Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean Postcolony

Abstract

Abstract The Anglophone Caribbean state entered the twenty-first century in crisis. For many observers, the region’s various maladies—political violence, crime, and economic deprivation—were symptoms of a post-Cold War neoliberal (dis)order. Such diagnoses correctly identified the proximate causes of the crisis, but there was a deeper history shaping the postcolonial condition. The crisis of the Anglophone Caribbean state, as this chapter demonstrates in relation to Guyana and Jamaica, was rooted in the contested nature of decolonization and its violent afterlives. In both cases, decolonization witnessed the emergence of rival political parties, who were more concerned with capturing the state and distributing resources to their respective supporters than they were in effecting radical change. The result was low-intensity political conflict, linked to party, trade union, and communal affiliation, and, as the hopes of independence went unrealized, growing anger amongst the most disenfranchised. These episodes of political warfare and collective popular protest meant that the postcolonial state in Guyana and Jamaica came to rely on the same violent modalities as its colonial predecessor. In turn, the continuities between the colonial and postcolonial contributed to an experience of time that for many people was, as Deborah Thomas has argued, non-linear, characterized by a sense of stasis, repetition, and even reversal. In other words, if we are to understand the successive crises that have affected the Anglophone Caribbean since the end of the Cold War, we have to listen attentively to the ongoing dialogue between the colonial past and the postcolonial present.