Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment

As an overseas department of France, Guadeloupe is one of a handful of non-independent societies in the Caribbean that seem like political exceptions—or even paradoxes—in our current postcolonial era. In Non-Sovereign Futures, Yarimar Bonilla wrestles with the conceptual arsenal of political modernity—challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution—in order to recast Guadeloupe not as a problematically non-sovereign site but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself.
           
Through a deep ethnography of Guadeloupean labor activism, Bonilla examines how Caribbean political actors navigate the conflicting norms and desires produced by the modernist project of postcolonial sovereignty. Exploring the political and historical imaginaries of activist communities, she examines their attempts to forge new visions for the future by reconfiguring narratives of the past, especially the histories of colonialism and slavery. Drawing from nearly a decade of ethnographic research, she shows that political participation—even in failed movements—has social impacts beyond simple material or economic gains. Ultimately, she uses the cases of Guadeloupe and the Caribbean at large to offer a more sophisticated conception of the possibilities of sovereignty in the postcolonial era. 

• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (California Series in Public Anthropology)
• Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle
• Critique of Black Reason (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
• The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
• Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
• Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (Gender, Theory, and Religion)
• The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists
• How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective