"Open the Gates Mek We Repatriate": Caribbean slavery, constructivism, and hermeneutic tensions

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edit version of an article published in International Theory. The definitive publisher-authenticated version: Shilliam, Robbie. "“Open the Gates Mek We Repatriate”: Caribbean slavery, constructivism, and hermeneutic tensions." International Theory 6.02 (2014): 349-372 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1752971914000165© 2015, Cambridge University Press

The Black Pacific

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why have the struggles of the African Diaspora so resonated with South Pacific people? How have Maori, Pasifika and Pakeha activists incorporated the ideologies of the African diaspora into their struggle against colonial rule and racism, and their pursuit of social justice? This book challenges predominant understandings of the historical linkages that make up the (post-)colonial world. The author goes beyond both the domination of the Atlantic viewpoint, and the correctives now being offered by South Pacific and Indian Ocean studies, to look at how the Atlantic ecumene is refracted in and has influenced the Pacific ecumene. The book is empirically rich, using extensive interviews, participation and archival work and focusing on the politics of Black Power and the Rastafari faith. It is also theoretically sophisticated, offering an innovative hermeneutical critique of post-colonial and subaltern studies. The Black Pacific is essential reading for students and scholars of Politics, International Relations, History and Anthropology interested in anti-colonial struggles, anti-racism and the quests for equality, justice, freedom and self-determination

From Bohemian to Bourgeois: American Batik in the Early Twentieth Century

In 1919 Pieter Mijer wrote in his influential book Batiks and How to Make Them, Batik is still a comparatively recent importation; brought here some ten years ago, it was met with absolute incomprehension and lack of interest, but its real merit as a means of decorating fabrics has earned it a place in the industrial art of the nation and year by year it is gaining wider recognition. This paper briefly considers the rise and fall in popularity of batik in America in the period Mijer indicated: how it changed from being a foreign import chiefly seen in museums with ethnographic collections to being a high fashion fabric with a rather brief span of popularity. It also investigates the role of certain American artists, designers, educators, and department stores in the appropriation and transformation of this unfamiliar technique and its associated motifs by the textile industry as a commercial venture

What the Haitian Revolution might tell us about development, security and the politics of race

En este artículo el autor propone un acercamiento crítico al nexo desarrollo/seguridad. Este argumenta que, a pesar de las investigaciones recientes en las ciencias sociales y las Relaciones Internacionales, la cuestión racial continúa estando en los márgenes de la disciplina, especialmente cuando se trata de comprender los conflictos en el tercer mundo durante la Posguerra Fría y el ya extendido discurso de los “estados fallidos”. Reconociendo el trabajo de re-historicidad hecho desde algunas disciplinas influyentes como la sociología histórica, critica su tendencia a obscurecer las políticas raciales dentro del orden mundial moderno. Por tanto, este propone un acercamiento al nexo desarrollo/seguridad, primeramente desde una repolitización de estos conceptos, y en segundo lugar, desde las narrativas de la Revolución Haitiana y las políticas raciales desarrolladas durante dicho periodo de la historia del mundo modernoIn this article, the author proposes a critical approach to the development/security nexus. He argues that, despite recent researches in Social Sciences and International Relations, the question of race is still at the margins of the discipline, specially when it comes to understand post Cold War conflicts in the third world and the extended discourse of “failed states”. Recognizing the re-historicizing work done from some influential disciplines as historical sociology, he criticizes their tendency to obscure the politics of race within the modern world order. Therefore, he proposes an approach to the development/security nexus, firstly from a re-politicization of these concepts, and secondly, from the narratives of the Haitian Revolution and the politics of race developed during this period in the Modern World Histor

The Black Pacific

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why have the struggles of the African Diaspora so resonated with South Pacific people? How have Maori, Pasifika and Pakeha activists incorporated the ideologies of the African diaspora into their struggle against colonial rule and racism, and their pursuit of social justice? This book challenges predominant understandings of the historical linkages that make up the (post-)colonial world. The author goes beyond both the domination of the Atlantic viewpoint, and the correctives now being offered by South Pacific and Indian Ocean studies, to look at how the Atlantic ecumene is refracted in and has influenced the Pacific ecumene. The book is empirically rich, using extensive interviews, participation and archival work and focusing on the politics of Black Power and the Rastafari faith. It is also theoretically sophisticated, offering an innovative hermeneutical critique of post-colonial and subaltern studies. The Black Pacific is essential reading for students and scholars of Politics, International Relations, History and Anthropology interested in anti-colonial struggles, anti-racism and the quests for equality, justice, freedom and self-determination

Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands? Locke, Nandy, Fanon and the Bandung Spirit

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Keskidee Aroha: Translation on the colonial stage

Abstract In 1979 a Black theatre group from London toured the north island of Aotearoa New Zealand, visiting community centres and marae (traditional Māori meeting places). 1 The troupe was named after a small Guyanese bird renowned for its resilience -the Keskidee -and consisted of Black British, African-Caribbean, African-American and African performers including a group of Rasta musicians, the Ras Messengers. The New Zealand organizers of the tour called their collective Keskidee Aroha, aroha being the Māori word for compassion and empathy. This article explores the colonial stage upon which Keskidee played and assesses the type of inter-cultural translations that are prompted when (post-)colonized subjects speak to each-other rather than address the colonizer

Aquello que la Revolución haitiana puede decirnos sobre el desarrollo, la seguridad y la política de raza

En este artículo el autor propone un acercamiento crítico al nexo desarrollo/seguridad. Este argumenta que, a pesar de las investigaciones recientes en las ciencias sociales y las Relaciones Internacionales, la cuestión racial continúa estando en los márgenes de la disciplina, especialmente cuando se trata de comprender los conflictos en el tercer mundo durante la Posguerra Fría y el ya extendido discurso de los “estados fallidos”. Reconociendo el trabajo de re-historicidad hecho desde algunas disciplinas influyentes como la sociología histórica, critica su tendencia a obscurecer las políticas raciales dentro del orden mundial moderno. Por tanto, este propone un acercamiento al nexo desarrollo/seguridad, primeramente desde una repolitización de estos conceptos, y en segundo lugar, desde las narrativas de la Revolución Haitiana y las políticas raciales desarrolladas durante dicho periodo de la historia del mundo moderno

Raced markets: an introduction

The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. Our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy. Instead we attend to how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions. Our Introduction opens this conversation for New Political Economy readers, positioning neoliberalism and the current conjuncture as the present political economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame of analysis. Our hope is that this special issue will be read as a timely intervention, referencing a long tradition of (often marginalised) thought which attends to race as productive and material, rather than confined to the ideological realm