New this week, Global Guyana exposes the twin impacts of gendered erasure and environmental erosion that structure Caribbean women’s lives. |
Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in which intersectional race and gender formations circumscribe Caribbean women’s lives.
Drawing from archival research and oral history, and examining mass-mediated flashpoints across the African and Indian diasporas—including Rihanna’s sonic routes, ethnic conflict reportage, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking—Global Guyana repositions this marginalized nation as a nexus of social and economic activity which drives popular culture and ideas about sexuality while reshaping the geopolitical and literal topography of the Caribbean region. Oneka LaBennett employs the powerful analytic of the pointer broom to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and global racial capitalism. She illuminates how both oil extraction and sand export are implicated in a well-established practice of pillaging the Caribbean’s natural resources while masking the ecological consequences that disproportionately affect women and children.
Global Guyana uncovers how ecological erosion and gendered violence are entrenched in extractive industries emanating from this often-effaced but pivotal country. Sounding the alarm on the portentous repercussions that ambitious development spells out for the nation’s people and its geographical terrain, LaBennett issues a warning for all of us about the looming threat of global environmental calamity.
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"Wielding her pointer broom, an everyday object used by countless girls and women in Guyana in the daily work of keeping order, LaBennett sweeps the messy, layered detritus of history, politics, and experience into a remarkably personal ethnography." |
Elizabeth Chin, author of My Life with Things
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"Reminds us of the constructive power of feminist autoethnography, the significance of demystifying the popular, and why political economy matters now more than ever. Global Guyana is both an urgent new Caribbean narrative and scholarly act of reclamation!" |
Gina Athena Ulysse, author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives
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"Exposes and challenges political economies of erasure, deftly sweeping into our frame and inviting us to reckon with the everyday practices upon which our current global order depends."
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Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto
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| More from Oneka LaBennett |
Overwhelmingly, Black teenage girls are negatively represented in national and global popular discourses, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. Such popular representations are pervasive and often portray Black adolescents’ consumer and leisure culture as corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological.
In She’s Mad Real, Oneka LaBennett draws on over a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are in fact strategic consumers of popular culture and through this consumption they assert far more agency in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge. Importantly, LaBennett also studies Caribbean girls’ consumer and leisure culture within public spaces in order to analyze how Black teens are marginalized and policed as they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York’s contested terrains.
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Save 20% on all titles when you use code ENEWS20 at checkout on nyupress.org. Orders over $40 receive free domestic shipping!
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