Global Guyana’s Call for Reckoning (Review)

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In 2015, ExxonMobil’s “discovery” of billions of barrels of oil offshore Guyana thrust the country onto the world stage as the latest and most promising petrostate. Taking seriously the symbolic and material meanings, desires, and capitalist fantasies attached to this new panorama, Oneka LaBennett’s Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond disrupts the mirage of oil’s promise and traces the ecological and materials impacts of the state’s extractive push into the industries of oil and sand, with Guyanese women at the center.

As LaBennett illustrates, Guyana is a geographic point on the map that is seemingly “everywhere and nowhere.” Even when it appears in popular films and media, the country is consistently misrecognized and erased. Simultaneously, Guyana epitomizes how ecological extraction remains entrenched in the Caribbean, whether in the form of idyllic beaches and sea, or abundant resources like sand, oil, and gold. One of the most insidious functions of this “here, yet nowhere” narrative is the maintenance of colonial and imperial projections of underdevelopment and backwardness that constrain Guyana as destined to succumb to the resource curse, with real on-the-ground consequences.

Most Guyanese, whether born in the South American homeland or abroad in its multiple diasporas, are intimately familiar with what LaBennett describes as an enduring “representational gaze” that perpetuates a narrative of a country beset by racial political turmoil. This narrative of a country on the brink has its origins in Dutch and British colonial domination and exploitation. The legacies of slavery and indentureship indubitably shape racial and gendered relations in post-independence Guyana, including the racial discord fomented by dominant political parties and elites. Complicating narratives that rely on colonial stereotypes of intrinsic racial antipathy between Afro- and Indo-Guyanese, Global Guyana crucially asks: “How do we speak to the intimacies of these relations in the wake of indentureship and slavery?” By recuperating affinities and intimacies, LaBennett reveals the gendered racial constructions and entanglements that underpin the modern colonial project and global capitalism.

Against the backdrop of these legacies, LaBennett engages with Guyana's increasingly fraught geopolitical positioning in light of the expansion of its oil and sand industries. Generative and expansive, this analysis is necessary in a moment of intensified dispossession, extractivism, ecological devastation, and climate precarity in Guyana and beyond.

In conversation with the ideas of revolutionary intellectuals and activists like Walter Rodney and Andaiye, who long pinpointed respectively how colonialism and imperialism facilitate capital expansion and operate in racialized gendered ways, LaBennett excavates Guyana from beneath layers of myths, stories, and contested representations. Her work beautifully demonstrates how we—as researchers, activists, and kin—are, too, imbricated in multiple, overlapping violences.

As a Guyanese in the diaspora, LaBennett models how our bodies and family genealogies provide insights into power relations and dynamics erased from colonial histories and archives. Through an autoethnographic tracing of the intimate Afro-Asian relations and “partial secrets” in her own family, LaBennett demonstrates how racial, gendered, and sexualized constructions hinging on women’s bodies enabled colonial plantations and capitalist expansion. Women’s labor and stories, including their connections to land and property, complicate the dominant, linear narrative of Guyana’s history and political and economic woes. Tracing these erased histories, LaBennet recuperates the “matrilineal line of kinship relations.”

LaBennett’s analysis is underpinned conceptually by novelist Oonya Kempadoo’s “sssweep,” sweep, stamp motion of the pointer broom, a traditional broom made from coconut branches, and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics,” an approach informed by the constant movement of the sea, coming and going like the tides. Across the book’s four chapters, LaBennett uses the pointer broom—a seemingly innocuous instrument representative of women’s labor—to analytically sweep into view multiple colonial and post-independence erasures: the gendered labor of women in Guyana and the diaspora, the politicized violence that shapes the lives of everyday Guyanese, and the ecologies and environments of extraction endemic to global racial capitalism.

The book does an exceptional rewriting of Guyana’s place within the broader Caribbean. In contrast to representations of the country as an anomalous or peculiar geographic space, LaBennett depicts Guyana as a central window into understanding how the circum-Caribbean is swept up in—and has always been central to—global logics of exploitation and gendered violence. Her chapter on sand mining and extraction, which highlights how this granular particle makes up the architecture of our modern world and the utopic imaginary of the Caribbean, provides a metaphor for modern capitalism and the central place of the New (Caribbean) World and Guyana’s place within it.

Similarly, the chapter on Barbadian singer, actress, and cosmetics and fashion mogul Rihanna, whose mother is Afro-Guyanese, examines how anti-Guyanese sentiments in Barbados work to efface the long history of Barbadian-Guyanese relationships, migration, and kinship. The image of Guyanese migrants, particularly Guyanese women, as threats to the Bajan nation and nuclear family, LaBennet argues, is “rooted in Bajan political anxieties about competition for employment and scarce natural resources.”

LaBennett’s attention to multiple sites—the nation-state, the diaspora, and Guyanese representation globally—provides a deep corrective to how we understand the relationship between space, land, and the body. Engaging these connections at multiple scales helps us to see beyond the nationalist, capitalist drive toward economic development by any means necessary. With the pointer broom, LaBennett’s work opens the door for a deeper investigation into the place of African and Asian relations, beyond their suturing to the state.

How might the pointer broom also sweep into view a deeper engagement with the Guyanese hinterland and the place of Indigenous peoples and communities? As a Black and Indigenous (Warrau/Lokono) Guyanese scholar, I believe LaBennett’s work will be especially generative for emerging scholarship troubling national narratives that situate Amerindian Indigenous peoples as marginal, rather than central to Guyana’s development drive. The racially bifurcated political system manufactured in Guyana effaces the complexities of Indigenous politics and the ecological devastation of Indigenous lands and waters. With the largest Indigenous population in the Caribbean, Guyana’s “peculiar” place is an important site for understanding how Amerindian peoples navigate the racial and gendered constructions that facilitate ongoing land and bodily dispossession.

As the oil and sand boom marches on, the political and material stakes for Guyanese are high. Their livelihoods are enmeshed in reductive international narratives that depict Guyana as backward, underdeveloped, and lacking the capacity to manage its own resources. For example, Guyana is currently undergoing rapid infrastructural development with the expansion of roads and highways to support extractive activities. As LaBennett argues, the intensified development has only increased instances of vehicular death and the precarity of rural villagers along Public Road, Guyana’s main highway used to transport extracted sand. As LaBennett rightfully pinpoints, this accelerated infrastructure growth is in part a nationalist response to dogged international coverage of Guyana’s supposed lack of preparedness to handle the oil boom.

In this context, as the economic interests of an elite political stratum and multinational corporations converge, centering the grounded realities of how everyday people navigate and live through the looming ecological catastrophes of expanding oil and sand extraction becomes paramount.

Oneka LaBennett deftly traces the colonial and imperial threads that shape the tapestries of Guyanese life. Much like Caribbean life in other contexts and histories, these threads are intricate: portions are frayed or occluded from view, and others are foregrounded as the presiding elements of what it means to be Guyanese. LaBennett’s methodological emphasis on global and local representations in film, newspapers, op-eds, and other media, coupled with archival and oral histories, provides a critical opening for further examination of how everyday Guyanese live within and beyond the political machinations of the state and its corporate partners. The book offers a necessary framework for situating Guyana within local narratives and wider global forces, tracking how the stories national and imperial powers construct about themselves yield tangible material impacts. These narratives are not ossified; they too, can be disrupted and rewritten.

As LaBennett makes visible, the conditions of possibility for racial capitalism and its animating racial and gendered constructions invite a question about the conditions of possibility for redress beyond the nation-state. Timely and necessary, Global Guyana is an incisive call for reckoning with the nature of modernity and capitalism in Guyana and the Caribbean more broadly—not as a failing of Guyanese citizens, but as an indictment of the impossibility of the conditions of modernity itself.

Shanya Cordis is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and author of the forthcoming book Unsettling Geographies: Antiblackness, Gendered Violence, and Indigenous Dispossession in Guyana. Special thanks to Heather Gies and Michelle Chase for their indispensable and insightful comments.

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