Global Guyana: An Interview with Oneka LaBennett

In today’s post, Kiana M. Knight, managing editor of Black Perspectives and a PhD candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University, interviews renowned scholar Oneka LaBennett about her latest book. Dr. LaBennett is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond (NYU Press 2024); She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (NYU Press 2011); and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (UC Press 2012). Her most recent book, Global Guyana develops a powerful set of heuristics to trace the entwined histories of descendants of enslaved Africans and Indian indentured laborers, alongside the contemporary dynamics of the outsized Guyanese diaspora, and the broad reach of the nation’s extractive industries. 

Kiana M. Knight (KMK): You previously published She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn, which is the only ethnographic monograph on Brooklyn’s Caribbean girls’ identity formation through the lens of popular culture. Your extensive oral history research on Bronx women’s contributions to hip hop music also grapples with Black women’s relationship to popular culture. Tell us how your new book, Global Guyana, builds on and departs from your previous work.

Oneka LaBennett (OLB): Readers can see how Global Guyana builds on my previous attention to Black women’s relationship with popular culture particularly in Chapter Two, “Rihanna’s Guyanese Pattacake and the Homewrecking State in Barbados.” The world knows Rihanna as a Bajan or Barbadian superstar. But her mother, Monica Braithwaite, and her maternal grandmother are Guyanese. In fact, Rihanna credits her maternal kin with shaping her worldview and inspiring her cosmetics empire. In the chapter, RiRi is a springboard for examining the Barbadian stereotype that paints Guyanese women as homewreckers. Intersectional race/gender formations and migratory processes come to a head in Guyana in ways that we don’t usually consider. When we look into Rihanna’s family ties in Guyana, we begin to see that her family story is part of a long history of intermarriage between Bajan men and Guyanese women. These familial ties are connected to global racial capitalism. Post emancipation, Barbados had a large labor force, but a dearth of land. Bajan men began migrating to Guyana to find work, and while they were there, they often married Guyanese women. This started an enduring process of kinship ties between the two countries.

In the present day, the notion that Bajan men favor Guyanese women has led to a host of regional popular discourses which position Guyanese immigrant women as a threat to the nuclear family. One example is an extremely popular Barbadian calypso sung by a Guyanese woman called “GT Advice” (“GT” refers to Guyana’s capital, Georgetown). The song is a cautionary tale to Bajan women—the Guyanese singer is advising them on how to safeguard their husbands and boyfriends from the irresistible threat of the Guyanese woman. I was curious about this song in light of the fact that Rihanna, the daughter of a Guyanese woman, is held up as a national hero in Barbados. While RiRi has been critiqued on her island home for her rude girl sexuality or her slackness, she is rarely, if ever, read as a Guyanese homewrecker. The chapter offers a reading of Rihanna’s song “Birthday Cake,” and considers it alongside the Guyanese creole term for vagina, “pattacake.” I make the case that when RiRi performs the song, she slaps/pats her groin, essentially signaling her pattacake. It’s a wink to Guyanese observers. And I note in the book that Rihanna’s mother is an Afro-Guyanese woman. When RiRi talks about her cosmetics line, Fenty Beauty, she imparts how watching her mother put on make-up when she was a child inspired her interest in cosmetics. So, I want readers to consider the significance of a Black Guyanese woman inspiring this cosmetics line that is estimated to be worth $2.8 billion. And I deconstruct Rihanna’s public remarks about how Guyanese women are treated in Barbados. In interviews, she likens the treatment of Guyanese women to that of Mexican immigrants in the US. They have both faced threats of deportation, with immigration agents separating mothers from their children. In an interview with Afua Hirsch in British Vogue, Rihanna says, “The Guyanese are like Mexicans in Barbados…I know what it feels like to have the immigration come into your home in the middle of the night and drag people out. My mother was legal…but let’s say I know what that fight looks like…I was probably, what, eight-years-old when I experienced that in the middle of the night. So I know how disheartening it is for a child—and if that was my parent that was getting dragged out of my house, I can guarantee you that my life would have been a shambles” (Hirsch 2020). Here, Rihanna alerts us that Guyanese women face deportation in Barbados and are seen as foreign menaces. In order for the Barbados government to celebrate Rihanna as a national hero and as a symbol of Bajan tourism, it has had to ignore the superstar’s Guyanese ancestry.

We can connect these insights to the race/gender formations that go hand in hand with global racial capitalism. In 2015, ExxonMobil discovered a supergiant oil field off Guyana’s shores. It was one of the most valuable petroleum and natural gas findings in decades and has transformed Guyana into the world’s fastest-growing economy. The amount of petroleum that stands to be recovered off Guyana’s coast is unmatched across the globe; experts suggest it will replace Kuwait as the largest oil producer per capita. This discovery sparked an uptick in representations of the country and its people in the global press. It also positioned Guyana as a nation on the precipice of economic transformation. But Guyana’s development dreams are being built on extractive industries and at the expense of women’s sexual labor and the environment. Scholars have found that wherever extractive industries are in place, women and girls are trafficked for sex.

In the Introduction and throughout the book, I unpack Guyana’s everywhere and nowhereness in reductive popular representations across international newspaper articles and television programs. Guyana is nowhere in the nationalist discourses that position Rihanna as a symbol of Bajan tourism, but Guyanese women and girls are trafficked for sex tourism. Throughout Guyana’s history, its women have been at the center of global racial processes—whether linked to the plantation economy or to regional economies attached to sex tourism. If we examine popular representations of the nation and its people, we see that Guyanese women are marginalized at home, exoticized within the region, and rendered nearly invisible beyond. It’s therefore not surprising to me that Rihanna’s Guyanese ancestry is rendered invisible in the global context, even while Guyanese women are pigeonholed as sexually dangerous foreigners in Barbados. I apply Rihanna’s family ties to argue that the realities of love and marriage between Bajan men and Guyanese women are not rooted in inherently sexualized qualities Guyanese women embody, but in the global undercurrents of kinship and loss, and in the migratory processes through which Caribbean women symbolically and literally traverse diasporic spaces. Finally, the book departs from my previous work in its focus on the environment. But I think we can address that more in one of your subsequent questions.

KMK: You share in the introduction that your new book is heavily influenced by your perspective as an anthropologist born in Guyana who grew up in the United States. Could you speak more about how your identity informed your approach to this project?

OLB: All scholars are shaped by our identities, by who we are and where we come from. As an anthropologist, I’m trained to examine how my positionality informs my work. Being Guyanese has always influenced my scholarship. My family moved from Guyana to Brooklyn when I was seven and a half years old. I had never seen television. This sparked a life-long interest in popular culture. I like to quote Stuart Hall when I discuss how being Guyanese informs my work. In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Hall wrote, “If the paper seems preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of displacement, it is worth remembering that all discourse is ‘placed,’ and the heart has its reasons” (Hall 1990). But it’s one thing to disclose one’s positionality and it’s another to write a book that is autoethnographic. Global Guyana contains one autoethnographic chapter, but draws on autoethnography throughout. The book employs what I call a pointer broom  analytic. This analytic was inspired by my childhood memories of Guyana. The pointer broom, or “pointa” broom is a handleless Guyanese yard broom traditionally homemade from the dried spines at the center of coconut leaves, then tied in a tight bundle with a small strip of cloth or twine. It is an everyday tool that generations of Guyanese girls and women have used to sweep up dust, sand, and debris in yards and homes. With continuous sweeping, the dried spines truncate, rendering the instrument shorter and shorter and necessitating that the sweeper bend closer to the ground, repeatedly stamping the top of the broom against a hard surface in order to realign the individual spines. The Anglophone Caribbean saying “new broom sweep clean, but old broom know corna” positions the broom as a metaphor for the value of experience and as a symbol for recovering the past. With origins in Africa and Asia, the “sweep, sweep, stamp” of the pointer broom resonates across the Caribbean and the African and Indian Diasporas. The kinetic interplay between sweeper and broom mirrors the movement of women and resources across continents, and reverberates in the transnational sonic routes of African Diasporic music. The women in my family coil our pointer brooms in suitcases, bringing the brooms along with us when we settle in other countries. (And I’ve learned that this practice is common among many women throughout the Guyanese Diaspora.)

Wielded in a sweeping motion, the pointer broom becomes an apt metaphor for my approach in Global Guyana, which is both gendered labor and a historiography that susses out morsels of cultural knowledge and history that have long fallen into seemingly inaccessible cracks and crevices. The pointer broom approach positions Guyanese girls’ and women’s understandings of their own social worlds as uniquely efficacious for uncovering a more nuanced ethnographic engagement with Guyana. My pointer broom analytic employs a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, including autoethnography, archival research, and oral history, to offer an unconventional portrayal of  Guyana and its global connections. And my use of autoethnography stems from my commitment to Black feminist ethnography. I’m influenced by a trailblazing group of scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, and a more recent, remarkably influential group that includes Irma McClaurin, Faye Harrison, A. Lynn Bolles, Leith Mullings, Gina Athena Ulysse, and others. Black feminist anthropologists merge theory, politics, and the arts, drawing on their own personal identities and experiences to write from perspectives in which the researcher and the “subjects of study” are not separate. When I started witnessing the ways in which the ExxonMobil oil discovery was shaping global representations of Guyana—often resulting in reductive treatments—I was moved to draw from my positioned understanding of my homeland and its people.

KMK: Global Guyana relies on oral history and archival research. I think the use of oral history is especially important since readers can hear from women themselves about the racial and gender dynamics of the unrecognized global currents that emerge out of Guyana that you are interested in bolstering. Can you talk about your experience using oral history and archival research as an anthropologist? What were some of the challenges?

OLB: In one of my previous positions, I was research director of a community/university oral history project centered around African Americans in the Bronx. So, I have a background in, and a love for oral history. My Aunt Gene, one of the primary interlocutors for Global Guyana, is the family oral historian. I’ve been listening to Aunt Gene’s stories all my life. It was natural, therefore, that she was the first family member to whom I turned when I wrote the autoethnographic chapter of Global Guyana. The chapter, “From Full Negro to Dougla Girl: ‘All ah You in Here Is Black People!” traces my maternal line across five generations of women. While I’m Black, my maternal family largely identifies as Indian. But I uncovered, by using archival research and oral history, that my great-great-grandmother, Poragia Shewdesi, who came to Guyana from India as an indentured laborer, had a child with an Afro-Guyanese man when such a relationship was strictly tabooed by British colonial officials. The chapter traces the afterlives of slavery and indenture in Guyana through the lens of my maternal family tree. Because my aunt is such a fabulous storyteller, I was able to incorporate her oral histories into this chapter. However, while I’m an anthropologist and a self-taught oral historian, I’m not an historian per se. Therefore, entering the archives was new territory for me. I was able to recover my maternal family’s open secret—that my great-grandmother (Poragia’s daughter), was in fact Indian and Black, or Dougla as people of African and Indian parentage are known in Guyana—by locating birth records at Guyana’s national archives. There were many challenges that accompanied doing this work beyond simply learning a new methodology. Most significantly, I strove to treat what I call an “open secret” (because some members of the family, including my Aunt Gene, already knew that they had what she called, “Black blood”) with care and respect. I wanted to render the fact that my great-grandmother identified as Indian even though her father was Black, as a meaningful design for living. I therefore had to contextualize her identity within the minefield of colonial gendered racializations that she and her family navigated. To return to the book’s central analytic, I utilized my pointer broom to sweep my great-grandmother’s identity into the light. The result is a woman-centered account of defining family, defying sexual taboos, and claiming ethnic identifications, chronicled from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period. I address more than what might be written off as a coverup of Blackness, the likes of which we might find in countless family records across the African Diaspora. Rather, the autoethnographic work at play in my investigation unsettled the notion that Afro- and Indo-Guyanese identities have been incompatible from the start. By taking a pointer broom to interracial intimacies and kinship configurations, I was able to reveal the ways in which Guyanese girls and women like my maternal kin were stereotyped as “unmarriable” and “rebellious,” while also being elided from the scholarship on Indo- and Afro-Caribbean identity, when in they in fact have always been central to global racial capitalism.

KMK: Global Guyana encourages scholars to pursue renewed historical and ethnographic engagement with Guyana. More specifically, engagement that grapples with the racialized and gendered dynamics of unconsidered global currents. How do you envision your work pushing fields of study that you engage forward?

OLB: I’d like to use this question as an opportunity to underscore the book’s focus on the connections among women, resource extraction, and the environment. I mentioned that Guyana’s recent oil boom has sparked renewed interest in the country. While Guyana’s oil has made headlines, sand extraction in this country and elsewhere remains the worldwide crisis that nobody has heard about. We use only one resource more than sand, and that is water. And we are using sand faster than it can be replenished. The global drive for taller buildings, sprawling cities, endless roadways, and computer monitors and cell phones relies on the extraction of sand, or silica quartz. Guyana has been quietly replenishing beach sand in other Caribbean tourism-dependent nations since the 1990’s. These landscapes have experienced significant beach erosion. So, if you’re sunbathing on a powdery white sand beach in Jamaica, you may in fact be relaxing on Guyanese sand. As the site of both high-profile oil extraction and invisible sand mining, the nation is becoming a generative prism through which we can radically reformulate how we understand the dynamics of capitalism and ecology in the Americas. And across all extractive industries, we find devastating effects for women and children, including sex trafficking, contaminated water, and insufficient food supplies. Guyana has something valuable to teach us about the interplay between violence against women and environmental catastrophe.

The pointer broom is my instrument of choice because it demonstrates the relationship between women and the natural environment. Global Guyana grapples with issues of material loss and geographic erasure, brooming through dwindling mounds of sand to uncover a more complex understanding of Guyana’s development dreams and the social and environmental tolls of resource extraction. While extractive machines move voluminous mounds of sand, and oil drilling causes monumental destruction to the sea floor and to the environment, the pointer broom methodically attends to small piles and single grains. It brooms into the light how communities on the ground make sense of these upheavals, allowing us to witness what Guyana’s oil boom means to everyday people. And I privilege the pointer broom deliberately and in contrast to the tool that is most often taken up as a symbol of Caribbean plantation life—the cutlass. While the cutlass has been gendered as male, especially because of its dual function as a cane-cutting blade and as an implement  of violence which Indian husbands brandished against their wives, the pointer broom is a women’s device that gathers rather than slashes. Using the pointer broom as a feminist analytic enables us to disentangle the speculative but symbiotic relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and global racial capitalism. Caribbean women’s sexual and reproductive labor sustained the plantation economy and continues to underpin global capitalism’s extractive processes and tourist fantasies. With the tourist-friendly image of Rihanna recruited to promote Barbados’s beauty, Guyana is relegated to ugliness and erasure—the underbelly of sand loss and the gendered landscape of some of the most vulnerable causalities of the Anthropocene. My work on this project encourages research on these seemingly disparate processes of global capitalism.

KMK: To conclude, what element of writing this book turned out to be the most gratifying or unexpected?

OLB: The oral histories I gathered from my aunt and my mother were beautiful and moving. Without giving away the end of the book, I was able to impart to readers how my great-grandmother died, and how her death shared commonalities with violence that my mother suffered. I had to use my pointer broom with care, so as to not rustle the dark corners in which my mother safeguarded painful memories. Writing these portions of the book was both difficult and rewarding because I learned so much about my maternal family. But I write against the forms of erasure scores of Caribbean women have experienced. It has also been incredibly gratifying to share the book with audiences, especially with other Guyanese women with whom the work resonated. When I mention the pointer broom analytic to an audience that includes Guyanese women, they get it. And it resonates with African American women as well because of the rich traditions around similar brooms within African American culture (including jumping the broom, and superstitions against sweeping after dark and sweeping one’s feet). As a scholar I’ve always been driven to write in an accessible voice, so it has been rewarding to put forth a feminist analytic that appeals to audiences beyond the academy.