Forging Relational Difference: Racial Gendered Violence and Dispossession in Guyana

Building on black and indigenous feminist scholarship, this essay examines the mutually constitutive processes of racial gendered violence and colonial dispossession undergirding Guyanese statecraft. Through an analysis of the colonial construction of the racial-sexual bodies of Amerindian and Afro- and Indo-creole women, it argues that these imbricated violences may better be understood through a feminist analytic and praxis of relational difference. A departure point that brings the scaffold histories and legacies of colonialism, dispossession, slavery, and indentureship into stark relief, relational difference troubles the overdetermined rhetoric of impending racial disturbance and chaos that haunt the political landscape. Tracing the specificity of indigenous and black dispossession and antiblackness as integral to Guyanese nation formation and the Caribbean more broadly, it ultimately calls for an expansive Caribbean feminist politics that reckons with indigenous political subjectivities and creates awareness of black belonging beyond statist framings toward mutual liberation.