Oneka LaBennet’s Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond captures the “everywhereness and nowhereness” of Guyana, South America. Since 2015, Guyana has become an emerging petrostate routinely featured in the Western news cycle due to its promise of capital accumulation for outside investors. In Global Guyana, resource extraction is broadly conceived: oil, sand, and women’s labor. Temporally situated, Global Guyana demonstrates the necessity of Caribbean feminist methodological praxis in our attempts to reckon with the current ecological and global political moment. LaBennet’s spatial and temporal exploration of Guyana’s natural and gendered resources for the extractive economies of the Global North provide a framework for historical and contemporary anthropocenic meditations. LaBennet, a trained anthropologist born in Sara Johanna, Guyana, develops an autoethnographic kinship formation that “mobiliz[es] autoethnography as a strategy to (re)define my own kinship formations in a manner that complicates colonial and contemporary categorizations of gender and the family in Guyana and beyond.” Across each chapter, this text explores the critical intersection of ecology, Guyanese women’s experience, and labor across the Guyanese diaspora.

Disentangling Western erotic fantasies of discovery and accumulation, Global Guyana conducts a contemporary feminist analysis on how resource extraction is a ubiquitous and ongoing process that is entangled with race, gender, and sexuality. The theoretical frame of this text is Kamau Braithwhite’s tidalectics and Oonya Kempadoo’s sssweep, sweep, stamp of the pointer broom. Both Braithwaite and Kempadoo capture the seemingly mundane and quotidian task of sweeping, showcasing the influence of Black Caribbean women and girls’ environmental, political, artistic, and domestic labor. Thus, Global Guyana’s theoretical and methodological frame hinges upon the pointer broom, “an analogy that traces the global patterns of movement connecting Guyanese women to larger processes across diasporic space and time.” Through the analogy of the pointer broom, LaBennett sweeps together Guyanese ecology, social processes of racialization and gender, and resource extraction to unsettle “processes of erasure and related forms of erosion across archives and temporalities via examples stemming from and through Guyana.”

LaBennett’s analysis of the processes of racialization through her own experience and the experiences of her matrilineage highlight the complexities of Blackness as a social and racial category within the region. Global Guyana asks, in a country lauded for its multiethnic population, within an anti-Black world, how can Blackness and the Dougla take up space? Further, what are the stakes in acknowledging African ancestry in the midst of anti-Blackness? Chapter One ponders these questions and also asks: how might we consider the archives and afterlives of slavery and indentured servitude as interconnected? How and why does Blackness become legible or illegible, possible or impossible to ‘see’ in a society as racially mixed as Guyana’s? LaBennett ventures to explore and potentially answer these questions by centering archival encounters, oral histories, and autoethnography as a young mixed race, Black and Indian (‘dougla’) girl, through what she terms an act ‘autoethnographic kinship formation.’ This chapter offers a framework to discuss mixed race identity in the Global South, specifically in relation to Indo-Caribbean women’s sexuality. Black and Indian solidarities are fraught terrains because of the developments of colonial hierarchies. The ‘dougla girl’ serves as a physical evocation of the fluid nature of this fraught colonial terrain and also as a pillar of colonial anxieties. 

Chapter Two focuses intently on the Bajan-Guyanese diaspora vis-a-vis sonic pathways and the Bajan-Guyanese sexual economies. Here, LaBennett focuses on Rihanna, the billionaire pop star turned entrepreneur who, while known for her Bajan ancestry, was raised by her Afro-Guyanese mother and influenced significantly by this cultural upbringing. LaBennett states, “Local contradictions surrounding this effacement point both to Bajan national anxieties about claiming the superstar as their own and to the ways in which Afro-Guyanese gender identity is rendered illegible, while Indo-Guyanese femininity, as portrayed in popular culture, comes to represent an essentialized Guyanese woman.” Here, Black Guyanese women’s positionality is developed through anti-Black stereotypes and a complex experience of xenophobia charged with hypersexual rhetoric. Indo-Guyanese women’s subject position additionally falls into the commodification of the Bajan-Guyanese sexual economy by becoming the ideal and desirable Guyanese woman. Focusing on Rihanna’s racial and cultural heritage grants space to discuss how gender and sexuality continue to inform Afro- and Indo-Caribbean social politics. 

Chapters Three and Four focus on themes of material extraction. Throughout Chapter Three, LaBennet traces the ecological erosion of Guyana’s sand reserves and forests to the white sandy beaches of Caribbean islands, in the process uncovering an oft-hidden global market of sand extraction and movement. Uncovering this ecological extraction highlights the irony and insidious underside of the Caribbean tourist economy. While Guyana, aesthetically, cannot maneuver in the same ways as other Caribbean nations, tourism still is an influential resource for this economy. For Guyana, and Guyanese people, like the rest of the Global South, erosion is an integral part of its economy while also serving to accelerate the climate precarity in the region. Further, LaBennett highlights how “environmental concerns, geographic situatedness, and feminist analysis, enable us to witness the colossal movements of sand in the contemporary period, literally eroding territories under our feet.” In this text, erosion and extraction serve material and symbolic tools to demonstrate how the effects of colonization are ever present, even within a post-colonial nation state. Chapter Four, on the other hand, outlines how the El Dorado myth continues to shape colonial and western interactions with Guyana’s natural resources. The historical search for gold mirrors the contemporary search, discovery, and extraction of oil off of Guyana’s Atlantic coast. Through LaBannet’s ethnographic studies, the attitudes of local Guyanese people are uncovered, citing corruption and frustration with governmental economic processes. However, in Global North media outlets, the mismanagement of funds is deemed as the product of Guyanese political leaders’ lack of economic and political wit. This chapter offers an articulation of local and global geopolitics, with the Guyanese petrostate at the fore. 

Global Guyana is developed on this shaking, unsteady ground where erosion, women’s labor, and the Guyanese diaspora collide and uncover how history continues to inform the future. Further, there is an emphasis on the Guyanese ethnic divide that serves to distract the increasing gendered violence against women and children. LaBennett’s pointer broom sweeps together the granular and seemingly separate histories of Guyana to paint a broader picture of how gender, racialization, and extraction are systems that work in tandem.