Caribbean Repair

Abstract

IN 2013, CARICOM LAUNCHED THE CARICOM REPARATIONS COMMISSION (CRC), comprised of scholars, activists, and government officials from Jamaica, Barbados, St Lucia, Guyana, Suriname, Antigua, St Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago.1 Members of the commission work with national reparation task forces and committees in the Caribbean and international supporting organisations to enhance their claims. Thus far the CRC has developed a “Ten Point Action Plan”, a public statement that identifies the legacies of slavery and colonialism and makes demands for those European governments that profited from slavery and colonialism to issue an apology and to participate in a reparations programme aimed at enhancing social and economic development in the region.2 Despite the challenges of COVID-19, the CRC has continued their outreach efforts largely through social media. In July 2020 at a press conference, which featured Barbadian prime minister and chair of the prime ministerial subcommittee for reparations, Mia Mottley, CRC chair Sir Hilary Beckles announced the CRC’s proposal for a three-day summit, which would involve the participation of governments, the private sector and the Church of England to discuss how “how to honour this debt to the Caribbean”.3 In this essay, I explore how contemporary claims for reparations in the Caribbean challenge us to think differently about the scope and limitations of certain strands of what Cedric J. Robinson called the black radical tradition.4 Today, reparation activists situate their claims within a genealogy of Caribbean black radical responses, from the Haitian Revolution to the intellectual interventions of Caribbean thinkers and the lived experiences of those impacted by native genocide, chattel slavery and indentureship – Sir Hilary Beckles’s essay “The Reparation Movement: Greatest Political Tide” and Verene A. Shepherd’s and Ahmed Reid’s “Women, Slavery and the Reparation Movement in the Caribbean”5 are such examples. Reading Raymond Williams, Ruth Wilson Gilmore maintains that the black radical tradition is a liminal practice that is defined by a conscious