example of conditions that suppress or repress freedom that do not suppress or limit—that is, do not abolish—equality, and vice versa.

Balibar grounds equaliberty historically in a particular working through of the French Revolution and its founding text, the Rights of Man and Citizens, an interpretation that extends or universalizes human dignity (44–45). This universalization is possible, according to Balibar, because the French Revolution’s founding text makes no distinction between Man and Citizens. Every person counts and is simultaneously related to those within and without the state in which he or she resides. Fraternity—that other concept of the French Revolution, which can be understood as (national) community—only came about as a way of managing the insurrectionary impulse that resides in equaliberty, because modes of citizenship that exclude Man (here meaning fellow human beings) are contested constantly (52). Could this not be the leitmotif of the alter-imaginaries of liberty with equality in the Dutch Caribbean?

We resist the seduction of using the concept of equaliberty, in the first instance, given that the Caribbean (not mentioned in Balibar’s notable theorization of equaliberty) functions as an unnamed subtext bearing the name of Haiti, which troubles the neat folding of the pursuit of liberty with equality into the history of France (or, for that matter, the United States). Caribbean theorists and their postcolonial peers, such as C. L. R. James ([1938] 1975, [1960] 2013), Michel-Rolph Trouillot ([1995] 2015), and Gurminder Bhambra (2014), remind us that it was through the input of those Africans and their descendants fighting against enslavement that Man and Citizen were equated, an equation that from its inception was being ripped apart by the fiction of race. We take another route, derived from Trouillot ([1995] 2015); namely, that many among the enslaved were not necessarily interested in nesting their pursuit of liberty and equality in the nation-state logic of sovereignty. And so, the dreams and projects of liberty with equality in the Dutch Caribbean, unperturbed by the question of sovereignty, may be part of a submarine current that from its inception was pan-Caribbean, Atlantic, and transversal—in the sense of bringing African, Amerindian, European, and Asian worlds together. It is this equaliberty in the second instance, removed from the (methodological) nationalist pretense of foundational France, that we take on board.

Conversely, however, the Caribbean was not immune to the ideology of sovereignty and the imagination of community in the broad format of a nation organized in a state (G. Lewis 1963, 1968; Knight 1990; Meeks 2000; L. Lewis 2013; Rosenberg 2007). One could argue that in the face of colonial domination, the historically subalternized in the region pursued ideals of liberty that were, from the eighteenth century onward, inadvertently transfigured by many resistance leaders into the ideal of sovereignty and nationalism as the hegemonic project of political belonging (Allahar 2011). Thus, in the Dutch Caribbean too, the teleology from people to nation to the sovereign nation-state continues to hold sway. The political myth among those who uphold this telos in the Dutch Caribbean goes as follows: the people who belong (or who are considered to belong) to the separate islands are part of individual nations, who ideally should govern themselves and their territory.

To date, conventional literature produced by many intellectuals on the Dutch Caribbean islands still understands sovereignty as something singular, rooted in a social contract, territorially bound, and absolute (e.g., Jeffry [1963] 2011; Sekou 1989, [1997] 2007; Lake 2000, 2014; Arrindell 2014). It is crucial to recognize, however, and, to reiterate a point made earlier, that the ideals or universals of moving from a nation to a nation with a state that holds sovereign sway over a territory are best conceived as traveling packages (Tsing 2005) that interact with local processes and power dynamics and therefore (may) create new and other forms. This in turn may presuppose that all the projects of equaliberty produced by Caribbean people can be taken up and made compatible with the global traveling package of the nation-state model. Consequently, equaliberty and the nation-state model may interact, but they cannot be conceptually or analytically collapsed like, for instance, Balibar ideally imagines with his Man—Citizen couplet. As this collection will show, Man, or rather many Caribbean Wo=Men, live within polities premised on citizenship while following another rhythm.

In doing so, we make explicit, with reference to the Dutch Caribbean, what is being done in the wider field of Caribbean studies. Following the sociologist Linden Lewis (2013), we recognize that both the search for sovereignty and the making of nations have taken alternative, heterogeneous, and nonteleological routes and forms. This is the case because these routes were always interspersed by and had to consider and take up some of the equaliberty projects of the historically subalternized that are not fully amenable to the nation-state logic. Looking at how these routes developed and how various forms came into being, one can characterize, for heuristic purposes, three waves of nation-making and subsequent state-building in the Caribbean (cf. Knight 1990; Robotham 1998). These waves are not strictly chronological: one does not end as another begins, but they run together over time or coexist within a single place.

The first wave of anticolonial agitation led to the political founding of Haiti, Venezuela, and Cuba. These independent countries were founded on the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality—equaliberty—whereby the nation-state model was conceived as a temporary but necessary evil; this model inspired later national movements in the rest of the Caribbean (see, e.g., James [1938] 1975; Granger 2003).

The second wave also contained elements of European Romanticism, namely the idea of grounding peoplehood and cultural belonging in blood and soil. As Bonilla (cf. James [1960] 2013) argues, postcolonial sovereignty not only became equated with the right to a passport, a flag, a stamp, a coin, and the formation of a native state but also became associated with a restrictive ideology that suggests that national borders can and should serve as containers for homogeneous content. This led to an emphasis on the policing of ‘national identity’ at the expense of other social projects [of equaliberty] and to the presumption that those who lie outside the nation’s fabricated borders—or those who disrupt the homogeneity of its contents—are not only alien to the national project but a threat to its stability (Bonilla 2015, 13). This restrictive ideology implied a transition from universalism to a historical and cultural particularism in the claim for self-determination and led to a belonging that was imagined or defined in ethnonational