Global Guyana

Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond

Oneka LaBennett

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479827022
• Print ISBN:
  9781479827015
• Subtopic: Natural Resource Extraction Industry

Shortlisted, 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Nonfiction

Exposes the global threat of environmental catastrophe and the forms of erasure that structure Caribbean women's lives in the overlooked nation of Guyana

Previously ranked among the hemisphere's poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in which intersectional race and gender formations circumscribe Caribbean women's lives.

Drawing from archival research and oral history, and examining mass-mediated flashpoints across the African and Indian diasporas—including Rihanna's sonic routes, ethnic conflict reportage, HBO's Lovecraft Country, and Netflix's Indian Matchmaking—Global Guyana repositions this marginalized nation as a nexus of social and economic activity which drives popular culture and ideas about sexuality while reshaping the geopolitical and literal topography of the Caribbean region. Oneka LaBennett employs the powerful analytic of the pointer broom to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between Guyanese women's gendered labor and global racial capitalism. She illuminates how both oil extraction and sand export are implicated in a well-established practice of pillaging the Caribbean's natural resources while masking the ecological consequences that disproportionately affect women and children.

Global Guyana uncovers how ecological erosion and gendered violence are entrenched in extractive industries emanating from this often-effaced but pivotal country. Sounding the alarm on the portentous repercussions that ambitious development spells out for the nation's people and its geographical terrain, LaBennett issues a warning for all of us about the looming threat of global environmental calamity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: A Pointer Broom Approach
• Introduction: Everywhere and Nowhere: A Sweeping Vision of/from Guyana
• 1. From Full Negro to Dougla Girl: “All ah You in Here Is Black People!”
• 2. Rihanna’s Guyanese Pattacake and the Homewrecking State in Barbados
• 3. Transplanted Beaches and Silica Cities: Sand, Erasure, and Erosion in the Age of the Anthropocene
• 4. Recasting El Dorado: Representing Oil, Politics, and Ethnic Conflict
• Coda: The Road Ahead
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author