TINGS BROWN!

Abstract

In Barbados economic hardship has a color. Ask Barbadians ‘how're you doing?’ and, if things are difficult in any way they might answer, ‘Tings brown!’ This seems to be an especially appropriate phrase for this paper which explores the inter-relations between contemporary racialized identificatory strategies and economic hardship in the Caribbean. My interest is in exploring the challenges Caribbean citizens and governments face in trying to pursue both democracy and economic sustainability at this time. One way in which these challenges continue to manifest themselves is in the overt and covert debates about who has the right to claim the protection of state institutions. Within these debates ‘brown’ surfaces as a way of drawing a line between those claims which are deemed legitimate and those which are deemed illegitimate. This paper focuses on four ways in which ‘brown’ defines the borders of dominant nationalist projects in Barbados. At the center of this article is an exploration of the difficulties facing Guyanese migrant workers in Barbados.

Keywords:

• Caribbean
• race
• migration
• creolization
• post-colonial
• globalization
• tourism

Notes

1. People from Barbados are referred to as Barbadians or Bajans.

2. Though formal integration has had a stuttering start, the movement of people within the region has been such that most Caribbean people can point to family members who either came from one of the other Caribbean territories or who currently reside there.

3. I am specifically examining the Barbadian case; however negative attitudes towards Guyanese are present beyond Barbados. For example, Guyanese President Bharat Jagdeo, at a CARICOM Heads of Government accused many elements in the Caribbean media and society of xenophobic attitudes towards Guyanese.

4. In this instance I am using Jolanta Dzrewicka and Rona Halualani delimitation of the cultural to mean narratives, identity discourses etc compared to the structural which means nation-state formations, law, governance and economics (Dzrewicka & Halualani 2002). As will be clear, this is a helpful way of categorizing what is at seen to be at stake in Barbados when one contrasts responses to Guyanese with responses to tourists. Nevertheless, I also recognize that the division itself imposes a false logic. For example, it will also become clear in the following pages that the Barbadian economy is both cultural and structural.

5. In this article I will refer to the Indo-Caribbean population using the labels East Indian or Indo-Caribbean, Indo-Guyanese, Indo-Trinidadian. There remains some controversy about these labels; however, I have elected to draw upon the recent literature which suggests that the local term, East Indian, can often be used to mark Caribbean citizens of Indian heritage as foreign whereas the hyphenated Indo-Caribbean etc acknowledges Indo-Caribbeans as an integral and legitimate part of Caribbean society. Thus, when I use East Indian I am highlighting those processes that marginalize Indo-Caribbeans.

6. Bolland (2006) points out that there is an important difference between when creolization is used as an analytical tool and when it is used as an ideological tool. Puri (2004) on the other hand argues that creolization's critical edge has been lost because of what she has called its complicity with nationalist projects. In this article my focus is really on the ideological uses of creolization in nationalism where it has often been sucked dry of its potential for complexity and contention.

7. Those of mixed heritage in the Caribbean have been (and continue to be) labeled in a variety of ways. ‘Colored’ was one of the historical designations. My own use of ‘brownskin’ in this article is a conscious selection of one of the color-conscious categories that is used in Barbados.

8. Dougla is a label used in the Caribbean to identify people of African and Indian decent. Reddock states, that douglarization ‘refers to (Hindu religious and Indo-Trinidadian nationalist leaders') perceptions that the Peoples National Movement (PNM), the governing party of Trinidad and Tobago from 1956–1986 and 1991–1995 encouraged intimate relations between African men and Indian women in order to “Africanize/Creolize” the population and in this way, deal with the problem of race relations’ (Reddock 1999, p. 573).

9. As part of the CWC 2007 a Legacy Committee was formed with a Legacy plan the stated objective of which is to ensure that Barbados gets the most return from its investment in the cricket competition.

10. I have focused my attention in this article on the intra-regional movement of labor. However the international movement of labor has also been controversial in Barbados. The government has had to deal with controversies surrounding the recruitment of labor from India and China.