Eating Paradise: Food as Coloniality and Leisure

Sandals Resorts’ Gourmet Discovery Dining programme continues the company’s practice of marketing difference by combining tourism with the commodification of food from non-Western cultures (Dodman and Rhiney 2008). The article draws on bell hooks’ (1992) concept of ‘eating the other’ and the analysis undertakes an interdisciplinary approach that combines visual analysis with Anibal Quijano’s (2007) concept of modernity/coloniality. The discussion explores the trends of global multiculturalism that have been adopted by Sandals in a hybridized cut and mix approach to selling a packaged ideal of the Caribbean. The visual techniques devised to create a culinary holiday package are overlaid onto a manufactured and homogenised or McDonaldized (Ritzer and Liska 1997) Caribbean that provides insight into the way in which global neoliberal multiculturalism is framed by ongoing colonial relations after formal colonial rule has ended in the Caribbean region

Between Commerce and Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, and Commercial Incivility

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as a robust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. This essay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflections on commerce, empire and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned the colonial system of monopoly, war and conquest, his strictures against empire did not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonial slavery represented a manifestly uncivil institution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also a decisively commercial institution pivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical ‘commercial incivility’ of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the link between slavery and commerce, and confined his criticism of slavery to its ancient, feudal and Asiatic incarnations. I contend that Hume’s disavowal of the commercial barbarism of the Atlantic economy is part of a broader ideological effort to separate the idea of commerce from its imperial origins and posit it as the liberal antithesis of empire. The implications of analysis, I conclude, go beyond the eighteenth-century debates over commerce and empire, and more generally pertain to the contradictory entwinement of liberalism and capitalism

White labour in black slave plantation society /and economy : a case study of indentured labour in seventeenth century Barbados

This study was prompted by the need to fill a gap within the labour historiography of the English speaking West Indies. From the 1950s, the number of works dealing with Black and Asian indentured servitude have been rapidly increasing. In this upsurge of interest in West Indian history the study of white indentured servitude, the basis of the early plantation economy, remained largely unworked. This study attempts to evaluate the importance of white indentured labour to plantation development in Barbados, the most valuable colony within the English mercantile system of the seventeenth century. The use of indentured labour, which was recruited from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland for commodity production in the first half of the century, provided the basis for the gradual transition to Black slavery. This process is analysed to show the development of the ideologies of race and colour, and their application to the division of labour in the West Indies. The transformation of the English institution of indentured servitude, with its pre-industrial, moral, paternalistic superstructure, into a market system of brutal servitude, is a central theme of the work. The contradictions of white labour in a Black slave economy and society, at the levels of ideology and entrepreneurial economic thinking, are analysed to show the failure of the white servants to entrenched themselves in the West Indies, either as peasants or as a proletariat. Finally, the study explores the West Indian dimension of the European labourers' experience in the New World, where the majority found a life more oppressive and fruitless than that which they had left behind

Le mouvement Caribéen pour les réparations

La Caraïbe souffre toujours des effets de siècles d\u27esclavage, sur les plans de l\u27économie, de la santé, de l\u27éducation ou de la culture. Depuis 2014, la Caricom propose un plan de réparations en dix points. Le CAGI présente cette conférence sur ce mouvement caribéen pour les réparations. Quelles réparations pour les pays victimes de l\u27esclavage ? Quelle pourrait être la nature de ces réparations ? La réponse du professeur Sir Hilary Beckles à travers cette conférence