Description
Processes of colonial violence and extraction are both highly gendered and racialised. However, they are rarely studied as such. This paper studies the gendered and racialised power dynamics of extractive capitalism at the global and local level through an examination of ongoing contestations between the oil sector, agrarian labour and fisherfolk in the post-colonial nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The extraction of oil and gas in Trinidad has dramatically reconfigured coastal and marine environments, landscapes and livelihoods, and produced a range of ecological problems, such as water pollution and oil spills. This paper combines indigenous Caribbean theorising and a feminist and intersectional approach, to explore the gendered dynamics of negotiations over material and ecological resources. It develops and re-deploys the concept of ‘frontier masculinity’ as a useful tool for examining a complex range of subjectivities, identities and cosmologies, struggles over territory, power and resources, and the ways in which gender and race are coded into global and local political practices. Often seen as a peripheral region, even of the Global South, a critical and feminist examination of Caribbean political economy illuminates’ the on-going nature of processes of colonialism, extraction, dispossession and struggles over ecological resources, and how these processes are intimately connected to unequal relations of gender, race and class. Ultimately, it finds that colonial extraction has produced a range of peripheralised and disempowered – and distinctively gendered and raced – positionalities that struggle to negotiate a place in the contemporary political economy.
