Groundings: Caribbean Counternarratives in the Understories of Care

Care labor is foundational to the traditions upon which the Caribbean is built. These are deeply gendered practices, stubbornly committed to disrupting the forms of dispossession and dehumanization inherent in the colonial and imperialist logics that have historically shaped the region. Historically operating as a counter logic in a minor key, care was integral to how dispossessed Indigenous peoples, trafficked Africans, and indentured Indians held onto human and non-human relations. These care relations, grounded in respect, reciprocity, and solidarity, came to be an indispensable part of Caribbean life itself. Often taken for granted and “hidden in plain sight,” the practice of care in the Caribbean is understoried, not only because it is mostly unpaid and undervalued but also because it has largely operated outside of capitalist logics through principles such as reciprocity, communitarianism, and solidarity.¹

International finance and development institutions routinely celebrate care through the language of resilience. By contrast, these institutions almost never acknowledge the grounds upon which care labor is produced, the actors whose energies are made invisible, the material relationships and circulating principles, the imaginaries and stories that animate and sustain these traditions, or the cooptation that too often follows institutional recognition.² Governments too have been reluctant to acknowledge the vital role that care labor has played in mitigating the ongoing crisis that has characterized the region since the decline of the plantation era. 

Naming the Current Crisis 

Today care relations are facing their greatest challenge. While debt peonage, financial abandonment, and political coercion are longstanding external economic and social threats, they have deepened and become more lethal in the context of climate change and the growing inability of the region’s land, sea, air, and non-human kin to produce the conditions for continued survival. In 2022 UN Secretary-General António Gutteres declared the Caribbean to be ground zero for the global climate emergency, given its vulnerability to rising sea levels, extreme weather events, dangerous temperature increases, droughts, and floods.³ Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley also warned that if the earth’s surface temperature rises beyond two degrees Celsius, as it appears set to do, it would be a “death sentence” for island and coastal communities.⁴ Although these are warnings about the future, climate change is already shifting the terrain of social reproduction in the Caribbean. From spectacular recent hurricane destruction in Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico, to deadly levels of heat stress for human and non-human kin alike, we are reminded that as home to one of the largest collections of small island and low-lying coastal lands, the Caribbean is vulnerable to the existential crisis of climate change.⁵

Caribbean feminist scholarship is increasingly attentive to theorizing from and with the region’s geographical and geological scapes.⁶ For Vanessa Agard Jones, sand, “this object that exists at the point of nature’s hesitation between land and sea,” enables a queer reading of Caribbean landscapes that attends to embedded and ever moving archives of desire.⁷ For Andrea Baldwin, the brackish waters of coastal and inland territories, where fresh and saltwaters meet and merge, offer metaphorical scaffolding for her elaboration of a “Caribbean feminist ecosystem” in which livingness stubbornly endures the harsh environment of the contact zone; it is a liminal space of “mixing, relationality and (re) invention . . . conjur[ing] a before and after of the present, a history, and a future the opening creates.”⁸

In the tradition of this work, in this essay we take up the concept of “grounding” to explore how communities are attending to the challenge of climate change through what Honor Ford-Smith and Beverley Hanson describe as a myriad of care labors and relations that enact and demand reflexive, ethical responses to the present crisis at multiple scales.⁹ The vocabulary of grounding comes out of the praxis of Pan-Africanist Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, who defined the concept in an essay published after his deportation from Jamaica in 1968 — just six years after flag independence — where he had been a lecturer at the University of the West Indies. Rooted in Rastafari cultural practice, grounding responds to the neocolonial moment in the Caribbean by affirming the importance of political education and dialogue in community. As Rodney reflected:

I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of Black people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because, that is Black power, that is one of the elements, a sitting down together to reason, to ‘ground’. . . it might be in a sports club, it might be in a schoolroom, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully. . . I have sat on a little oil drum, rusty and in the midst of garbage and some Black brothers and I have grounded together.¹⁰

Groundings/ground is both materiality and metaphor. It works as noun and verb (together underscoring a processual dynamic), providing important points of departure for a feminist analytic that can both name the crisis as well as suggest the possibility of change, working out where we are at, what it is we want, and how to get there.¹¹ As noun, grounding/ground directs us to the materialization of a set of relations that define “Caribbean,” the historical specificity of which lies in the particular constellation of global flows and social relations that constitute it, thus eschewing methodological nationalism and a parochial, localist, and ethnonationalist understanding of place.¹² Small places are not “anachronistic space” but sites that can teach big lessons.¹³ And the Caribbean offers an epistemic (even anticipatory) vantage point, as a space of discrepant movement; as a site of deeply uneven encounter of multiple worlds; as an Indigenous space violently interrupted by Columbus’ accidental arrival in 1492; as a crucial node of extractivism in an emergent global racial capitalist order and inter-imperialist rivalry, anchored by the transatlantic slave trade in Africans and the ships of indenture that followed; as a zone of vital and unceasing experimentation in the face of extraordinary violence; and as an affective, vibrant space, animated by dense networks of affiliative practices led by women that disrupt all manner of boundaries. As a region with such an extensive history of capitalist entanglement, the Caribbean is the proverbial canary in the coalmine. It stands as an important place from which to think about the coloniality of the contemporary structures that threaten where and how care operates, as well as to learn from and with community efforts to negotiate, push back, and build alternative futures. Moreover, as verb, grounding/to ground illuminates the painstaking work of cultivating critical literacies in the pursuit of transformation. It demands that we draw on non-hierarchical principles of collective reasoning and reciprocity and center the self-organizing capacity, creativity, knowledge, and social motion of the most vulnerable in society.

In an essay that explores the transnational possibilities of Black women in Latin America, Keisha-Khan Perry moves away from relying on familiar feminist vocabularies of standpoint epistemology or situated knowledges.¹⁴ Instead, she draws on Rodney’s groundings in order to explore a transnationally oriented place-based solidarity. Perry’s intervention refuses the invisibility of Black women from accounts of the “global Black radical tradition,” while also insisting on geographic axes that foreground the epistemic significance of spaces like Latin America and the Caribbean. With the Caribbean and Caribbean feminist praxis as our starting point, we offer brief reflections that build on and extend Rodney’s and Perry’s engagement with groundings. It provides an analytical and methodological anchor for revisiting histories and considering some contemporary examples of gendered care and social reproduction under conditions that have been both destabilizing and grounding.¹⁵ Later in this essay, we turn to Indigenous hemispheric theorizing and, specifically, the concept of grounded normativity developed by Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson to help us diagnose catastrophe as well as point to the otherwise work underway. Finally, we take an important cue from sociologist Cecilia Green’s analysis of the limit point of Caribbean theorizing that attends to “the commanding heights of the economy and its hegemonic force” at the expense of seeking out “the nooks and crannies and living networks of the popular and domestic economy and its creative potential,” those deeply gendered spaces where people “have invented themselves, their lives, and their livelihoods.”¹⁶

Grounding Care as an Ethical Response to Permanent Crisis

In 2022 the Collins dictionary declared “permacrisis” the Word of the Year. Shorthand for “permanent crisis,” the word entered our lexicon because it captured, as writer David Shariatmadari describes, a “dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner.”¹⁷ Far from a novel idea, permanent crisis has been a condition of the Caribbean since as far back as the late nineteenth century when the plantation system entered a period of irretrievable decline. Defined as persistent and complex interconnected events that expose communities to forms of instability and insecurity, the term captures the long durée of intergenerational suffering in the Caribbean to which care labor and relations have been faithful responses that offer important lessons.

If plantation slavery — built upon Indigenous dispossession — sanctioned policies and structures that heightened the vulnerability of the unfree to premature death, neglect on the part of the colonial government became a calculus of abdication from even a minimal duty of care in the post-emancipation period. Care in this instance was not grounded in an ethics that positioned the newly emancipated as citizen subjects of worth, but rather as a surplus population of declining importance to the accumulation of imperial wealth. In keeping with the logic that saw the region as mere resource for the benefit of elsewhere, Europe’s non-reciprocal relations with land and peoples meant that when slavery was finally and legally abolished, no duty of care or compensation would be extended. It is not surprising, then, that a crisis ensued in the post-emancipation period, as newly freed communities found themselves with neither access to land nor wages that could enable households to sustain the essential conditions for human life. Extreme levels of life-threatening poverty became the context for large-scale labor mobilizations like the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica,¹⁸ and the 1876 Belmanna Riots in Trinidad, which were not just about poor paid wages and working conditions, but importantly, the systematic denial of the biological, social, and economic means to transform the society’s class, gender, and racial hierarchies.¹⁹ Rather than investing in infrastructures to repair the damage of centuries of wanton extractivism, colonial governments sought instead to maintain the structural foundations of the plantation system in order to assure the region’s continued economic dependence on European metropolitan centres.²⁰ As Hilary Beckles observes, the “economic development of the colony as a whole was the lowest rung of the colonial priority.”²¹

In the absence of social support and in the face of colonial neglect, Caribbean people developed extensive and enduring care networks that became a grounding practice in which women were central. For example, drawing on the spiritualities of Ogun and Shango as well as Muntu and Ubuntu, African philosophies handed down, from one generation to the next, the care relations that developed during slavery and stood in diametrical opposition to the capitalist values of the plantation.²² Through informal savings and other community-based economic schemes, such as “morning sport,” “susu,” “lend day,” and “box hand,” participants committed to the tacit rules of these exchanges with their emphases on trust, responsibility, and accountability to the collective.²³ Spatial organization was also key to practices of sustenance and regeneration. The yard, or “lakou” (its Haitian variant), thus offered an architecture for raising kids and managing households, constituting a key material and emotional infrastructure for women.²⁴

Throughout the post-emancipation years, the Caribbean was rife with revolts against the un-liveability of colonial rule. Rebellions in Guyana (1856), Antigua (1858), St. Vincent (1862), Jamaica (1865), St. Croix (1878) and across the entire Anglophone region in 1938 were a powerful labor response to colonial oppression.²⁵ Less often appreciated are the insights rebellions offered into the crisis of social reproduction in which women and girls found themselves upon emancipation.²⁶ In a desperate bid to extract the last bit of profit from these plantation economies, the Colonial Office vigorously sought to keep wages as low as possible, including through the introduction of a new supply of unfree, indentured workers from Portugal, China, and India, whilst doing almost nothing to alleviate the dire social conditions centuries in the making. In her analysis of the findings of the West India Royal Commission, set up after the 1938 rebellion, for example, Joan French observes that “[b]y 1938, local conditions were sub-human: wages were low especially for women, health services and housing were poor, and the majority were unable to afford many basic necessities at current prices. Riddled by disease and plagued by exhaustion, thousands, including women, roamed from estate to estate in search of seasonal work.”²⁷ The release of the long-awaited Moyne Commission Report in 1945 was accompanied by the establishment of a £1 million West Indian Welfare Fund to finance social investments primarily in health, education, and housing over a twenty-year period.²⁸ The colonial government had by then acquired a welfarist orientation — one that appeared to be less motivated by the degraded conditions for sustaining life than by the cost that prolonged labor unrest imposed on these already ailing imperial possessions.²⁹ Ford-Smith and Hanson also remind us that in Jamaica, amidst this state of permacrisis, the state’s willingness to assume responsibility for the social reproduction of the population was the outcome of fervent organizing by women like Amy Bailey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, and Una Marson for women’s rights to education, access to land, and socialized child care.³⁰

If the years following the release of the Moyne Report marked a significant turning point in the sheer impossibility of making life work, it was not until the postwar years of the 1960s, when a growing number of territories became sovereign nation states, that the sense of permanent crisis seemed finally set to end.³¹ New economic trajectories, based on resource extraction and industrial development, became powerful transformational goals and, together with deepening state commitments to social reproduction, brought care relations into the public domain. Campaigns to establish minimum standards of healthcare as well as free primary and secondary education offered hope for the poorest to gain access to basic social rights. In this hopeful period, which Jamaican economist Norman Girvan reminds us lasted for only approximately fifteen years, Caribbean states and communities actively sought to make up for lost ground.³² Feminists were active in holding the state to account, pushing for legislative changes on domestic violence, maternity leave, the value of women’s unpaid domestic work, and more.³³ In other words, feminists were instrumental in demands for already existing care economies to be recognized and embedded in national policy.

The Caribbean’s relatively steady economic growth and the social reforms that characterized the 1960s was generally short-lived, coming to an abrupt halt by the 1974 oil price crisis as debt-plagued countries across the archipelago came under the direct supervision of Washington-based international financial institutions, or subject to their approval. With their familiar “one size fits all” policies, international development agencies in collaboration with the United States became key players in the dismantling of the commitments to social reproduction made in that window of opportunity between the 1960s and 70s. The prioritization of debt recovery and the steady retreat of the state from the provision of critical infrastructures for social reproduction, yet again left it to communities and primarily women to improvise, strategize, and organize for viable pathways to survive the permacrisis. 

Most Caribbean governments today continue to view the care economies that communities create as either orthogonal to the market economy or a threat to its expansion. Take for example remittances — informal transfers sent by Caribbeans abroad in the form of cash or barrels with everyday necessities that have faithfully sustained families and communities since the 1980s. As Karen Fog Olwig has demonstrated, it is largely through these intricate networks of reciprocal care exchange that individuals without access to formal wage work have been able to weather the astronomical import-induced cost of living. A lifeline representing 22.5 percent of GDP in Haiti and 16.2 percent in Jamaica in 2019, these “exports” of care are increasingly subject to the predations of financial markets, or otherwise characterized as unproductive and even criminal.³⁴ In the wake of their retreat from social reproduction, Caribbean states have taken up popular neoliberal discourses that place responsibility for making life work on the individual. Many young people have been drawn to this discourse and the promise of access to capital that unleashing one’s entrepreneurial self makes possible.³⁵ Others are voting with their feet and leaving. But, with mobility through international migration pathways declining, what else is there that might offer another map to living otherwise? 

Life and Livelihood on Eroding Grounds: On Caribbean Care and Solidarity

The contemporary spectre of climate change, species extinction, and the literal loss of the ground upon which people live — and upon which ancestral relationships are built — is yet another chapter in the permanent crisis that continues to challenge life in the region. In Carriacou the loss of the Tibeau cemetery — recently swept out to sea — speaks to the greatest threat yet: how to remember and rebuild the kind of care relationships that have supported life for hundreds of years with the land, with each other, and with an appreciation for our connection to all our relations.³⁶

The Caribbean radical tradition has belatedly and only very recently started to reckon with Indigenous communities’ teachings and presence, with what it means to meaningfully acknowledge the ground one is on.³⁷ Disappearing beaches, flooded lands, dying reefs, eroding lands. These unnatural disasters are rooted in histories of climate colonialism, in plantation logics that sought to extinguish biodiversity through the imposition of export-oriented monocrop economies, habits of imperialist extractivism that persist across the region in tourism, in mining, in logging, and in fossil fuels. This work both requires and is more than “the need that we find between us . . . what we can do for each other.”³⁸

We can extend Rodney’s groundings through the vocabulary of grounded normativity, offered by Dene and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writers Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.³⁹ Their elaboration of Indigenous jurisdiction and the “place-based solidarity” it materializes does not stand still but travels. In their words, grounded normativity generates “deep relations to St. Lawrence River leading to the Atlantic Ocean, the diverse plant and animal nations within their territories, the thunders and rains, and all the physical and spiritual forces that connect them to this place, their place of creation, in an intimate and meaningful way.”⁴⁰ Grounded normativity offers a deep, wide, and respectful literacy, which is not about coveting land as property but rather of storying the properties of land and how relationships to land and living beings offer lessons for inhabiting our worlds “in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, non-dominating, non-exploitative manner.”⁴¹ Drawing on examples from across the Caribbean, we story these relations with land in which a feminist ethics of care and solidarity shows up: through women’s regional movement that defies territorial fragmentation in its provisioning capacities; in their regrouping in the face of environmental catastrophe; and in their work to protect and defend eroding grounds from further extractive-driven dispossession and despoliation. 

To begin, if with Coulthard and Simpson we recognize the waters as connecting, rather than dividing, lands and peoples across the Caribbean, we follow pre-colonial Indigenous pathways that continue to show up in contemporary transterritorial movement — movement that stubbornly eschews the jurisdictional parameters of Westphalian sovereignty. For instance, in his compelling account of what he describes as itinerant Caribbean life, Charles Carnegie turns to the speculators, traders, hucksters, higglers — predominantly women — who have stitched the region together through their informalized economic activities:

Haitian traders buy, or used to, at both ends of the archipelago (in Puerto Rico and Curaçao); Vincentians and Grenadians do business in Trinidad; St. Lucians buy in Barbados, Martinique, St. Martin, and French Guiana; and Jamaicans trade in the Cayman Islands or Panama. All of them and more buy and sell in Miami and New York. This form of trading, carried on largely by women, has been extant since at least the mid-nineteenth century and was an important means through which the newly formed peasantry consolidated its freedom.⁴²

Women, as we have already mentioned, have long been key to the internal marketing systems that emerged during slavery in the interstices of the plantation.⁴³ As Carnegie elaborates, a vocabulary of interrelatedness accompanied these travels and economic exchanges in ways that refused the plantation’s totalizing impulses. Moreover, such vocabularies, serving as intra- and extra-regional strategies of social reproduction intended to hold households together, continue to reject capitalocentric logics today. These strategies include: linguistic dexterity and facility across geographies in a region that is still stubbornly balkanized along the lines that once connected countries more to their respective European colonizers than to each other; child-minding and unwaged care work that falls to confederations of female kin when women are away; the multiplication of familial and other fictive kinship practices across place; circuits of gossip and other unofficial modes of storying through which vital information, news, and opinions are shared to navigate, plan, and reorient in order to make a living and make life; the interdependence, mutual aid, and informal economic saving mechanisms among women that enable this work to go on — to name just a few. As Carnegie points out, “this constant traffic of messages and people extends and varies the quilt of interterritorial social life in the Antilles.”⁴⁴

Women traders, in other words, performed work and exercised skill that remain largely undervalued and misrecognized by deeply classed and gendered restrictions on movement, and are themselves often seen as trespassing national boundaries. How might we fruitfully (the word is deliberately) recast discussions of regional integration if we began instead with the provisioning itineraries of these women traders? Women’s work creates regional economic space through engagement with diverse ecologies to provide for their families and communities, employing practices of subsistence and exchange. The lessons of this husbandry are crucial, particularly in a part of the world where food imports for some countries account for more than eighty percent of food consumed.⁴⁵ The items they trade shape tastes and influence recipes and cuisines.⁴⁶ They include foods and provisions nurtured and grown on small farms — family land, the plots that in many instances offered respite, autonomy, even alternatives to the plantation.⁴⁷ The farmer, the fisherfolk, the trader, the marketer — these are backward and forward linkages that are not without friction, but that respond to dense affiliative provisioning networks across land and water, suggestive of vibrantly diverse models of relation and sustainability.

If grounded normativity makes visible how transterritorial networks act as vital forms of relation and care across Caribbean places, it also allows us to track how, on grounds eroded by climate change, “marginalized subjects and communities work across their micro-specificities to align more effectively against macro-structural barriers to freedom and self-determination.”⁴⁸ Climate emergencies whose increasing frequency and intensity bely the notion that these are just natural disasters, generate deeply gendered collective responses in the aftermath of devastation. For example, on the Guyanese coast, six feet below sea level and where over 80 percent of the population resides, heavier-than-usual rains in 2005 collided with denuded drainage and irrigation infrastructure which had been laid bare as a result of decades of IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies. The ensuing floods affected some 40 percent of the population.⁴⁹ While official responses were framed by the state as handouts to a supplicant population, grassroots women who began responding to requests for relief soon shifted gear to listen to and organize with each other, across Indigenous, African, and Indian differences, in a country long polarized by racialized divides.⁵⁰ Gathering to hear and share each other’s stories shone a light on specific members of the community — including “shut ins” who were disabled and/or elderly who could not be reached by relief efforts and single mothers who had to leave their children in flooded homes to seek help. Refusing the label as dependents in need of the state’s protection, they instead reframed society as in fact dependent on their care work. As the handbill that they printed and distributed made clear: “[It was] grassroots women of every race who braved waist-deep and even chest-deep flood waters . . . to invent ways to feed, clothe, shelter, teach, nurse, worry about and provide safety and a sense of security.”⁵¹ The knowledge that emerged through these meetings shaped the specific actions to be taken that would capture these diverse experiences, and also made clear the targets of their demands, articulated in the language of entitlements. It included calls for women’s unwaged work to be recognized (and compensated) as sustaining communities through the floods. Additionally, among the things that were counted were subsistence gardens and livestock (the plots) that had been destroyed.⁵²

In the Western Caribbean, Haitian writers Myriam J. A. Chancy and Gina Ulysse reflect on the hegemonic and deeply embedded racist politics of representation that shaped Western responses to the devastating January 2010 earthquake that claimed hundreds of thousands of Haitian lives.⁵³ Attending to the ways in which gender and sexuality produced particular kinds of vulnerabilities, they emphasized practices of self-determination, like the African diasporic traditions of sharing and collectivity (konbit) that were central to repertoires of survival. Referring to a report of an external aid outfit that contracted market women (small food vendors in communities known as timachan) to feed families, Chancy importantly underscores the radical promise of this already existing work of relation that exemplifies care of land and people.⁵⁴

This caring work stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the imperial response of the United States, which imposed a reconstruction effort that deepened Haitian dependency on food imports through free trade and cheap labor. As Chancy summarizes of these grounded community efforts, “The food distributed at the grassroots level is all locally grown, giving lie to the myth that food aid to Haiti must be subsidized from without: Haiti can feed itself, and Haitians each other.”⁵⁵ Likewise, the 2021 La Soufriere volcanic eruption in St. Vincent and the Grenadines particularly affected Carib/Garifuna peoples who were forced to leave their homes. These experiences of Indigenous displacement generated a collective response to provide food, toiletries, medical care, and more in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic; village women set up community kitchens, managed shelters in schools, and took in families themselves. Indigenous youth also got involved, organizing entertainment and self-care.⁵⁶ Grounded normativity invites us to consider relations such as these across Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities which “might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests.”⁵⁷ Across these examples and across difference, caring work is grounded in the substance of everyday life. It offers both a vocabulary and an imaginative praxis of engagement that is so much more than survival.

Finally, a politics beyond survival takes us to the land defenders, those who stand their ground in defense of, and in the face of, the most extraordinary challenges and threats.⁵⁸ It suggests paying careful attention to how “[o]ur relationship to the land itself generates the processes, practices, and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity.”⁵⁹ In Guyana, in the face of massive oil production deep in Atlantic waters, the grassroots women of Red Thread have drawn on lessons learned from the 2005 floods to begin an environmental campaign at home and beyond. In Belize a seven-year country-wide, door-to-door education, outreach, and mobilizing effort — waged again with women in the forefront — resulted first in a temporary moratorium on all offshore drilling for oil and then, in November 2023, in a law stipulating that the moratorium can only be reversed via a referendum.⁶⁰ This work connects to long and ongoing traditions of Maroon, Indigenous, and Rastafari resistance, some of which directly challenged the state through the courts. Red Thread’s struggles thus recall the Saramaka peoples of Suriname, who storied their relation to lands, waters, and animals — and also chose what to withhold — to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to prove their custodianship in the face of threats of displacement by the Surinamese government in the name of development.⁶¹ Or they can be likened to the Mayan Leaders Alliance in which women are centrally involved, an alliance that took the Belizean government to the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2018 to halt extractivist incursions on Mayan lands.⁶² Or the Maroon communities of cockpit country in Jamaica, who are still battling to defend their lands after decades of despoliation through bauxite mining.⁶³ Or the communities naming the desecration of Indigenous lands and rivers through mining in Guyana.⁶⁴ If our previous examples illustrated a variety of responses to climate crisis, here we see initiatives that prioritize care for the land, water, and air — natural forces that give us life. This Caribbean grassroots women’s care work offers us a foundation for refusing a system that reduces all — and us all — to profit.

Concluding notes

Grounds: A noun that takes us to residue, to the meditations of M. Jacqui Alexander, for whom the palimpsest operates as a spatial and temporal register of the here and there, then and now.⁶⁵ Rooted in the substance of everyday life and organized around the collective labor of primarily women to provide for kin, community, and society, Caribbean care practices continue to be the principal grounds for the radically alternative political cultures that emerged in opposition to the region’s long and violent colonial history. As the region moves towards its most challenging existential threat yet, climate change, we have gestured in this essay at the counternarratives of care. By building on Rodney’s groundings, through Perry’s diasporic feminist deepening and Coulthard’s and Simpson’s notion of grounded normativity, we urge attunement to the residue — the afterlives of colonialism — and to the deeply gendered radical possibilities embedded in everyday practices of making a way that have always exceeded domination.

Residue also shows up as environmental colonialism, leaching into our waters and lands and requiring a feeling literacy that extends to the sacred intelligence of all living, grounded things.⁶⁶ It offers a frame to locate, to highlight another struggle, the Vie Chère protests that erupted on the streets of Martinique in September 2024 in response once again to unsustainably high costs of living. The Martiniquais’ demands for life cannot be disarticulated from the obscenely asymmetrical relations of departmentalization with France, high dependence on food imports, and the poisoning of lands and those that inhabit it through the widespread use of the carcinogenic pesticide chlordecone, widely used on an elite controlled banana industry geared for the European markets and until fairly recently protected under preferential trade agreements.⁶⁷ Here, residue denotes the material dregs of chemical toxicity which demand care yet “assert life’s value to be financial rather than existential.”⁶⁸

But grounds as residue (as coffee grounds, as tea leaves) also orients us to futures. It invites us to collectively work out what it is we want to bring with us with the regenerative promise of compost. It repurposes traditions in dynamic, intergenerational practices of sharing to take us where we need to go, beyond enclosure and capitalist accumulation. The gestures, conversations, feelings, the relations of interdependence and care all keep folks showing up beyond obligation, working carefully and slowly at the seams. Indeed, if we start here we see what Perry insists on: that “political pessimism is not welcome.”⁶⁹ These are catastrophic times, but as Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite put it, “Art must come out of catastrophe.”⁷⁰ To be sure, this largely invisible work of care, shouldered mainly by grassroots women, is generous and generative, a canvas and ground of poetic possibility that offer us multiple repertoires for living otherwise.

Endnotes

1. See Simon P. Newman, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica,” William & Mary Quarterly, (June 2018); Shauna Sweeney, “Market Marronage: Fugitive Women and Jamaica’s Internal Marketing System, 1781-1834,” William & Mary Quarterly, 76, no. 2 (2019).[↑]
2. On the limits to women’s labor in the face of state retrenchment of social provisioning, see Beverley Mullings, “Neoliberalization, Social Reproduction and the Limits to Labor in Jamaica,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30, no. 2 (2009). On the dangers of cooptation to practices of solidarity in care, see Honor Ford-Smith, Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: A Case Study of Funding and Organizational Democracy in Sistren, 1977-1988 (The Women’s Program, International Council for Adult Education, 1989); Violet Eudine Barriteau, “Confronting Power and Politics: A Feminist Theorizing of Gender in Commonwealth Caribbean Societies,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 3, vol.2 (2003).[↑]
3. “Caribbean ‘Ground Zero’ for Global Climate Emergency, Says Secretary-General, Addressing Government Heads at Regional Conference,” UN Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, United Nations, July 3, 2022, https://press.un.org/en/2022/sgsm21361.doc.htm.[↑]
4. “COP26: ‘Two degrees is a death sentence’ for island nations – Barbados PM Mia Mottley,” BBC, November 1, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-59117750.[↑]
5. We acknowledge the late Jamaican economist Norman Girvan, who a decade and a half ago first named the climate crisis as an existential threat. See Norman Girvan, “Are Caribbean countries facing existential threats?,” Latin America in Movement, November 3, 2010, https://www.alainet.org/en/active/42028.[↑]
6. Mimi Sheller, Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2020); Tao Leigh Goffe, “Unmapping the Caribbean: Toward a Digital Praxis of Archipelagic Sounding,” archipelagos 5, (2020); https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-72th-0z19. The significance of the region is underscored by Tiffany Lethabo King’s elucidation of the Black shoals which “gains its force from the traditions of Caribbean poetics and studies;” Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019), 4.[↑]
7. Vanessa Agard-Jones, “What the Sands Remember,” GLQ 18, no. 2-3 (2012): 326.[↑]
8. Andrea Baldwin, “Brackish Possibilities: (Re)Thinking Caribbean Feminist Ecologies,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 45, no. 2 (2024): 218. On the contact zone, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 2008).[↑]
9. Honor Ford-Smith and Beverley Hanson, “Justice as a Labor of Care: Self-Care, Collective Entanglement, and Feminist Activism in Caribbean Spaces,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 11, no. 1 (2022).[↑]
10. Walter Rodney, “The Groundings With My Brothers,” in The Groundings with My Brothers (Bogle L’Ouverture Publications, 1969). Rodney’s deportation sparked what has come to be known as the Rodney riots, catalyzing the Black Power movement across the Caribbean. Rodney’s crime was to refuse the privileged isolation of the trained intellectual, and to venture off the university campus to speak with, listen to, and learn alongside ordinary Jamaicans in everyday spaces, challenging the stubborn divides that were so very clearly a threat to the neocolonial managers of the newly independent Jamaican state.[↑]
11. This framing is drawn from Andaiye, “An Open Letter to Young People,” Stabroek News, June 3, 2019, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2019/06/03/features/in-the-diaspora/an-open-letter-to-young-people/.[↑]
12. Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Space, Place and Gender (University of Minnesota Press, 1994).[↑]
13. The term ‘anachronistic space’ comes from Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995).[↑]
14. Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, “The Groundings with my Sisters: Toward a Black Diasporic Feminist Agenda in the Americas,” The Scholar & Feminist Online 7, no. 2 (2009).[↑]
15. We thank the editors for this framing.[↑]
16. Cecilia Green, “Caribbean Dependency Theory of the 1970s: A Historical-Materialist-Feminist Revision,” in New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, ed. Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl (University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 68.[↑]
17. David Shariatmadari, “A year of ‘permacrisis ,’” Collin’s Language Lovers Blog, Collin’s Dictionary, November 1, 2022, https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/a-year-of- permacrisis/.[↑]
18. Gad Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (University of Tennessee Press, 1994).[↑]
19. Bridget Bereton, “Post-Emancipation Protest in the Caribbean: The ‘Belmanna Riots’ in Tobago, 1876,” Caribbean Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2008).[↑]
20. Nigel O. Bolland, On the March: Labor Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934–39 (Ian Randle Publishers, 1995); Jay Mandle, Persistent Underdevelopment: Change and Economic Modernization in the West Indies (Gordon and Breach, 1996).[↑]
21. Hilary M. Beckles, How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean: A Reparation Response to Europe’s Legacy of Plunder and Poverty (University of the West Indies Press, 2021), 55.[↑]
22. Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5, (1971). [↑]
23. For a discussion of these economic practices frequently led by women, see Caroline Hossein, “Acknowledging the Banker Ladies as Cooperators,” in The Banker Ladies: Vanguards of Solidarity Economics and Community-Based Banks (University of Toronto Press, 2024).[↑]
24. On yards, see Erna Brodber, Yards in the City of Kingston (Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1975). On lakou, see Myriam J. A. Chancy, Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2020).[↑]
25. Bolland, On the March.[↑]
26. Beckles, How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean.[↑]
27. Joan French, “Women and Colonial Policy in Jamaica After the 1938 Uprising,” in Subversive Women: Women’s Movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Saskia Wieringa (Zed Books, 1997): 128. [↑]
28. West India Royal Commission (Moyne Commission), 1945, Cmnd. 6607, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office.[↑]
29. See French, “Women and Colonial Policy.”[↑]
30. Ford-Smith and Hanson, “Justice as a Labor of Care.”[↑]
31. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, followed by Barbados and Guyana in 1966.[↑]
32. Norman Girvan, “50 Years of In-Dependence in Jamaica: Reflections,” Latin America in Movement (2012).[↑]
33. For a comprehensive and critical engagement with feminist activism during this period, see Michelle Rowley, Feminist Advocacy and Gender Equity in the Anglophone Caribbean: Envisioning a Politics of Coalition (Routledge, 2013).[↑]
34. Beverley Mullings, “Racial Capitalism, Coloniality and the Financialization of Caribbean Remittances,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 54, (2022); D. Alissa Trotz and Beverley Mullings, “Transnational Migration, the State and Development: Reflecting on ‘The Diaspora Option,’” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17, no. 2 (2013): 41.[↑]
35. Carla Freeman, Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class (Duke University Press, 2015); Jovan Lewis, Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).[↑]
36. Natricia Duncan, “On the Grenadian Island of Carriacou, Even the Dead Are Now Climate Victims,” The Guardian, December 3, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/03/grenada-carriacou-caribbean-climate-victims-icj.[↑]
37. The Caribbean radical tradition refers to genealogies of anti-colonial thought and praxis that surface from the first moment of Europe’s arrival in this hemisphere. It overlaps with but is not coterminous with the Black radical tradition. See Aaron Kamugisha, Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2019). On the elision of indigeneity, see Melanie Newton, “Returns to a Native Land: Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean,” Small Axe 17, no.2 41 (2013); Shona Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Shanya Cordis, “Forging Relational Difference: Racial Gendered Violence and Dispossession in Guyana,” Small Axe 23, no.3 (2019): 60; Myriam J. A. Chancy, Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2020).[↑]
38. June Jordan, “Letter from the Bahamas,” in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (Basic Civitas Books, 2022).[↑]
39. Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity,” American Quarterly 68 (2016): 249.[↑]
40. Coulthard and Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity,” 249.[↑]
41. Coulthard and Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity,” 249, 254.[↑]
42. Charles Carnegie, Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (Rutgers University Press, 2022), 85. Also see Carole Boyce-Davies, “Women, Labor, and the Transnational: From Work to Work,” in Caribbean Spaces: Escapes From Twilight Zones (University of Illinois Press, 2013).[↑]
43. For a classic essay on the internal marketing system see Victoria Durant-Gonzalez, “The Occupation of Higglering,” Jamaica Journal, 16, no. 3 (1983). For a comprehensive historical account of what she names as market marronage during slavery, see Shauna Sweeney, “Market Marronage.” Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison’s poem, controlling the silver, offers a multidimensional account of women’s care work in sustaining family and community that is spiritual, economic, social and cultural. See Lorna Goodison, Controlling the Silver (University of Illinois Press, 2004).[↑]
44. Carnegie, Postnationalism Prefigured, 89. Also see Andaiye, “Bringing the 60’s to the 21st Century: The new independence movements,” Public talk, Southern California Library, Los Angeles, 2008.[↑]
45. CARICOM, “CARICOM Reports Significant Progress on Regional Food Security Initiative,” Caribbean Business and Travel 4, (2004).[↑]
46. See Charles Carnegie’s superb account, Postnationalism Prefigured. [↑]
47. On the material and epistemological significance of the plot, engaged here as capture land, see Rachel Goffe, “Capture Land as Abolition Geography: The Mutuality of Placemaking and Flight,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42, no.1 (2024).[↑]
48. Coulthard and Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity,” 250-251.[↑]
49. Red Thread, Organising for Survival: Grassroots Women of the Flood. Notes and Demands (Red Thread Centre, 2005).[↑]
50. Alissa Trotz, “Shifting the Ground Beneath Us: Social Reproduction, Grassroots Women’s Activism, and the 2005 Floods in Guyana,” Interventions: Journal in Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 1 (2010).[↑]
51. Red Thread, Organising for Survival.[↑]
52. Trotz, “Shifting the Ground Beneath Us.”[↑]
53. Ulysse’s intervention is framed by the proverb, “tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm” (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). Myriam Chancy, Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (University of Texas Press, 2023); Gina Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post Quake Chronicle (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). Also see Alex Dupuy on the longue duree of French and US imperialist occupation and destabilization since Haitian independence, Haiti since 1804: Critical Perspectives on Class, Power, and Gender (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).[↑]
54. This promise is further exemplified in Jamaica, in the grounding that the creative arts project “Paint Jamaica” and its urban agriculture, food preparation, and community education components confer on community members in Parade Gardens, West Kingston. Beverley Mullings, “Caliban, Social Reproduction and Our Future Yet to Come,” Geoforum 118, (2021).[↑]
55. Myriam J. A. Chancy, “Hearing Our Mothers: Safeguarding Haitian Women‘s Representation and Practices of Survival (March 2010),” in Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (University of Texas Press, 2023), 96.[↑]
56. Judy Grant, “Caring, Loving and Learning in Struggle: The La Soufriere Volcanic Eruption in St. Vincent,” Stabroek News, April 19, 2021, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2021/04/19/features/in-the-diaspora/caring-loving-and-learning-in-struggle-the-la-soufriere-volcanic-eruption-in-st-vincent/.[↑]
57. Coulthard and Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity,” 254.[↑]
58. Contrast this collective endeavour to protect the commons with the kind of privatized attachment that shows up elsewhere, like the stand your ground laws in the settler colony of the United States that are so deadly for Black life. That this is not so far removed from the Caribbean is evident in the 2025 Trinidad and Tobago elections, where the winning party campaigned on a promise to allow distribution of firearms to citizens and the introduction of stand your ground laws as a response to crime. See Zophia Edwards, “From the Streets to the Seats: Labor Day, Labor Power, and the Trade Unionists in the New Trinidad and Tobago Government,” Stabroek News, June 23, 2025, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2025/06/23/features/in-the-diaspora/from-the-streets-to-the-seats-labour-day-labour-power-and-the-trade-unionists-in-the-new-trinidad-and-tobago-government/.[↑]
59. Coulthard and Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity,” 254.[↑]
60. On Guyana, see Janette Bulkan, Roshini Kempadoo, and D. Alissa Trotz, “Guyana’s Oil Dorado,” NACLA Report on the Americas 55, no. 3 (2023). On Belize, see Tyrone Hall, “Guyana’s Oil Boom: An Opportunity For Bold Environmental Activism,” Stabroek News, July 30, 2018, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2018/07/30/features/in-the-diaspora/guyanas-oil-boom-an-opportunity-for-bold-environmental-activism/; “People’s Referendum on Offshore Oil in Belize is Now Law,” Oceana Press Release, November 13, 2023, https://belize.oceana.org/press-releases/peoples-referendum-on-offshore-oil-in-belize-is-now-law/.[↑]
61. See Richard Price, Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Richard Price, “Maroons and Indigenous Peoples versus the State in Suriname,” NACLA Report on the Americas 55, no. 3 (2023).[↑]
62. Filiberto Penados, and Mark Chatarpal, “The Maya Land Rights Struggle: A Framework for Operationalizing ‘Development with Identity,” Stabroek News, December 14, 2015, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2015/12/14/features/in-the-diaspora/maya-land-rights-struggle-framework-operationalizing-development-identity/.[↑]
63. “Impact of Extractive Industries on Human Rights and Climate Change in the Caribbean,” Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, October 27, 2021, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zORVK5msIM&t=68s.[↑]
64. “Impact of Extractive Industries on Human Rights and Climate Change in the Caribbean.”[↑]
65. See M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2006). Andrea Baldwin also draws on the idea of sediment in her elaboration of feminist ecologies of knowledge production, but whereas sediment in this reading references oppression and destruction (the challenges that Caribbean women face in their everyday lives), our attention to grounds also enables a reading of the potentiality of sediment to sprout new beginnings. Andrea Baldwin, “Brackish Possibilities,” 223.[↑]
66. On sacred intelligence, see M. Jacqui Alexander, with Gina Ulysse, “Groundings on Rasenblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander,” Hemispheric Institute, 2015, https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/12-1-essays/e-121-essay-alexander-interview-with-gina.html.[↑]
67. On Chlordecone contamination in the French Caribbean, see Vanessa Agard-Jones, “On Spray,” Somatosphere: Science, Medicine and Anthropology, May 27, 2024. On the 2024 Martinican protests, see Alyssa A. L. James, “Martinique’s Vie Chère Protests and the Fight for Caribbean Justice,” Stabroek News, December 16, 2024, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2024/12/16/features/in-the-diaspora/martiniques-vie-chere-protests-and-the-fight-for-caribbean-justice/.[↑]
68. We thank the editors for this wording.[↑]
69. Perry, “The Groundings with my Sisters.”[↑]
70. Kamau Brathwaite, “Poetics, Revelations, and Catastrophes: An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” interview by Joyelle McSweeney, Rain Taxi, Online Edition, Fall 2005, https://raintaxi.com/poetics-revelations-and-catastrophes-an-interview-with-kamau-brathwaite/. Thanks to Christian Campbell for sending us in search of this interview.[↑]