(Re)thinking material and epistemic futures: Caribbean reparations, development, and education

• In Event: Attending to the Colonial and Racial Natures of Comparative and International Education and Development

Proposal

Recently, there have been exhortations by international development and education scholars to (re)think development in more progressive, inclusive, and equitable ways, with reparations being central to this agenda (Soudien 2022). In taking up this challenge, in this conceptual paper we envision new development possibilities for the Anglophone Caribbean through the conceptual frame of reparations for the legacies of chattel slavery, indigenous dispossession, extractive capitalism, and their significance to the making of capitalist modernity. We lay out the development paradigm’s historical geometries, including the violence of colonialism, extractive and racial capitalism, and the resultant material and epistemic effects. We argue for a (re)think of development in the Caribbean through the lens of reparations using two approaches. First, materially, we propose a structural reform of the aid system to return to the Caribbean stolen economic wealth that resulted in the enrichment of former colonizing powers and the un- and under-development of the Caribbean. Secondly, we insist on epistemic reparations that should translate practically into the right of Caribbean societies to explore their ways of knowing as legitimate and the right to construct their schooling/education in ways that reflect their context-specific needs. We see these two matters as connected. We present these approaches as merely entry points into reparation and (re)thinking development for Caribbean societies; we do not suggest these are sufficient for full reparations or to fully create developed/sustainable Caribbean societies by any means. The arguments we present in this paper are unique in at least two ways. One, our argument brings together two of the historical processes and phenomena that define colonial and modernist encounters with the Anglophone Caribbean – the enduring epistemological/educational inequities and the economic/“aid” system. This is unique in the sense that while there is growing literature on each theme by itself – epistemological/educational issues and the economic/“aid” mechanism – none has engaged with these matters interdependently. Second, given the almost totalizing impact of the colonial project on the Caribbean (no other region has been remade to such an extent by colonial processes in terms of its people, social systems, and cultural practices), the region potentially has the most to say on the depth, complexity and far-reaching nature of colonialism and justification for reparations. Our arguments on reparations in the context of the Caribbean, then, may have significant insights for the reparation projects of other areas of the Global South. To convey the logic of our call for reparations, we lay bare the link between material and epistemic dominance of Western modernity and the exploitation of the region – how the Amerindians (the indigenous population) were decimated, Africans enslaved, Asians indentured, and the resulting un- and under-development that have plagued the region. Therefore, we cannot separate the issues of material exploitation and race/racism in various forms (including epistemic) from modernist development of which extractivist capitalism is central in shaping historical and modern categorization and stratification of race. Thus, the region has a strong case for reparations, especially as we attempt to address global inequalities embedded in global development markers.

Authors

• tavis d jules, Loyola University Chicago

• Nigel Brissett, Clark University