Creole becoming and the commons

Black freedom in Belize

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4464858
AutoresMelissa Johnson (0000-0002-8716-6497, Southwestern University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen4
Número4
Páginas1217-1231
Fecha de publicación2021-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/2514848619891165
OpenAlexW2991530489
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas44

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

Capitalism · Colonialism · Commons · Creole language · Diaspora · Ethnology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability