Their Modernity Matters Too: The Invisible Links Between Black Atlantic Identity Formations in the Caribbean and Consumer Capitalism

Abstract

Much work in the field of Black Atlantic studies has highlighted the lives and philosophies of liberation of black savants such as W. E. B. DuBois and Claude McKay. These and other black intellectuals, who combined anti-capitalist critique with the struggle against anti-black racism, have been heralded as planetary humanists eschewing exclusive nationalism. This article seeks to complement this body of work by revealing the underprivileged actions of the Afro-Caribbean working classes to tame capitalism and demolish racism. It focuses on Elza, Tica and Amelia Richardson, three sisters who were born in the Dominican Republic and whose travels and kinship ties connect the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean to Canada, Western Europe, and the United States of America. Reading the life histories of the Richardson sisters, it is possible to see beyond race and recognise the power that consumer capitalism has had in shaping both blacks and whites in the Caribbean and its Diaspora.

Keywords:

• Black Atlantic
• consumer capitalism
• racism
• cocolos

Notes

Notes

[1] Of the three sisters, two have passed away and one, Elza, suffers from a severe form of Alzheimer. This essay is dedicated to them and the stories of defiance and hope they passed on to me and their other grandchildren.

[2] Constructivism also reminds us that black and white are relational categories as well as political markers. They are not essential pre-political identities existing outside the racial dynamics that structures our world. Despite the reifications of blackness and whiteness in real life, I urge the reader to constantly place them between parentheses whilst reading this article.

[3] I acknowledge that Gilroy has of course included the lives of working classes in his oeuvre–see for instance There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Gilroy, 1987)–yet this is far less pronounced than his analyses of the W. E. B. DuBois’.

[4] I privilege this academic definition of a cocolo because it coincided with that of the Richardson sisters. Other academic explanations–such as that cocolo emerged as a bastardisation to designate the workers from Tortola, a neighbouring British island where many cane cutters came from, or that it derived from coconut and was a discriminatory term used for all foreign blacks including Haitians–are something that I never heard the sisters speak about. In their definition, Haitians were not cocolos and being a cocolo was having an identity one could be proud of. Perhaps what occurred was a process of re-signification whereby a negative term employed by the powerful became a badge of honour for those designated as such.

[5] For a thorough historical and anthropological analysis of the emergence of the Black Atlantic ecologies on Aruba, see Green (1974).

[6] It took of course somewhat longer for it to directly register in the poorer Caribbean countries, as the works of Thomas (2002) and Robotham (1998), privileging the neo-liberal moment, commencing with the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, demonstrate. Nevertheless one must not lose sight of the structural time of Capitalism of which the advent of neo-liberalism was just an announcement of the shift to the hegemony of consumerism-driven identity politics that had already been instituted. (Thomas implicitly admits so much as she identifies the precursors of the 1980s consumer-driven identity politics of modern blackness in the 1960s rude boy culture in Jamaica. This culture was directly influenced by the rise of the American culture industry.)

[7] A classic on the role of money in Capitalism is of course Georg Simmel. For a succinct reflection of the continuing importance of the Simmelian analysis in this regard, see Deflem (2003).

[8] Sometimes a novel conveys better than academic studies do the madness of racist assaults on Haitians in the Dominican Republic. See, in this case, Danticat (1998). For an academic grounding, see Inoa (1999, pp. 140–213).