>> Our lecture today is going
to be by Shona Jackson.
Professor Jackson is Associate Professor of
English and Associate Director of Grad Studies
at Texas A&M University, where
she teaches courses in Caribbean
and [inaudible] studies,
and Postcolonial Theory.
She received her PhD from the
interdisciplinary program in Modern Thought
and Literature from Stanford in 2009.
Her first book Creole Indigeneity: Between
Myth and Nation in the Caribbean was published
in 2012 and it was the object of a
stand alone panel on its contributions
to the field of Indigenous studies
at the Native American and Indigenous Studies
Association annual meeting in May 2014.
Her other publications include book chapters
and journal articles in a number of periodicals
such as Theory and Event , Small Acts ,
Caribbean Quarterly , The Oxford Handbook
of Indigenous American Literature
which won the 2017 MLA Prize for Studies
in Native American Literature,
Cultures, and Languages.
And Caribbean Literature in the
Environment: Between Nature and Culture .
She was the founding co-editor of
the book series in Caribbean studies
of the University Press of Mississippi,
and is a member of the editorial
review board of Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education, and Society .
And an advisory and contributing
editor for Callaloo,
for which she co-edited the
first 30th anniversary volume
which was titled Reading Callaloo ,
and a special section on
postcoloniality and blackness.
She's current at work on two books.
The first one titled Marxism
History and Indigenous Sovereignty
in the Caribbean and another
titled Dialectics of the Flesh:
Being and Teaching in the Academy .
Please welcome Shona Jackson.
[ Applause ]
>> So, good evening.
I'd like to thank Dr. Koshi and the two
graduates in art history, Sara Richter
and Alisa Brailauer, for organizing this.
It's good to be here with you.
So, my talk today is actually centered
on work for my current book project.
It is not about post-colonial theory per se.
My title is thus, Postcolonial Theory,
sort of, not really, maybe not at all.
[ Laughter ]
What I will outline is how post-colonial theory
led me to my research focus and that way,
gesture to its still unexhausted
possibilities and enduring limitations.
As a caveat, the way that I approached
my project in the current book is not
in fact routed through the field.
Something I did something I
did specifically for this talk.
I have found that although I have
moved away from the post-colonial,
because of the region I write
about, the Caribbean,
that is how my work is largely understood.
Postcolonial studies still does the work
in the academy of making certain spaces,
geographies, times, and bodies intelligible.
While at this moment I would be on tend in
having some kind of scorn for the field however,
without in many ways I would not have a job.
I am indebted to its place holding function
and in my specific case its ability to absorb
and reproduce the British
Commonwealth within the academy.
It is or was at least 10 to 15 years ago,
and in terms of hiring practices
the functional equivalent
of the equal opportunity
slot for the global south.
For our Federlic and Kwame Anthony Apio this
is of course our beginning and the beginning
of the pernicious displacement
of our objects of study.
Postcolonial studies is waning in the academy.
Displaced on some level by
the world over the global.
It has also been displaced by the add-on
function of intersectionality and the politics
of inclusion, as well as the primacy of other
fields such as the digital, the environment,
disability studies, LatinX, medievalism.
This is in part because the way in
which the academy plays politics
with all of our differences.
For instance, I think that it's remarkable
that we can have so many well defined periods
in English but other areas emerge ad hoc and
are often limited to the investigative focus
of individuals within a specific program.
But, what else could we expect from a
field that is mostly intelligible only
from the waste generated by its melancholy --
to reference Paul Gilroy --
but deliberate autophagia.
I recall the glee on the
face of a would be Marxist --
and for me, all Marxists
are would be [laughter] --
when he told me about Vivek Chibber's
post-colonial theory in the specter of capital,
and the fact that with it, post-colonial
theories were really finally done.
But here is the deal.
Even though I don't locate my work there
anymore, I don't have scorn or contempt.
Again, without the weaknesses or limitations
of its hybrid partial poststructuralist
and partial Marxist methodology,
my own work may never have emerged.
Therefore I'll focus on three moment
or places in which reading with
and against post-colonial theory opened up my
spaces for my work on indigeneity and blackness.
Before turning concretely
to what that looks like.
The first is the nation.
In graduate school, we read The
Usual Suspects and I was invited
to see the nation primary in
its terms of discursivity.
The is what poststructuralism
bequeathed to post-colonial theory.
The nation was that cultural sphere that
could be apprehended in terms of its modes
of writing and/or representation, even where it
was the uneasy congealing of a set of fragments.
So here, think Partha Chatterjee,
Homi Bhabha, et cetera.
Our work as post-colonial theorists
became about locating the nation
and as such it's fragments were nothing less
than the expression of a
proper relationship to it.
However, my problem was that this
was prefaced on the assumption
that all post-colonial cultures wrote
or articulated themselves in terms
that could always be apprehended.
So I began to wonder about the field in terms
of what it was translating rather than reading
and how this incessant legibility
function obscured the settler state
and its relation to indigeneity.
The secondary is subjectivity.
If one follows Giatris Bibac, it is "the
legal subject of socialized capital"
that actually circulates
in the post-colonial text
because the Western academic is always already
in the other side of the
global division of labor.
As such, she cannot hope to
represent Spivak Subaltern.
In part, at least as I see it, subjectivity in
post-colonial studies is rendered in terms only
of a positive or negative
relationship to the market.
That market that institutes itself according
to Faco on the scale of the world in order
for Resand Detaut realized at the
level of the biologized population.
So post-colonial theory is limited by the always
already of a relation to liberal subject-hood
in terms again of success or failure.
The later of which is actually a
partial completion or inhabiting.
Those subject positions that can't be
read in terms of this Spivak Subaltern,
in slave and post slavery black and indigenous
peoples in settler states are simply ignored.
Moreover, while the post-colonial might account
for speech or its inability to be heard,
it cannot account for nonbeing unless
it could be coopted as phenon was
in the post-colonial studies
reader as phenomenal illogical.
And that was in the first edition
of the post-colonial studies reader.
And incidentally, I think that -- I always
think of phenon in terms of two readings.
Right? There's a phenomenological phenon
that's a terrain of post-colonial primarily,
and the anthological which is the terrain
of afro-pessimism and black existentialism.
The third and of course, related
area is the critique of capital.
Ella Show Haught and a host of others fault
post-colonial theory because of the way
in which it disappears the formal relation
to capital that the term third-world,
problematic as it was, encapsulated.
As a super cession of third-world, too
indebted to its structuralist elements,
there have been calls for it to be replaced
by neocolonial and post-independence,
so that it can now finally properly index the
political and economic relation it signals
and better express the continuity
and relationally of struggles.
For Tibbert, it has failed entirely to have an
effective critique or even account of capital
because it inherited the errors of Celadrin
studies and the overrepresentation of ideology.
In doing so, it can't actually properly address
the role of the working classes or masses
in anti and post-independent history because
it ascribes to the bouje class in India.
For example, a world historical role that
he claims bouje classes have never had.
In his critique of Ranjit Guha and Partha
Chaterti and others, he takes these writers
to task for what I will call
their misuse and misunderstanding
of the universalizing tendency of capital.
Abstract labor, coercion, and
interest, history, et cetera.
He also claims that Marx does account for racial
and ethnic heterogeneity in the labor force,
which post-colonial interventions
try to recover.
In other words, post-colonial theorists
read into Marx a kind of orientalism --
so think Durlic here -- that was
never, for Chibber ever there.
While I found Chibber's claims compelling and it
did make me rethink to some extent how we talk
about the Caribbean middle classes, I could
not help but note the repetition in his claims.
When we read Candice Subaltern
speak, write, and later dance --
and I'm serving on a committee
with a student working on sing --
I couldn't help but think
Chibber's work perfectly expressed,
not a difference from post-colonial
theory but it's organizing trope
and method of expression, repetition.
Put differently, he could have developed a
reading of working class history in India
that did not center post-colonial
studies, but he did.
So post-colonial theory as far as
I see it, and maybe to the dismay
of that colleague I mentioned earlier, the
would be Marxist, is not actually dead.
It's just in the rinse cycle
of a perpetual wash.
This endless repetition means that
Chibber too inscribes the subject in terms
of a relation to the world historical.
This is clear when he critiques
the post-colonial idea
that the subaltern worker has no interests
and is only motivated by loyalty to community.
By contrast, he says, that the only way
wealthier subaltern's could have emerged was
if they actually had interests.
The subaltern is always thus already the
liberal subject, the would be legal subject
of global capital, to return to Spivak.
And for Denise DeSilva, the would be
transparent subject, always seeking to move
out of the state of affectability.
This left me again thinking about in somewhat
Heideggerian terms, the proper relation
to capital that the post-colonial
subject must have in terms either
of an inhabiting or an imminence.
These are the only two positions
captured by the post-colonial in general.
And so, those who express a different
relation to it can't be factored in.
This is the true limit of critiques of
capital routed through the field proper.
For all its focus on discourse,
post-colonial theory has never actually dealt
with what it means to exist, as
Sylvia Wynter argues, homonarins.
Beings who are able to rewrite our
genetic codes, rewrite our very flesh,
beings who are able to realize ourselves as
human not through those genetic codes alone,
but through, as she puts it, "Narratively
instituted conceptions of itself,
and thereby the culture specific discursive
programs to which these conceptions give rise".
It does not deal with the way in which the
privileging of the liberal subject is part
and parcel of that memetic desire for
whiteness as a relation to the market.
Part and parcel of the overriding of our biology
that asks to always see ourselves in terms
of a consumptive relation to
capital and its esthetics.
It is precisely our capacity to
rewrite ourselves in Wynter's terms,
that is the one writing post-colonial
theory is incapable of apprehending
because it is not a repetition
but an inscription.
What, however, I think post-colonial
theory has to offer
in this regard is precisely what is
conceived of as its central flaw.
The enduring methodological
tension between structure, Marxism,
and poststructuralism, sign,
narrative, subjectivity.
Between us, Wynter would say
structure and anti-structure.
When we operate on either side of the
tension to the exclusion of the other,
we repeat it's founding presuppositions
with regard to the market and the subject.
For example, when post-colonial studies
follows the precepts of Marxism for instance,
it ignores the way in which economics
functions as a "teleological economic script"
for which economics is the master
narrative or discipline of homeoeconomists.
It ignores the way in which Marxism
reproduces the fallacy that --
and I'm going to quote Wynter from
her essay No Humans Involved here,
"Our human behaviors are motivated primarily
by the imperative" -- let me see, yeah --
"Our human behaviors are motivated primarily
by the imperative common to all organic species
of securing the material basis of their
existence, rather than by the imperative
of securing the overall conditions of existence,
of each local cultures representation --
represented conception of itself".
When it follows the precepts of
poststructuralism on the other hand,
post-colonial studies comes closer to
revealing the mechanisms of subjectivity
but still can't address how the above
actually works as a condition of possibility
for its inscription of capitals or subject
who then manipulate signs like
nation, culture, et cetera.
But, when post-colonial studies
fails at the material
and poststructuralist --
poststructural critiques.
That's precisely where I think it still has
the unrealized potential to walk us back
from both precipices and move beyond repetition
into an otherwise rather than
an addition to difference.
In my work in graduate school I did as I
was instructed and turned to the nation
as the cultural or symbolic tapestry.
But as I progressed, what became clear was its
hieroglyphic dependence on a relation to capital
and its act or [inaudible] which
would not explain the intimacies
of the nation's vibrance
that I've mentioned before.
That intimacy, as I describe in the preface
of my first book, the closing of the shades
and turning off of the radio that my
family did every day when I was little,
at the moments when other
parts of our blood surfaced.
Such as our South Asian ancestry.
Precisely when south asian music would come
on the radio my family would
just turn off the radio.
So that's one example.
It was the naming of my great-grandmother
that was not a naming
but a marking off of an intimate difference.
In this case a sexual relation
of black and indigenous bodies.
And there, I simply mean we referred
to her as Lady Buck, because of her --
it's a pejorative term and it refers
to her black and indigenous origins.
And so, that's the intimacy I'm talking about.
It was the attempt to excavate these
intimacies that led me to work with, through,
and against post-colonial theory, settler
colonial studies, indigenous black
and south Asian studies, in order to
bring into focus what we were never --
relations that were never fragments and
always global rather than singularly national.
So, what I'd like to do now is share an argument
from my current book around labor and the kind
of space clearing I hope to effect
there, which is also a way of moving
as Sylvia Wynter would say,
"Beyond the absolutism
of our present economic categories"
and their modes of inscription.
Beyond structure as the completion of structure.
It is a space clearing that for me
leads to another account of history,
particularly labor history
and of the subjects within it.
So this is the non-post-colonial part.
Much of my earlier work focused on the
marginalization of indigenous peoples
in the Caribbean, particularly Guyana.
What I observed is how the
descendants of the formerly enslaved
and indentured collectively called
Creole's claimed belonging and rights
to the post-colonial nation state by the fact
of their progenitors having
performed modern labor upon the land.
On the plantation.
In contrast indigenous people's were subject
to a persistent narrative which holds
that they didn't do that kind of
formative modern work to any real degree
and so that they weren't true
workers for the modern nation.
They also frequently have a kind of development
discourse thrown -- directed at them.
This is true for the Caribbean and even to some
extent for the Latin American settler states,
though Bolivia changes the
calculus on this somewhat.
Even where indigenous people such as the
Mayan in Cancun are the overwhelming majority
of workers in particular industries and
experience what Pembina Castiano calls a return
to servitude, the nation is
never an inheritance of theirs.
Theirs is not a labor for the nation or one that
results in a kind of completion or inhabiting
of the dominant positions
socially or politically.
So while for Creole's the nation is a
patrimony of the labor of their ancestors,
in the colonial period and their own
organized labor in the early-20th Century,
indigenous labor in contrast has no such
terminus and is thus a kind of failure.
It's a failure that manages
the threat of their status
as both internal citizens and extra sovereigns.
Where they are the former, their
lack of productivity actually serves
to confirm their inability to be
captured by the telos of modern capital.
Where they are the latter, the failure is
part of what limits their internal sovereignty
because it always signals the
underdevelopment of their own sovereign spaces.
And that's actually something that --
the underdevelopment of indigenous
spaces is something
that I think Vine Deloria Jr. notes
in Custer Died For Your Sins .
What strikes me about all of this is that in the
21st Century we don't have a real way of talking
about the actual work that indigenous peoples
have done and continue to do in the Caribbean.
We don't have a way of thinking about their
labor outside of the need to manage it.
So this is what my current project is focused
on and what I'd like to talk about today.
How and why did indigenous people's labor
disappear before and maybe in connection
with the largely regional
explanation that they perished.
And then, how can we recover
or read their histories of work
as an end regional labor history.
What I'm working towards is a kind of method for
reading labor and labor history in the region
in such a way that [inaudible] can
actually be centrally figured rather
than placed on the margin.
My talk thus reexamines the reasons
for disappearance and draws attention
to distinctions around work and labor.
I'm aware that distinction might be
sacrilegious for Marxian orthodoxies
and poststructuralist heterodoxies,
but we're going to let that alone.
The standard narrative of
disappearance in the Caribbean is
that black enslaved peoples were brought in to
replace indigenous peoples who had perished.
Hence, most region and country
specific histories reiterate this face.
And also, of course then our labor
histories reiterate the same thing.
So you can read Eric Williams,
you can read C. L. R. James.
They're all there.
This essentially sets up a
prepositional relationship
between blacks and indigenous peoples.
And here I mean prepositional in two senses.
First, the temporal preposition
of indigenous peoples to blacks,
because they perished, after they perished.
And in terms of a grammar in
which as a unified part of speech,
the prepositional phrase must
express something about the noun,
and in this instances completes it's meaning.
So the subject, blacks and black labor
for instance, can't elaborate by itself,
so it seeks a kind of fullness and causality
that always signals its success
rather than failure.
Our history is dependent upon this relationship,
this grammar in which the labors of blacks,
Indians, and native peoples
can't exist within the same time.
And now, only exists in the substitution of
being, non-being, now based on life/death,
productive or nonproductive,
for cosmogonic belonging.
The problem then becomes how
do you read together two labors
that can't operate in the same time?
Because they are now expressed
by a bio-political relation
rather than on their own terms.
To attempt such a reading I
return to a core historical moment
in which the regions divergent
histories were initiated together
and that is the moment or concept of conversion.
It is within the single Christian
monarchic narrative that both black
and indigenous peoples first link up in the
15th and 16th centuries and it is this moment
to which I turn as an optic that moves us
beyond the disarticulations of lives, histories,
and rights across the time
space of the Americas.
Generally we think of conversion
as a religious phenomenon.
The endocrine into and acceptance
of another faith.
It frames the push for discovery
in the 15th Century.
However, as an opening within which
deposit the relatedness of black
and indigenous new world labor,
I want to suggest that conversion
within which all labors are potentially -- all
potential labors rather than actual labors are
for God, encapsulates the beginning of
a new labor history for the Caribbean
that stretches the concept of labor
within and beyond the Marxist tradition.
And there I'm just kind of playing with phenon.
Before I get into the discussion however,
I need to say that I'm going to use labor
and work to index different things.
I borrowed their distinction from Hannah
Arendt, when in circumscribed criticism of Marx
in The Human Condition , she reframes
human activity into three areas.
There are problems with their rank, but I'm
not going to go into them there -- them here.
What's important for me is her positioning
of labor as life itself, what we need to do
to reproduce ourselves, and her framing of work
is that which "provides an artificial world
of things distinctly different
from all natural surroundings".
What I find useful is the way in which
the definitions create space for thinking
about the actions or labors that indigenous
peoples and blacks do for themselves
versus the work that they must do for Europeans.
So here I will use these two terms and I
want you to keep the distinction in mind.
It's a terminological break that I think is one
way of approaching and making visible the way
in which the constant reipscription
of liberal subjectivity
in post-colonial studies belies the mimetic
desire for whiteness -- and this is Wynter --
as a relation to class and as an expression
of genetically redeemed status in the capture
of all of our laborers as and through work.
In his first letter to the sovereigns,
Ferdinand and Isabella about the new world,
Columbus writes, "And I gave a thousand handsome
good things, in order that they might strive
to aid us and to give us of
the things which they have
in abundance and which are necessary to us."
Here he reproduces a discursive economy
within which he identifies indigenous peoples
with surplus -- with a surplus or resources
while he essentially identifies the Europeans
with scarcity and needs.
Twice in the letter he refers
to indigenous lands and peoples
as innumerable or without number.
Again, associating their bodies with
abundance and excess which he subordinates
to European needs, so the
labor indigenous peoples do
to produce their own innumerability
can't actually read as such.
In every instance in which indigenous
peoples labor is referenced,
even through direct physical action
witnessed by Columbus or the products of such,
it is already subordinated to a
language external to them and within
which they are positioned in terms of
the dialectic of abundance and scarcity.
Thus their labor for themselves as
that which occurred within the mandate
of their own cosmogonic narratives and
the social political systems that ensued
from them becomes misread in terms of
what is necessary for European survival.
So in terms of things, objects, work.
And as an aside, what I think happens is
that when enslaved blacks eventually --
are eventually imported they come to be
associated with needs rather than scarcity --
with needs and scarcity rather than
abundance, so that their labor is always
on the other side of the dialectic.
Indigenous peoples labor for themselves, that
labor which if one follows Arendt, is not work,
is immediately understood as excess because it
is being read against or through the scarcity
that attains because of the
sea voyages to the new world,
the precarious unstable microcosm the caravels
represent as well as the mandate Columbus had
to find spices and precious metals for a
monarchy whose resources had been depleted
by the nearly eight century long
conquesta and for a Europe --
and I know the term is anachronous
here, but I'll just keep using it --
that is eager to find new trade routes after
the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.
It is through the lens of this collective and
sustained scarcity that in the letters records
that this translates what he
observes of indigenous labor.
So for example, he says they "carry their
goods" or the products of their labor.
What for him in that instance
is always already their work.
What Columbus is seeing and not seeing is
indigenous labor and the products of that labor,
neither which are part of the European
futile and early capitalists follower --
or sort of the emergence of their
early origins of capital and Marx.
But neither which are part of these
economies of which Columbus is representative.
Reading in a rather counterintuitive
way then, Columbus's letters
in fact record an extant
new world labor history.
A history in which a parallel motive action,
specifically indigenous labor is always already
read through what I refer to as it's conversion
within and to the global economies
that will emerge from this encounter.
So within and to work and
eventually as work failure.
Near the end of his first letter,
Columbus invokes conversion
as the overarching justification for his voyage.
When he writes that he will seek permission
from the sovereigns for the "conversation
to our holy faith" of the
peoples he has encountered.
This need to convert newly discovered peoples
in order to extend the Christian social
and political order of Europe is a well-known
part of the logic deployed to justify conquests
of new lands and enslavement
of indigenous peoples.
It is this logic however that the
[inaudible] famously challenged
when he argued int eh 16th Century that
indigenous peoples, though subordinate
and fallen, should not be enslaved
like the negro's of Guinea --
that's mentioned in Columbus's letters --
but should be made vassals of the crown.
The desire to convert the newly
encountered peoples to Christianity comes
from both Columbus's letters and Las Casas who
transcribed and edited Columbus's travel logs.
It was however, Las Casas who would question
religious conversion as the justification
for Spanish abuses of indigenous peoples
and recognize according to Wynter,
"The relativity of all human
systems of perception".
As a theological shift that disconnects early
material gain from Christian spiritual gain,
Las Casas's conversion is purportedly
singly responsible for the mass introduction
of blacks as slaves in the new world.
His conversion becomes the poetic apory
that places indigenous peoples and blacks
on the opposite side of new world work.
Blacks must do the physical
work for material gain
and indigenous peoples no matter what work they
do building missions and in their continued work
for the Spanish colonies, are
relegated to spiritual labors.
Their labor for themselves, like that
of blacks, is actually now antecedent.
But the conversion of Las Casas
that resulted in the importation
of enslaved blacks worked not singularly
because it found a more reliable
and renewable labor source.
It worked because it froze
indigenous action in time space,
thereby rendering it invisible whether it
manifested as labor for their own wellbeing
or work for the continued
wellbeing of the European cultural,
economic system that came to supplant their own.
In other words, while the conversion
is identified as Las Casas's own
in which he could recognize indigenous
semi-humanity visa vie the inhumanity
of Africans below Bojador, is actually the
fulfillment of that original conversion achieved
by Columbus in the discursive economy
that rendered indigenous labor invisible
against the needs/scarcity of Europe.
Under Las Casa, indigenous
work as a super cession
of their labor is again rendered invisible
against the scarcity experienced by Europe,
but this time it is spiritual
rather than material scarcity.
When Sylvia Wynter writes about Las
Casas and the exchange of indigenous
for black labor she says, that he's not
here proposing the substitution of white
and black slaves for Indian slaves per se,
but instead the substitution of men and women
who can be categorized as justly enslaved
within the system of classification legitimated
by Spanish Christian doctrine
for a group of enslaved men
and women who cannot be so classified.
As though who cannot now be justly enslaved,
indigenous peoples can no
longer perform just work.
In other words, their work can no longer
be understood or extracted within the new
and increasingly secular governing logic of
the Indies and hence its modes of production.
The work of indigenous peoples thus disappears
along with the indigenous body in the Caribbean,
in particular but not singularly
because of the poetics of extinction
that dominates the region
as we are led to believe.
It disappears because of its delinking
from the category of just unfree work
and its permanent suture with the religious
ontological function of the discoveries.
The development of the plantation
mode of production allowed blacks
to outstrip this suture whereas
the substitution of apartimeanto
for the incomanda did not do
the same for indigenous peoples.
This is the real significance of what Wynter
writes when she says that the exchange
of blacks for Indians was not the same.
Both groups continued to work for European
humanity but that work is not only understood
and articulated differently, it is ideologically
divergent in the religious secular dialectic
that produces blacks and indigenous
peoples together as modern subjects.
In spite of this, I think that if we
reread Las Casas's writings as a chronicle
of both the religious and economic conversions
of indigenous peoples what we can see in it
and maybe recover are two parallel
modes of indigenous labor and work.
One which links up with the work of
enslaved blacks and one which does not.
In his short account of the destruction
of the Indies and their various titles,
Las Casas writes that indigenous
peoples are naturally predisposed
to receive the Catholic faith because
of their docile and kind natures.
Not only are indigenous peoples as docile
bodies unsuited to function as slaves --
[inaudible] I think is an older translation --
but they seem to live in a paradise that itself
requires no work because of its fertility.
Las Casas describes the lands of the
islands as "more fertile and more beautiful
than the royal gardens in Seville".
In spite of this paradise, he does note however,
that indigenous peoples are supplying Europeans
with food and that one European
consumes the amount
of three indigenous families in a single day.
Later, when he speaks of the gold
rich province of Santa Marta he writes
that its native inhabitants had "the
will and the know how to extract" gold.
In all of the proceeding instances indigenous
peoples are either laboring for themselves --
and this is what is behind their supposed
innumerability -- or working for Europeans.
But both are misread because
they are presented in terms
of the European voracious capacity for such.
At every moment in which native labor or work
-- and I'm going to index them together here --
rises to the foreground in Las Casas,
it is necessarily subordinated not --
by not only the view of them as
docile but the capture of their labor
and work as excess free European need.
A capture that renders it
again into failed work.
Within Las Casas's own documents
there's ample evidence not only --
of not only work for the Spanish,
but pre-contact indigenous labor
that proceeds and is concurrent with it.
If we read against the grain, we can see in Las
Casas's descriptions the labor work required
to obtain the food for the Spanish -- that
the Spanish needed in the first place.
The labor work that populated
the islands with kingdoms,
each of which Las Casas was
larger than the Iberian Peninsula.
Throughout his writings indigenous peoples labor
for themselves and hence within their own modes
of production is either misread as
excess or as work for Europeans.
A clear example is of the gourds which Las Casas
says an indigenous king ordered filled with gold
to be gifted to the Spanish sovereigns.
This is not work in the minds for Europeans,
but labor for native wellbeing which results
in a product that is then
presented to Europeans.
The gold is in other words, fully produced
within a native economy, not a European one.
But here it is read as only a kind of surplus
within European social economic systems.
There are thus two parallel economies in which
indigenous peoples actually labor and work.
There is again, the one in which they
labor for themselves and live in cities
and towns that support a dense population.
And then there's the one in which indigenous
peoples were not only traded for goods,
but were forced to work in
mining, agriculture, shop building,
and in carrying the possessions of Europeans.
While both are eclipsed in Caribbean labor
history, this later work which is the work also
of European settler colonialism
allows only two outcomes.
Both of which reveal something about the
conversion of indigenous labor to work.
The first outcome is the subordination
of indigenous peoples wellbeing
to the European economy that is at this
moment using both money, coins, and barter,
and is graphically represented for instance
in the image of indigenous women being forced
to abandon infants on the side of the road
because they could not carry both their
children and the Spanish possessions.
Another example recorded by Las Casas lies in
his claim about the Inspector of Indian Affairs
who finding no gold, told the indigenous
people in Michoacain that they could find gold
and silver and use these to buy
back their confiscated idols.
Idols which those under the tutelage
of the Friars they had been told
to burn because they were false.
The transformation of the idols into goods with
a measurable value exemplifies the translation
of indigenous labor to a European economy
where it can now server European needs.
It is the capture of indigenous labor for
European wellbeing as a function of the market.
The second outcome is one that is tied to
Las Casas's conversion and the only way
in which he reads their actual work.
At one point he mentions indigenous
peoples building churches for the Friars
who are teaching them the word of God.
Las Casas may see this as labor because
the object is transcendent, cosmogonic,
and it does not produce those things that
are clearly the earthly needs of Europeans
such as the soldiers and governors make them do.
Labor for wellbeing and God becomes contrasted
in Las Casas to work for the earthly wellbeing
of Europeans which in his short account
reads -- he reads as destructive.
Because the church seeks to capture indigenous
preconquest labor as its own however,
they are already subject to conversion and
their preconquest labor for themselves --
for their own wellbeing is in
fact a kind of work for God.
The parallel of the market
that can't be read as such.
It is there from both these
conversions God and market
that I suggest indigenous peoples work
must be read back into regional histories
of the development of capital rather than
excluded starting with the middle passage.
The middle passage and all it's attendant
economies is what converted blacks
into valuable labor.
It is a formative stage in
primitive accumulation.
For me, it's important to foreground
however what the middle passage does rather
than just two crosses.
It strips the black indigenous body of its
cosmogonic belonging and it adds value.
Embedding it within a different
economy, a process that renders --
that is rendered in Saidiya Hartman's
Lose Your Mother as the necessary death
that blacks underwent in
order to become chattel.
And it is this passage, this death,
that indigenous peoples are
seen as not having undergone.
Their death was eliminatory
if we follow Patric Wolfe --
and I know a lot of the arguments against
that -- and produced land, not a new body.
Even for instance where Las Casas notes
that over 1 million indigenous peoples were
forcibly relocated and sold into slavery,
they seemingly lacked this middle passage
or process of adding value to their persons
because they are always already
seen as too weak to work.
They can only labor for God.
Ron Welburn who is of Cherokee, Assateague,
Lenape, and African-American decent argues
that this capture and enslavement should in
fact be read as an "other middle passage,"
which he distinguishes from the practice
of Indian removal in North America.
Building on Welburn in dialog with
Jace Weaver's The Red Atlantic ,
what I want to suggest is the forcible
relocation of indigenous peoples to work,
both physical and metaphysical, is not
only a middle passage in the Caribbean,
but it is indeed a prior or
foundational middle passage.
It is a middle passage that
links African and the Caribbean,
and what would become the Americas.
And it is formative for how those
territories will come to look
and what populations they
will have in the future.
The problem we have is that indigenous
peoples are linked with conversion,
a process that we can reframe as extractive
or devaluing while blacks are linked
with the middle passage, again,
a process that is adding value.
These twin poles of the Atlantic economy
function to separate black and indigenous work.
I think however, it is important
to recognize that both blacks
and indigenous peoples are embedded in processes
of conversion, of adding and subtracting value.
Just as both are involved in middle passages
that orient around conversion or the ability
to be converted from and to something.
Conversion should thus be understood as a
point of entanglement of indigenous labor
with new world economies even as their
facilitator beyond just the theft of land.
It is thus foundational for European
modernity as the African middle passage
and should be read along with that
as a history of indigenous work
within modernity and for the rise of capital.
And now, a caveat.
It must however, also be read alongside
the history of indigenous labor
for their own wellbeing as that
which is prior and runs parallel
to the middle passage transformations of labor.
These tandem movements of
indigenous peoples around work
in the Americas represent both a middle
passage that is already the Caribbean Sea
and another passage which is always a
translation of a parallel that forces us
to rethink the normative ends and
beginnings of labor history in the region.
Understanding the complex nature of
conversion in the new world is what allows us
to begin reading black indigenous labor back
into Caribbean history as not only the history
of a forgotten Atlantic, but of the
first Atlantic in a parallel mode of work
that is contiguous and continuous.
Rethinking conversion however as a kind
of Atlantic middle passage
is only a point of departure.
A place to recognize the centrality of
indigenous people's labor to our conceptions
of the Atlantic as a machine --
to reference Antonio Benitez Rojo.
And also recognizing their
labor that is not work.
We still have to deal with the
weight of regional labor history
in which indigenous labor history is absent.
But if we return to that record and read for
this labor work divide and for conversion,
we can undo the causal link between
the labor as work rights relation.
So you labor for this land,
therefore you have rights to it.
That reproduces the post-colonial state
as an outcome of a singular effort.
We can introduce a pause between the
plantation and its modes of work labor
and the post-colonial states capture of it.
Moreover, if we reread the radical tradition
of the Caribbean, in terms of the space
between labor and work, we
can introduce the kind of --
introduce a kind of imminence that
allows us to foreground the ways
in which the post-colonial
state as an inheritance
of the colonial state has a prior
existence in terms of a not yet,
but coming of black and indigenous labor.
This imminence or not yet is the capture
or [inaudible] against the futurity
of the settler state and it allows us to
see the ways in which the political economy
of the Caribbean contains within it rather than
units of production, units of being, existence,
labor, that are fundamentally interruptive.
Global capitalism and it's logics force
us to relate to ourselves as and as not
yet full inscribed as super subordinate
and thus forces us to read for our work.
Whenever we wake up we perform the labor of
breathing, moving, eating, necessary to life.
But it is always subsumed by the capture of our
work and our ability to purchase the shampoos,
body washes, and colognes with which we perfume
our labors and in so doing obscure them.
If we skip over the break between the two,
between labor and work or operate at the level
of their bio-political consolidation
we remain as Wynter suggests,
just as stuck as the theologians who
didn't think that the earth moved.
We must reject the ways in which capital
and its super narrative, as she says,
traps in the mimetic model of Western bouje
liberal mono humanist man and its capture
of original sin as natural scarcity
where the goal of higher standards
of living continuously force us to relate
to ourselves again as biological rather
than continuously enacting a script that is a
limit of both what we know and how we know it.
Reading our histories for rather than
against this tension between work
and labor pushes us beyond the
limits of [inaudible] politics
and towards the possibilities of sovereign ones
that demand a more expansive historical account
of all of our labors and
not just some of our work.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
So I think -- I understand
that we take questions.
Yes?
>> Hi, thank you so much.
Historically Creole's were Afro Euro
Caribbeans and that whole continuum,
and Indo Caribbean's were outside.
So could you say more about the Creolization
of Indo Caribbean's, you know, visa vie,
I guess the people who -- well
who came after indigenous people?
>> So, that is something that
I deal with in my first book
which I refuse to read ever again [laughter].
I really do.
But, so when Indo Caribbean's came during
the indenture period they were held or housed
in the same structures that had once
occupied the enslaved population
who had been leaving the plantation
to form villages and whatnot.
And they had their own sort of cultural units.
The conditions of their transport
were not the same.
And so, in the Caribbean
a sort of fissure emerged.
Where they saw themselves as fundamentally
different from formerly enslaved blacks.
Formerly enslaved blacks either had no
culture or they assimilated European culture.
Whereas Indians could point to a cultural
past that was actually not a past.
Right? Because it was constantly being enacted.
And there is that difference.
They I think eventually come to work primarily
in the rice industry whereas blacks had worked
in sugar cane and different things.
But what you see across the 20th
Century, especially after the end
of indenture is the narration of Indian
work on the former plantation as something
that at least for Guyana saved the colony.
And so, even while there was a sense of
a cultural distinctiveness from blacks,
which would eventually of course evolve as
they became more Creole, without, you know,
greater newels of Indian culture, even where
that distinctiveness emerged they began
to model belonging in the same terms
that blacks had modeled their belonging.
Which was a specific relation to the land
based on labor and what would allow the land
to as colony eventually be understood as a home.
And in many ways there's no other choice.
Right? You're hoping to inherit the nation.
You're hoping eventually, you know, we
moved towards independence and who is going
to hold the key spots at independence?
But again, despite the breaks between
blacks and Indians, they both undergo a sort
of Creolelizing process that allows them
to see the land as theirs by the fact
of them having performed
modern labor on the land.
Yeah?
>> Would you say that it's custom
for some cultures to view this --
>> Can you speak up just a touch?
>> Because it's [inaudible]
labor for the South [inaudible].
>> Oh, um.
No. I mean if you follow Arendt you are
always performing some kind of labor.
What happens is though -- so I think I
had assigned the Sylvia Wynter reading --
the interview with Katherine
McKittrick, what happens though is that --
Europe is undergoing a huge change, and I
could try to summarize a change and I will do
that if you want me to, but Europe is undergoing
a huge change and it begins to have a sort
of more and more consumptive
relationship to the world.
And that consumptive relationship requires
not other labors, but it requires work.
It requires work from enslaved blacks and
it requires work from indigenous peoples.
So that has to do with the mode of
production that is emerging not the --
not Europeans not having their own labors.
Additionally, the -- prior to the slave
trade in certain parts of the Americas,
the first people that were brought in were
actually indentured whites from Europe.
Whites, obviously not whites because
they weren't white [laughter] racially
at that moment.
But that labor source just
-- it became -- it was just--
became outstripped and so it led
to other groups being brought in.
Yes?
>> During a moment in your talk when you
were making a transition from the kind
of move beyond post-colonial studies to
the argument of your current project,
you said something about wanting to move
beyond structure as [inaudible] structure.
>> No, I think I said something like --
>> I'm just curious that -- it's that moment you
were making the transition I was curious about.
>> Yeah, I think I said something like
anti-structure is the completion of structure.
I was simply trying to suggest that
they were always in a kind of relation.
So that while we might critique post-colonial
studies, you know, because it has to do
with the two poles of critique
of post-colonial studies.
That post-colonial methodologies, you
know, are on the one hand, post-structure
and on the other hand they
also have to be structure.
They have to be Marxist at the same time.
And what I was simply saying is that
those things aren't necessarily opposed
but they're always already in a
kind of relation to each other.
Because they both sort of work to
in a sense produce a kind of subject
that is sort of precisely the problem.
>> Thanks.
>> Yes?
>> You said in the beginning
of the talk that you were --
in your research you were inspired by
intimacies [inaudible] always global rather
than singularly [inaudible].
And I was wondering if you can [inaudible]
indigeneity and blackness as [inaudible].
>> Because the post-colonialist
is so obsessed with the nation,
so you have post-colonial literatures which
again are being displaced by many other things.
Because of that what happens
is that over and over,
we are meant to think precisely
in terms of the nation.
Right? Precisely in terms of
the post-independent state.
What that did for me -- it
simply did not explain --
you know, so it forced me to sort of go to the
political, economic theorists in the region
and they would talk a lot about, you
know, class and ethnicity, and race.
But those were all concepts that
would refer back to the nation
and to the nations proper subjects.
And so, what I found is that if we kept looking
at the nation as a sort of unit of analysis,
if we looked at the nation in terms
of how it was discursively elaborated,
we couldn't see particular
bodies and histories within it.
Again, particular histories of labor and work.
But we also -- it took our
attention away from the global.
It took our attention away
from the way in which blackness
and indigeneity are actually constructed at
the level of the global rather than the local.
So I hope that answers your question.
>> I think I have a follow-up question.
So if their constructed globally, does
this mean that the indigenous [inaudible]?
>> I think we are forced into
seeing ourselves as national.
Right/ Every time we're reminded to vote.
I'm gotten a million reminders to
vote and I will be voting [laughter].
I got a sign out on my lawn.
But anyway, every time that we are
reminded about voting for instance,
that's always in relation to the national.
>> Yeah.
>> And post-colonial subjects I think
over and over are invited to see ourselves
as national subjects because the
nation is a libratory phenomenon.
Right? It is what allows us to inhabit a sort
of dominant position with regard to subject-hood
as opposed to if you're not a nation
state and you're just some small polity.
And then, so the -- and in part I think
we have to sort of look outside --
we have to begin to look outside
of that and what it meant.
What it masks.
But more than what it masks,
what it makes normal.
Right? It normalizes certain relationships
with regard to life, work, labor,
and we're meant to see those
as entirely natural.
We're meant to see the idea
of belonging as a citizen
to a settler state as just completely natural.
And so that's what the nation sort of constantly
reinforces and sort of replays for us.
Yes?
>> You mentioned [inaudible] perceive the
ownership of land based on [inaudible].
As the Creolization through work on land,
how is that like creating [inaudible].
Do you think ownership on the part
of European settlers [inaudible]?
>> Come in where?
>> The concept of nationhood that you
just mentioned as them like [inaudible]
or do you think their perceived
ownership of land as well would come
from some source of labor [inaudible]?
>> So it's an interesting question.
So let me clarify the first part.
And so again, I outline this in that book
that I refuse to read again [laughter].
I have a chapter, which is the [inaudible]
chapter Creole indigeneity and what I talk
about is the way in which that
in becoming Creole, right,
as opposed to former African peoples or former
Indian peoples, in becoming Creole indigenous
and -- I'm sorry, Indians
and blacks articulated --
sought in some way to themselves
become indigenous and at the --
and in this really strange
way both become indigenous
and also simultaneously have a possessive
relationship to the land that comes
out of the -- out of colonialism.
So that's one.
Whether or not Europeans and their
descendants have a relationship to the land,
you're asking that also that is one
of work not just possessiveness?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, it's always both.
We have hard working Americans.
We have hard working American families.
And that -- we're never asked to actually
analyze that work that we're doing.
We don't really look at it.
But, both narratives operate --
possession and then of course work
that transforms the land
into something valuable.
Yes?
>> I had a -- one of my advisors in undergrad
was an archeologist who specialized in Mayan
and in Belize, a local black population
descended from slaves had taken ownership
over a site of Mayan remains and actually
implanted their own histories onto it.
They saw it as a ritualized space.
Even though of course there was
knowledge that it was there before them.
But they took -- they felt it very
akin to who they were as people.
And I was wondering if that was something
that was common throughout central
and south America, the Caribbean?
Or if this was kind of just a one off?
>> So, in the Caribbean you have different --
you have the descendants
of the plantation proper.
And I hate to say it that
way but it's easier to do.
You have those decedents, people
who deliberately traced their labor
through the plantation and then you know,
you have communities that evolve from that.
But what you also have are a
lot of marooned communities,
so the maroons in Jamaica for instance.
You have marooned communities
that were displaced multiple
times like the Garifuna in Belize.
And so, the -- I believe that in
the -- one of the UN declarations,
the rights of marooned groups
are treated similarly to --
are treated in a similar way or as approximate
to the rights of indigenous peoples.
>> Okay.
>> These groups have histories that are
divergent from the plantation and their modes
of indigenizing are not then through a
specific relationship to modern labor.
Their modes of indigenizing,
their modes of belonging.
So I -- these are necessarily one off's
because the communities actually exist.
And then, the issue becomes how do we also
recognize them as indigenous peoples who are
on the land of indigenous peoples
and who remain in perpetual conflict
with the indigenous peoples
who they share that land with?
And the Maya Garifuna situation in Belize I
think had gotten really complicated and funky.
And there was a partial reconciliation at
a conference I was at in 2017 in Trinidad
where the head of a Mayan alliance and
the head of a sort of Garifuna community,
they sort of met and tried to get around that.
But it is a huge problem.
And we can't skip over it.
I don't know if we want to call
them neoindigenous peoples.
>> They're called tribal
people in their legal language.
>> Yeah, and that's also a
term that I stay away from.
Yeah, I love to watch [inaudible] based
things fall apart because he only uses
that word tribe one time at the end and
it's to deliberately reference the way
that social systems, kin systems
are literally reread or --
and mistranslated or rewritten
within European documents.
But yes, yes.
Yeah. Yeah.
And also, I don't know if the Garifuna have
exactly the same status as marooned communities
in let's say Surinam and other places.
I don't know that they have the same status.
Yeah, because they're seen as less.
>> They're immigrants.
>> Yeah, they're seen as
immigrants or less authentic,
but that's again because they
had been moved so many times.
>> But they are Afro Indigenous.
Because [inaudible].
>> They are yes.
>> Their heritage, so they
have different sort of status.
>> They have a different status
but it's still quite different
from like indigenous status,
Maya status, et cetera.
And so it's a long running
source of tension and conflict.
Yes?
>> Hi. Thanks for a really interesting talk.
Can I ask a question about your
kind of critical positioning
in [inaudible] but sort of also [inaudible].
I was wondering about [inaudible] a lot
of what you're doing is kind of moving
against the naturalization
of the nation, [inaudible].
And I guess I was wondering how your
critique of the [inaudible] as a nation one,
kind of links up with the [inaudible] itself of
also critiquing the artificiality of the nation
and the way in which it always [inaudible]
is this actually very fragile thing.
[Inaudible] for example.
Or more recent work in post-colonial
studies that also moving beyond the nation
in different ways, like some imperial
federalism or like international socialism,
and these other kinds of
histories that have been tracked.
They're really not converging in the
same lineages as you are [inaudible].
Yeah, so I was wondering like how your kind
of the critical stance that you're taking
against [inaudible] post-colonial
studies is also [inaudible].
>> Yeah. So I think -- post-colonial
studies has gotten a bad rap.
There are always these trajectories
that sort of move away from it
and then don't necessarily
refer back to it concretely.
So, yeah, I'm not sure how
to answer the question.
I mean, I suppose my work is
in one of these trajectories.
I'm not sure exactly if you're
asking about a specific.
>> I think the question is a
little bit about the kind of --
so you just said there's all these trajectories
that kind of move away from something
like post-colonial studies
proper or [inaudible].
Or what you're describing as post-colonial
studies proper, which [inaudible].
>> It -- I mean it does branch off
literally into all of those directions.
Post-structuralist, economic, political.
It does and it can do that.
I think that the issue that we have is sort
of trying to be aware of where it is involved
in a kind of repetition of certain
relationships and subjectivities
as opposed to being really divergent.
So that's all that I would say to that.
Yeah.
>> I think -- thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
