Upending the plantation “Babylon” system: on the genealogies of Black repair and plotting decolonial sovereignties in the Caribbean

Keywords: Black repair, climate reparations, Caribbean sovereignty, plantation, plot, postcolonial liberal state, reparative ecologies
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

By imperial design, the Caribbean region was created as uneven yet interconnected archipelagos
of Black dispossession. On this basis, Caribbean leaders have initiated calls for reparatory
justice, demanding restitution for longstanding systemic inequalities stemming largely from
plantation slavery, colonialism and native genocide. This paper interrogates the Caribbean
program for reparatory justice drawing out its political strategies and ideological underpinnings.
This analysis shows that the current “reparations-for-development” project reproduces a narrow
modernizing form of economic reparations that is premised on redress by accumulation and the
reification of the postcolonial liberal state despite its limited sovereignties, ongoing
marginalization of Caribbean peoples, and anti-black dispositions. With limited community
rootedness and in-depth consideration of increased marginalization of Caribbean communities
facing climate hazards, I argue that this narrow approach critically ignores the ways in which
Caribbean communities build collective solidarities, anti-capitalist routes to liberation and
mutual care, or an alternative economy of reparations. In this way, I define reparative ecologies
as the community-level efforts, epistemic frameworks and solidarity-building technologies that
marginalized people utilize in response to external market and socio-ecological pressures that
challenge postcolonial development and capitalist logics to envision alternative futures and shape
spaces of freedom. Climate breakdown further exposes the limitations of the postcolonial state
and increase debilitation of human/non-human life through military incursions, debt bondage and
epistemic/economic imperialism. This paper argues for a systemic approach that takes into
account the borderless nature of climate change, its specific marginalizations of Caribbean
communities, including a decolonial climate reparations agenda and potential liberatory spaces.