Creole becoming and the commons: Black freedom in Belize

Abstract

In rural Belize, Afro-Caribbean people have been generating economies and ecologies that simultaneously articulate with and are other than the global capitalism that initially brought enslaved West Africans and free Northern Europeans to the shores of Central America in the 1700s. What it is to be Belizean Creole initially emerged in the crucible of forest slavery and racial capitalism, but flourished in the generation of reciprocal economies and relational entanglement with the more than human, as blackness associated with freedom in the “bush.” Living in lands that did not interest Belize’s 19th century forestocracy, and that were not desirable for industrial agriculture, rural Creole people created commons for hunting, fishing, and other more than human engagement. The sense of being rural Creole develops from these entanglements and reciprocal relations that assemble with blackness and brownness in ways that are not fully contained within global white supremacist logics. This basis for a rural Creole identity has persisted even as rural Creole people engage today with the global capitalist projects of conservation and tourism, and as they live in transnational diaspora. In these ways, rural Creole people expand human being beyond the over-represented form of Man, as Sylvia Wynter has described the problem of the coloniality of “the human,” into a genre of “human being in common.” This expansion illustrates how commoning creates possibilities for blackness and brownness to thrive.