Decolonizing Neo-Colonial Ecologies in Barbuda, Part I
Photo of sand mining & construction in Barbuda by Annetta Jackson, Intersect Antigua
Blog post by Sarah-Anne Gresham, Intersect Antigua
Feminist Geographies of Disaster Capitalism: Decolonizing
Neo-Colonial Ecologies in Barbuda Post-Irma
Part I
“The hurricane does not roar in pentameter.”
– Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice
This is the first installment in a series of academic blog posts by our co-founder, Sarah-Anne Gresham, that fall under the CFS II themes of Critical Green Theory and Owning Your Own:
In 2017, Barbuda, the 62-square mile sister isle of Antigua, was decimated by hurricane Irma. Irma, one of the strongest hurricanes on record, was given a category designation of 5++, with sustained winds of over 180mph. Not only does this tragedy evince the ways that the climate crisis, punctuated by what many scholars have termed the Capitalocene, have uneven consequences- with small islanders suffering disproportionately while contributing the least to environmental degradation- it has also uprooted anti-colonial and anti-capitalist modes of relationality.
Writing in the journal publication Small Axe, Dr. Natasha Lightfoot, an Antiguan history professor at Columbia University, maintains that “Barbudans deem their rights to the land as based in their centuries-old customary collectivity rather than in colonial legal parlance” (136).
Despite this, efforts are being made by the government of Antigua to dissolve communal land relations and to institute privatized land ownership to make way for eco-tourism and other development initiatives. This, as Naomi Klein asserts in The Shock Doctrine, is characteristic of disaster capitalism.
In response to neo-colonial and capitalist definitions of personhood and development, I will interrogate the ways in which disaster capitalism imperils the people of Barbuda. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of deploying an interdisciplinary feminist analytic, including critical geographies and decolonial feminist theory, to attend to the ways that communal modes of relation are more sustainable and ethical alternatives to capitalist development.
One of the key research questions animating this piece is: to what extent are Barbudan women integral in sustaining these modes of relation? By deploying a feminist theoretical framework to the ongoing crisis in Barbuda, I am extending under-theorized avenues of critical inquiry to support anti-colonial and anti-capitalist modes of relation. These modes of relation are antithetical to the environmental degradation that attends disaster capitalism.
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On September 06, 2017, Barbudans experienced one of the most devastating disasters in living memory. The human and environmental perils caused by Hurricane Irma spurred the national government to push for the displacement of Barbudans, comprising under 2,000 people after it leveled the island with catastrophic wind gusts. “What we experienced is like something you see in a horror movie,” one Barbudan explained to a BBC correspondent. “We had containers – 40ft containers – flying left and right” the person continued. The Guardian described Barbuda as “a ghost town” in the hurricane’s aftermath with “an estimated 90% of properties...damaged.” The World Bank, referencing preliminary estimates, noted that the damages caused by Irma cost Antigua and Barbuda approximately 14% of GDP.
In the ruinous wake of this hurricane, Prime Minister Gaston Browne reported that approximately half of Barbudans were left homeless. With the looming threat of yet another hurricane, José, just three days after the passage of Irma, Antigua and Barbuda’s Cabinet declared a State of Emergency with the Attorney General, Steadroy ‘Cutie’ Benjamin, issuing a mandatory evacuation order for Barbuda.
Dr. Natasha Lightfoot, an Antiguan Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, noted that invocations of terra nullius by the international media, following this mass evacuation, was an inaccuracy that the government used to its advantage. In the footnotes of her Small Axe publication, “Disrepair, Distress, and Dispossession: Barbuda after Hurricane Irma,” Dr. Lightfoot cites an article, titled “New Airport on the Island of Barbuda, Antigua and Barbuda,” appearing in Environmental Justice Atlas. This article catalogued the actions of noted Barbudan environmentalist and educator John Mussington. The publication shared the following information about Mussington who is:
““a resident who refused to leave the island after Hurricane Irma struck because he suspected underhand motives for the evacuation, and filmed bulldozing of land for the new airport, reported that a huge area of land was being cleared and parceled up, saying it is clear that what is taking shape is not just an airport.””
What Mussington witnessed was the severing of Barbudans’ relationship with the land. The roaring hurricane served as a convenient excuse to begin development projects aligning with the government’s longstanding desire for privatization for capitalist accumulation. Dr. Lightfoot maintains that “for Antiguan government officials, such a declaration was aimed at erasing Barbudans’ long-standing presence on and communal possession of the land, to pave the way for more culturally and environmentally deleterious forms of redevelopment” (133). Though there is more to these development efforts than the creation of an airport designed to increase tourist traffic flows to the island as Mussington suggests, all major re-development projects undertaken without due process and respect for Barbudan sovereignty and knowledge present significant risks.
Barbudans’ relationship with the land dates back centuries. In a mini-documentary titled “BarbudaVoices,” Barbudans lament the unconscionable destruction of historical ruins to build the international airport that Mussington clandestinely espied. Only one well, dug over 300 years ago by their ancestors, survived. It was soon discovered that underground caves made the site completely unsuitable for the airport and the historical site remains abandoned with over three hundred years of history carelessly destroyed. One caption in the documentary reads, “[t]his all could have been avoided if laws were followed” and is a point of interest for this research paper.
““[F]or Antiguan government officials, such a declaration was aimed at erasing Barbudans’ long-standing presence on and communal possession of the land, to pave the way for more culturally and environmentally deleterious forms of redevelopment” ”
Where the law is treated as a boon that could save Barbudan people, Barbudan ecologies, and their history, legal frameworks are a limited means of imagining freedom otherwise. This isn’t to suggest that legal protections should not be pursued or honored. Rather, the calculated disregard for the law in the context of Barbuda’s care, sustainable restoration, and the sovereignty of its people, along with the antagonistic deployment of the law to prioritize neocolonial and capitalist definitions of re-development, means that the preservation of their relationship to the land must be grounded in imaginaries beyond legal bounds. In other words, when legal frameworks are selectively employed or ignored to serve development interests, it becomes clear that relying exclusively on the law as an organizing instrument is insufficient. Antiguans and Barbudans must strengthen claims of Barbudan sovereignty through a strong decolonizing sensibility rooted in Caribbean feminist and anti-colonial thought. Organizing for sovereignty must be informed by ancestral knowledge and contemporary scholarship that opposes neocolonialism and disaster capitalism.
While the nation of Antigua and Barbuda is ruled by an overarching government, the contours of self-actualization in the smaller of the two islands are largely shaped by a more localized Barbuda Council. This Council, as well as offshoot political movements and advocacy groups that include The Barbuda People’s Movement and Barbuda Silent No More, have been active and vocal against the government’s persistent attempts to fracture and hedge the land which has sustained generations of Barbudan people and their surrounding environment.
Lightfoot asserts that “Barbudans deem their rights to the land as based in their centuries-old customary collectivity rather than in colonial legal parlance” (136). If customary international law can be recognized and codified based on “general and consistent practice[s]” rather than formal written agreements, then surely the recognition of land rights can extend to Barbudans’ customary collectivity.
Nevertheless, in 2007 this collective ownership was codified in The Barbuda Land Act, under the previous government, the United Progressive Party (UPP). Under section two of the act, titled “Ownership of Land in Barbuda,” it reads “[a]ll land in Barbuda shall be owned in common by the people of Barbuda” with a subsection reading, “[n]o land in Barbuda shall be sold” and “[n]o person shall acquire the ownership of any land by prescription or otherwise” (6). It also lists prohibitions on felling growing timber and destroying mangroves. Following the ousting of the UPP in the 2014 general election and the changing of political power to the Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party (ABLP), neo-colonial and capitalist modes of relation constituted the ideological basis for the repeal of the 2007 Land Act.
Fishing boats by the Barbuda lagoon.
Photo by Annetta Jackson, Intersect Antigua
Where collective ownership of the land was formalized in the 2007 act, Barbudans were declared tenants of the Crown in the 2017 Amendment Act. A portion of section two of this amendment reads, “[a]ll lands within the Island of Barbuda are hereby vested in the Governor General on behalf of the Crown and shall be dealt with in accordance with the provisions of this Act” (6).
That the head of state is considered a landlord, extracting “rent” from those who live on Barbudan land, has resonances in Karl Marx’s “trinity formula.” At the beginning of chapter 48 in Capital, he shares the following insight: “Capital—Profit (Profit of Enterprise plus Interest), Land— Ground-Rent, Labor—Wages, this is the trinitarian formula which comprises all the secrets of the social process of production” (1900). This formula highlights the role of capitalists in the generation of income within a structure of economic relations. It resonates with the shift from communal ownership of Barbudan land to private property.
Prime Minister Gaston Browne, who is the leader of the ABLP and the Minister of Finance, has vociferously defended the amendment act, calling its 2007 antecedent unconstitutional and extolling the purported benefits of bringing Barbuda into the fold of capitalist modernity through the institution of privatized land ownership. These sentiments were documented by Human Rights Watch which shared:
““Proponents of those amendments – and this year’s repeal effort – assert that Barbudans do not actually own the land, that collective tenure is not viable, and that individual freehold – in which the individual will have rights only to the land they use and not common areas – is the only route to modernity.” ”
As a constitutional monarchy, rather than a republic, King Charles III is Antigua and Barbuda’s head of state and the nation’s sovereign. This exemplifies the explicit linkages between colonialism and capitalism in the period of modernity which subtends decision-making processes with respect to human-land relations. Barbudans’ attempts to invoke and actualize sovereignty were overruled by the government which sought legal refuge in the power of neo-colonial capitalism for the sake of development.
It therefore cannot be understated that Antigua’s relationship to the Crown today is not merely symbolic or innocuous – as many have intimated - but reflective of colonial modes of relation imbricated in the organization and distribution of power and control for the generation of capital.
Capital, according to Karl Marx in Volume II of Capital can be distinguished from money based on how it circulates. In the first chapter of this volume, titled “The Circulation of Money-Capital” Marx describes the transformation of money into capital based on the following formula: M –C...P...C'– M' (760). In the first stage, M, a sum of money, is converted into “C” for “commodities.” These commodities enter a mode of productive consumption or “P” where they are purchased and then marketized (C' - M') at a greater value than they originally cost.
This is a cyclical and reiterative process where acceleration is key for intensifying and maximizing the extraction of surplus value. In other words, an incessant and ever-increasing profit motive with a direct correlation to depletion, devaluation, extraction, and exploitation of people, their labor power, and their time, as well as the depletion and extraction of value from land are outcomes of this process. Marx sums this up cogently when he says, “[t]he restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value is common to the capitalist... (99).
Therefore, the intended extraction of surplus value from privatized land through development initiatives like luxury hotels sustained by the surplus labor of Barbudans, who would be folded into capitalist relations, are outcomes that they are actively resisting.
Instituting an overarching tertiary or servile economy where the surplus labor of workers is extracted and the demands of reproductive labor, routinely performed by women, are increased and under-remunerated, are not the freedom dreams that Barbudans’ ancestors, nor Antiguans’ ancestors for that matter, envisioned.
Stay tuned for Part II of this series.
