Oneka LaBennett’s World Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Setting within the Caribbean and Past (New York College Press, April 2024) “exposes the worldwide menace of environmental disaster and the types of erasure that construction Caribbean girls’s lives within the neglected nation of Guyana.”
Description: Beforehand ranked among the many hemisphere’s poorest international locations, Guyana is turning into a worldwide chief in per capita oil manufacturing, a shift which guarantees to profoundly remodel the nation. This sea change presents a novel alternative to dissect each the environmental impacts of modern-world useful resource extraction and the obscured but damaging methods through which intersectional race and gender formations circumscribe Caribbean girls’s lives.
Drawing from archival analysis and oral historical past, and inspecting mass-mediated flashpoints throughout the African and Indian diasporas—together with Rihanna’s sonic routes, ethnic battle reportage, HBO’s Lovecraft Nation, and Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking—World Guyana repositions this marginalized nation as a nexus of social and financial exercise which drives common tradition and concepts about sexuality whereas reshaping the geopolitical and literal topography of the Caribbean area. Oneka LaBennett employs the highly effective analytic of the pointer broom to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between Guyanese girls’s gendered labor and world racial capitalism. She illuminates how each oil extraction and sand export are implicated in a well-established follow of pillaging the Caribbean’s pure assets whereas masking the ecological penalties that disproportionately have an effect on girls and youngsters.
World Guyana uncovers how ecological erosion and gendered violence are entrenched in extractive industries emanating from this often-effaced however pivotal nation. Sounding the alarm on the portentous repercussions that formidable improvement spells out for the nation’s folks and its geographical terrain, LaBennett points a warning for all of us in regards to the looming menace of world environmental calamity.
Oneka LaBennett is Affiliate Professor of American Research and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Research on the College of Southern California. She’s the writer of She’s Mad Actual: In style Tradition and West Indian Women in Brooklyn and co-editor of Racial Formation within the Twenty-First Century.
For extra info, see https://nyupress.org/9781479827015/global-guyana/