American Madness: Colonial Myths & the Logics of Disposability

• In Event: Race and Identity Making Past and Present

Description for Program

In 2020, U.S. Virgin Islanders gathered across the major islands of St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John to protest the police killing of George Floyd. Though Black U.S. Virgin Islanders do not necessarily experience state-sponsored violence in the same ways their continental peers might, the realities of racial injustice continue to be relevant to them. Encapsulating the nuances of our racialized positionality within the American body politic, one protest signage read “It’s only paradise if locals can afford to live here.” On the surface, this sign seems to speak to a subject matter divorced from the kind of issues which enabled George Floyd’s death. However, upon closer inspection, the sign communicates how displacement and dispossession are also forms of racialized state violence. That this sign was displayed during the St. John BLM March increased its salience as more than two-thirds of the island is home to the Virgin Islands National Park.

Utilizing Roland Barthe’s theorization of mythology and David Pellow’s environmental justice analysis of disposability, I argue that the dispossession of Black Virgin Islanders is situated within a larger American mythic framework that sees all Black people within its far-reaching empire as expendable. These myths produce “distortions” that both enable and exacerbate the dispossession of Black Americans on the mainland and islands while simultaneously denying it. For Virgin Islanders, the Virgin Islands National Park, an ecotourist conservation site, normalizes U.S. empire and its maddening consequences by catering to a primarily white touring class while aiding in the displacement of Black natives. Ultimately, this paper examines the ways the natural environment is weaponized to (re)produce colonial harm and strip island people of their rights to a quality life free from alienation in their homeland.

Author

• Jessica Samuel, Washington University- St. Louis