An Africological Re-Imagination of Notions of Freedom and Unfreedom in a Colonial Context: Deconstructing the Cayman Islands as Paradise

Abstract

In the Cayman Islands, one is raised to be the managers of someone else’s financial empire; the empire of the United Kingdom to be precise. Historically, whenever there are whispers about political independence among the population, they are abruptly quieted by a chorus of familiar rhetoric that attributes the success of business and tourism industries on island to its administrative financial connection to the United Kingdom. In a colony where most people rarely think of themselves as colonized, to the majority of Caymanians there is nothing improper about this relationship, it is simply the way things have been. On the few occasions where there is sustained conversation on the topic of political independence, like clockwork, the dialogue often takes a decidedly anti-Jamaican and anti-black tone that positions the so-called socioeconomic “struggles” of Jamaica as a cautionary tale on the perils of political independence. Perils that are then juxtaposed with the so-called socioeconomic success of Cayman which are framed as the prosperity of political dependency. It is this enduring conversation that warrants further interrogation; how and why African descended persons are actively choosing to not be self-determining. Much of the current literature interrogates the colonial presence in the Caribbean in a historical context. However, my interest is in how modern-day manifestations of colonialism (economic, cultural) impacted understandings of agency and freedom? Moreover, Caribbean scholarly discourses on colonialism tend to situate it in the past, instead a present, ongoing reality in the region today. This project centers Caymanians and their understanding of their own humanity outside of what they provide to others. My work seeks to disrupt the concept of ‘Paradise’ in the Caribbean; a concept evoked in order to provide leisure for tourists (mostly originating from North America and Western Europe) and make the financial management of the wealth of the ruling elite from the same places as those tourists desirable. This research interrogates a humanity that is agentic, self-conscious, and decolonial.