Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean

CONCLUSION: Beyond Caliban, or the "Third Space" of Labor and Indigeneity

211 This book began by highlighting a disarticulation between the modes of being and belonging of Indigenous Peoples and Creoles in the Caribbean that congeal around labor. Its principal argument was that the ways in which Creoles indigenized, or came to belong to the Caribbean, particularly after emancipation and during the anti- and postcolonial periods, have led to the material and discursive displacement of the region’s Indigenous Peoples. Thus, the aim has been to demonstrate that while the political map of the modern Caribbean continuously shifts as power changes hands, the socioeconomic map has long been established between the discursive formations of European empiricism and capitalist social and material processes, between myth and nation, and between “interior” and “coast.” Within these formations, subaltern (a mostly corrupted descriptor of postcolonial criticism ) settler groups, largely blacks and Indo-Caribbean peoples, have simultaneously resisted colonialism, become indigenous, and with lasting results for social being in the region, deployed a new understanding of indigeneity that can support modern belonging and the institution of themselves as new natives. Creole Indigeneity took as its principal object Guyana’s social and political history as well as its real and cultural geography to show how contemporary Creole identity can express a particular ontological need: of the urgency of transforming exile into the substance of belonging. This need has been reinscribed or repeated in Caribbean discourse as a governing and inescapable logic—the flaw and epistemic condition of our uneven postcoloniality—and Conclusion: Beyond Caliban, or the “Third Space” of Labor and Indigeneity And, although Shakespeare was great, we cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban. —spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 212 Conclusion it has been satisfied through Creoles’ ability to transform the labor of enslaved peoples into what I referred to in chapter 1 as the “new time of belonging” for new native identities within the postcolonial state. Guyana’s difference as a non-island space makes visible the way in which Creole social and political subjectivity reflects a dual difference and deferring : a difference from the colonizer and a deferring of the existence of Indigenous Peoples. In the organization of Guyana’s postcolonial geography, with which this book began, we can see the structure of a difference that intimately informs Creole subjectivity or the constitution of an “I” or ego. This “I” in its dependence on European philosophical and social history has a limited ability to extend full humanity to all, as Achille Mbembe remarks: “We should first remind ourselves that, as a general rule, the experience of the Other, or the problem of the“I” of others and of human beings we perceive as foreign to us, has almost always posed virtually insurmountable difficulties to the Western philosophical and political tradition.”1 Having engaged this tradition in the quest for political sovereignty and transparency, the “I” of Creole being that represents the political, economic, and ontoepistemic shift from subaltern settler to a new indigeneity for blacks and Indians, is necessarily structured in, and hence limited by, modern labor and the Hegelian notion of history as progress: maintaining an antithesis or outside that has been sociohistorically produced. This “new” indigeneity ties Creoles to material accumulation derived from coastal plantation labor, while indigenous identity is associated with deprivation as Indigenous Peoples emerge as the material and ontologically necessary other of Creoles materially, discursively, and temporally. Thus, Creoles have essentially effected a material rerouting and rescripting of indigeneity in labor and continue to reproduce colonial modes of social being that are tied to the local political economy. Creole Indigeneity’s emphasis on material labor—in conjunction with the pre-plantation discursive economy of myth (chapter 3)—as the axis and aporia of Creole and indigenous identity is not meant to suggest that Indigenous Peoples do not mobilize around labor for their own rights claims (such as the indigenous struggle in Bolivia today), nor to ignore modes of belonging that hinge upon formal connection between Indigenous Peoples and Creoles, such as those evinced by the Garifuna of Belize and the black Caribs of St. Vincent , Dominica, and Honduras. These points of connection between Indigenous Peoples and settler groups not only structure people’s lives and provide alternative models of social and political belonging, but they are garnering increasing attention in the academy.2 The links between nonindigenous and Conclusion 213 indigenous cultures are an important redress to the continued disarticulations that force Indigenous...