Book review : Non-sovereign futures: French Caribbean politics in the wake of disenchantment

Abstract

What configurations of struggle and desire emerge from a tactical and ideological disenchantment with postcolonial sovereignty? What forms of political struggle/struggle in political forms does disenchantment prompt? What is political form after methodological nationalism? It is in turning to Guadeloupe with anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla鈥� to the archipelago鈥檚 militant labour movement across shifting contexts of status and rule鈥攖hat I pose these questions. In Non-sovereign futures, Bonilla refracts current Guadeloupean labour organisation through a French Antillean political genealogy that has long wrestled with its own structural tangle with 鈥渢he conceptual arsenal of political modernity鈥� and its 鈥渟eductive but constraining鈥� constitutive categories: freedom, sovereignty, nation and revolution (p. 3). From abolition and colonial incorporation (1794) to citizenship (1848), departmentalisation (1946), new syndicalism (1970s) and guerrilla insurgence (1980s), Guadeloupean resistance unfolds as a sustained struggle towards an assembly of concepts, tactics and configurations forged within and against the 鈥渆pistemic binds鈥� of political modernity and racial capitalism (p. 15). [excerpt from the review]