Of Rags and Riches in the Caribbean: Creolizing Migration Studies

Abstract

In this article, we re-connect highly unequal mobilities in the Caribbean that have so far escaped the purview of migration research and challenge dominant understandings of migrant integration: By replacing the methodological Occidentalism shaping the field through a creolized decolonial lens, we show how the precarious position of Haitians in the Greater Caribbean and particularly in French Guiana testifies to how colonial histories shape unequal mobilities until the present. We juxtapose these patterns between the first independent Black Republic and territories still under colonial occupation with short-cuts to global mobility available to investors in commodified citizenships in the Caribbean.

Keywords:

• Migration
• integration
• citizenship
• inequality
• coloniality
• Haiti
• Caribbean
• French Guiana

Notes

1 The term “European slave trade,” deliberately chosen by Guyanese historian Walter Rodney over the abstract label of “transatlantic slave trade,” is meant to “[…] call attention to the fact that the shipments were all by Europeans to markets controlled by Europeans, and this was in the interest of European capitalism and nothing else” (Rodney, 1982, p. 95).