“Peripheral Migrants,” Bare life and Caribbean Moderns

• In Event: Sovereignty and linked forms of exclusion in the Dominican countryside

Abstract

Replying to the charges of activists that Haitian sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic were treated as slaves, the Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons’s 1986 report on government owned agricultural bateyes devised a taxonomic scheme distinguishing 19th century chattel slavery from the D.R’s 20th century plantation labor. However, Pons’s report concludes that the D.R’s 20th conditions were actually worse than slavery. I examine these claims through a rethinking of plantation typologies as well as by way of a visual reading of Dominican photographer Fausto Ortiz’s series Ciudad de Sombras (City of shadows). These shadow-histories I argue, resemble elements of Agamben’s neomort or Homo Sacer. They highlight the complex politics of sovereignty in Caribbean postcolonial states and their continuing production of, and even investment in stateless bodies. Such phenomena facilitate explorations of modernity and modernization’s lineages operant in the performance of postcolonial sovereignty which while embracing forms of life simultaneously lead to death, expulsion and ultimately disavowal of particular subjects/citizens.

Author

• Michaeline Adelle Crichlow, Duke University