Making Space for the Maritorio: Raizal Dispossession and the Geopoetic Imagination in the San Andrés Archipelago

Abstract

Drawing in part on the work of Édouard Glissant, this article explores how the Raizal population of the San Andrés Archipelago in the Caribbean mobilises the concept of maritorio as an archipelagic geopoetic vessel with emancipatory potential. This concept disrupts dominant land/sea binaries that result from and are rooted in geopolitical mechanisms and colonial fantasies. The San Andrés Archipelago is administratively and politically part of Colombia, but the Raizal people of the Archipelago share a long colonial and postcolonial history with Black Creole people elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, especially the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, based on diverse forms of economic, familial, and cultural exchange and marine mobilities. For many years, the status of the Archipelago was the basis of a dispute between Nicaragua and Colombia at the International Court of Justice, who ruled in 2012 that the islands were in fact Colombian while Nicaragua gained 75,000 km² of sea. This ruling was devastating for the Raizales, fragmenting their maritorio and further thwarting Black mobilities and cultural exchange across the region. Legal-geopolitical dislocations applied to the islands and the sea exacerbated structural conditions of racial and environmental injustice, while geopoetic responses by Raizal people to this state of affairs serve to confront colonial dispossession, ecological damage, and the ideological fixities of the Eurocentric nation-state.