Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean

by Shona N. Jackson

During the colonial period in Guyana, the country’s coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. In Creole Indigeneity , Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies. Looking particularly at the nation’s politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles’ new identities. Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity—a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms “Creole indigeneity.” In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.

Genres: History, Indigenous, Race, Nonfiction

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Shona N. Jackson teaches courses in Caribbean Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and Post WWII Literature & Drama . She received her Ph.D. from the interdisciplinary Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford. She served as founding co-editor of the book series in Caribbean Studies at University Press of Mississippi and is a member of the editorial board of Voces del Caribe, Phoebe and Wadabagei, and an advisory and contributing editor for Callaloo. Her publications include Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (University Press of Minnesota 2012) a co-edited issue of Callaloo and essays in Caribbean Quarterly, Small Axe and the collection Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture.

(from https://www.english.tamu.edu/people/s...)

Reviews

[jess]

my main takeaway from this: a critique of how both afro-creole and indo-creole communities in guyana have construed labor as a modernizing/indigenizing force at the expense of the country's indigenous peoples. obviously a lot of nuance here, which jackson provides in spades – the movement of the formerly enslaved from plantations to villages, the role of black caribbean identity/culture in the guyanese understanding of creole indigeneity, the different narratives/myths of indigenous disappearance across the caribbean, the politics of comparing and differentiating indenture and slavery, the inheritance of colonial structures like the division between coast and interior ("hinterland"), and the conflict between black and indian labor parties but persistence of labor as the metaphysics through which the diasporic subject is made native.

essentially, both black and indian subjects in guyana are able to recast themselves as creole and therefore indigenous based on the material and intellectual labor that they contribute to the nation-building project, but this primacy of labor once again relegates amerindian communities to the role of a non-modern, non-laboring subject whose overidentification with the interior of the country must be transformed into modern wealth. the conclusion raises interesting questions about how indigenous experiences of creolization engage labor but also encompass much more beyond its frame.

this book is a deep dive into how creole identity and indigeneity have been constructed in "postcolonial" guyana, but it gives me a lot to chew on re:, for example, how labor becomes yoked to modernity/subjectivity for asian workers in hawai'i and alaska. i still feel like my brain is not yet big enough to be where shona jackson's is right now but i definitely got a lot more out of this the second time around, and i'm sure i will circle back to it multiple times, and feel my brain expanding more each time around :')

"how the colonial source of wealth can become the postcolonial source of power for a new nation that needs to make its own claims on history, without challenging the late twentieth-century economic imperialism of the United States and Europe." (135)
"Both men locate the republic's wealth in the labor performed by the worker on potentially colonizable land and for the benefit of the middle classes." (on burnham and jagan's diverging political visions, forgot page number)