By Percy Hintzen
Percy Hintzen is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies and Director of African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. He is a Guyanese sociologist who focuses on postcolonial political economy, globalization, and migration. He is a specialist on the Caribbean.
Kamala Devi Harris was born in 1964, the year that for Guyana marked the end of a period of violent deadly racial conflict between its African and South Asian descended population. Her parents, a black Jamaican graduate student studying economics and a Hindu Indian Tamil Nadu graduate student studying biology, met and married while participating in a movement advocating rejection of racial capitalism in Oakland, one of the most radical cities in the United States. They were enrolled at one of the most radical universities in the country, the University of California, Berkeley.
In the late 1940s, Guyana was engaged in an even more radical anti-colonial rejection of racial capitalism. It was organized through a marriage forged between the black urban and the rural South Asian working class. The union between Kamala’s bi-racial parents ruptured in divorce five years after her birth. In Guyana, there was a similar rupture between the black and South Asian popular classes, forged initially out of an ideological split. On the one hand, there were those who advocated for a radical refusal of racial colonial capitalism. On the other there were those who sought accommodation to the Fabian socialism of the British Labour Party and a gradualist path to reform. In 1959, the split morphed into a divorce within the working class movement. It descended into polarized racial politics, with one group retaining the mantle of anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial rejection and the other accommodating itself to a form of black petit-bourgeois universalism and capitalist accommodation. There was, in the latter, a culturalist rejection of the possibilities for transformation, fed by the sub-ideology of an accommodation to the capitalist “order of things” rooted in notions of class-derived rights proposed by a U.K. based League of Coloured Peoples with petit bourgeois aspirations. And here is where the “dougla” metaphor of hybridized politics, and its horizons of possibility manifest in the life trajectory of Kamala Harris, ends.
Kamala’s parents divorced five years after she was born. Both continued their radical engagement despite their separation — her father as a Professor of Economics at Stanford University and her mother as a biologist engaged in breast cancer research. Kamala grew up with her Hindu mother. But she brought to bear her African and South Asian provenances forged in the crucible of radicalism, to her constitutive selfhood. Notwithstanding the formative influences of her mother’s heritage, from which she drew her cultural capital, she honed to African American representative practice, choosing to go to the historically Black Howard University and to join one of the most significant black sororities in the United States.
In its national formation, Guyana rejected this possibility of a hybridized “dougla poetic”, one not confined solely to the Black-Indian divide but incorporating the entire panoply of cultural diversity out of which it is constituted. This poetic is forged out of its African, South Asian, East Asian, Western European, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Southern European constitutive self. But Guyana’s leaders made the choice to reject the possibilities of a form of hybridized radicalism as the country spiraled into the depths of a crisis that has lasted from the 1960s until today.
By comparison, Kamala Harris has used the intersectionalities constitutive of her female, immigrant, black, South Asian selfhood to catapult herself into a position as the most powerful woman in the world. She will become vice-president of the country located at the pivotal centre of the global architecture of geopolitical power. Her journey to power was forged in the realpolitik of capitalist America, and that demands cooptation, out of necessity. The radical roots of her provenance have pushed her, however tentatively, toward those who are at the cusp of an emerging critique of American-centred global capitalism. Women of colour, such as Cori Bush, Stacey Abrams, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley have deployed the power embodied in popular “grassroots” mobilization to mount a campaign aimed at empowerment that bends toward democratic socialist forms. And they have forced those who seek national office to nod toward the grassroots. They have become the vanguards for racial, gender, sexual, global, justice, environmental sustainability, and human equality. Importantly in the agenda of their critique is the quest for a “green new deal” with aspirations for the total elimination of the use of fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, in G-Town, the trajectory is in the opposite direction. This is the other side of “dougla poetics,” as a path to reform rather than to transformative power. While in the American centre of global capitalism there is emerging, however slowly, some possibility for an agenda that resembles the route taken by the radicals in colonial British Guiana of the forties and fifties, the consensus of the current postcolonial political elite in Guyana is becoming organized around an American-centred imperialism. Nor can we discount a future role for Kamala Harris in pushing us along this path. This is the other side of familiarity, its ambivalence and contradictions. In the interim, we are returning to a type of mono-cropism rooted in extraction dependency. Oil has become the new sugar and bauxite of the twentieth century. Like oil, production of both began in earnest under conditions of decline in global demand. Cane was being replaced by beet at the end of the nineteenth century and bauxite by new fuel-based materials— plastics, fiber-glass, and other polymers not too soon after the end of World War II. The promise of wealth never materialized from their production.
Now, Guyana has “come to oil” on a fool’s errand at the very time of oil’s demise, when it is becoming increasingly obsolete in the face of competitive pressures from renewables and rejection because of the existential threat it poses to human survivability. We in Guyana, at the same time, are riding to the rescue in a pollyannish quest to save some of the most powerful and endangered oil companies whose interests drove U.S. imperialist passions. As a country, we are enticed by the power of promised wealth in the same way that Kamala Harris is by the wealth of power. And we in Guyana are beginning to be used as a tool to settle fading ideological scores between the USA and a country that has attempted to use its oil revenues to forge an alternative regional vision free from U.S. hegemony. We fail to learn the lesson of that country’s decline, caught as it is in the trap of oil obsolescence. Guyana needs a new vision that can lead us out of the dystopian crisis of global, fossil-fuel based imperialism. Instead, we forge ahead.
The lessons are clear. And there is a solution. We are part of a sub-region that has become integral to human survival. I am speaking of a 1.7 billion-year Precambrian geological formation in northeastern South America known as the Guiana Shield. It is one of the most important ecological sub-regions in the world comprising the entirety of Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and portions of Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. It places us in a position to stave off the existential crisis facing nature’s economy, because of the “Shield’s” diverse ecosystem and its absorptive capacity as the “lungs” of the world. It contains large rainforests and the largest undisturbed areas of primary tropical forests in the world. It is home to a wealth of natural resources with vast potential for the sustainable production of alternative energy and for forms of sustainable agro-production consistent with food security. The region is the “last best hope” for human sustenance. And this is becoming universally recognized.
If Guyana is to pursue an alternative course, its leaders must begin to think outside of the box of colonial and postcolonial imposed categories organized around Westphalian notions of national territory and sovereignty. We are in the driver’s seat and can bargain ourselves into a better world for everyone as the solvent to an impending existential crisis of sustainability. We can contribute to global survival by a decision to keep the oil in the ground in exchange for the anticipated revenues generated from oil production. Estimates are that oil production from Guyana would make the single largest contribution to climate change. This is a stunning observation, one that should make any Guyanese shocked and ashamed. We can stop the descent by reconstituting the cosmovision of the forties and fifties. We can derive value from our diversities and from the knowledges and gnoses they bring that can be forged into a form of diverse unity— One People, One Destiny. This is the horizon of possibility from which we have strayed as a people. Instead, we continue to engage in fights and conflicts over categories and understandings imported by colonial commandment in an imposed system of divide et impera (divide and rule). And we seem hell bent on its reproduction when, even in America, the system is under question, however fleetingly and tentatively. While the future may be without guarantees, we can hope at least to extend its horizons and seek to bring its possibilities into reality, for the sake of humanity itself.
