Book review : Non-sovereign futures: French Caribbean politics in the wake of disenchantment

Abstract

What configurations of struggle and desire emerge from a tactical and ideological disenchantment with postcolonial sovereignty? What forms of political struggle/struggle in political forms does disenchantment prompt? What is political form after methodological nationalism? It is in turning to Guadeloupe with anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla— to the archipelago’s militant labour movement across shifting contexts of status and rule—that I pose these questions. In Non-sovereign futures, Bonilla refracts current Guadeloupean labour organisation through a French Antillean political genealogy that has long wrestled with its own structural tangle with “the conceptual arsenal of political modernity” and its “seductive but constraining” constitutive categories: freedom, sovereignty, nation and revolution (p. 3). From abolition and colonial incorporation (1794) to citizenship (1848), departmentalisation (1946), new syndicalism (1970s) and guerrilla insurgence (1980s), Guadeloupean resistance unfolds as a sustained struggle towards an assembly of concepts, tactics and configurations forged within and against the “epistemic binds” of political modernity and racial capitalism (p. 15). [excerpt from the review]