Law, Language, and a Nonsovereign Caribbean

Abstract

This article argues that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), a tribunal serving twelve independent primarily Anglophone Caribbean states, uses a variety of linguistic techniques in its pursuit of a regional future. Created upon a complicated (post)colonial landscape and charged with resolving the nonsovereignty of its member states, which, for the most part, continue to utilize the United Kingdom's Privy Council for their final court of appeal, the CCJ does not view sovereignty as a solution. Instead, as I demonstrate through several examples of the Court's use of, talk about, and abstention from language, the CCJ's judges and employees seek to constitute a yet-to-befully-defined nonsovereign region that carves out a Caribbean people, pointedly rejects ongoing British legacies and logics, refuses to adopt the legal practices associated with sovereignty, and strives to remain untethered to either nation-state or suprastate. [law, language, sovereignty, region, Caribbean] RESUMEN Este artículo argumenta que la Corte de Justicia del Caribe (CCJ), un tribunal al servicio de doce estados independientes primariamente anglófonos del Caribe, usa una variedad de técnicas lingüísticas en la búsqueda de un futuro regional. Creado sobre un paisaje (post)colonial complicado y encargado de resolver la no soberanía de sus estados miembros, la cual, en su mayor parte, continúa utilizando el Consejo Privado del Reino Unido para su corte final de apelaciones, el CCJ no ve la soberanía como una solución. En cambio, como lo demuestro a través de varios ejemplos acerca del uso de la Corte de, hablar sobre, y de la abstención de lenguaje, los jueces y empleados de la CCJ buscan constituir una región no soberana, aún por definir enteramente, que forja un pueblo caribeño, rechaza intencionalmente lógicas y legados británicos, rehúsa adoptar las prácticas legales asociadas con la soberanía, y lucha por permanecer libre de ataduras al Estado nación o al supra-Estado. [ley, lenguaje, soberanía, región, el Caribe]

Voices in a Sea of History: Why Study Language in the Caribbean

“…These include an activist political praxis that emphasizes Creole language and a felt connection to nèg mawon (Black Maroon) ancestry 6 . Lee Cabatingan (2020) shows how nonsovereignty serves as both problem to solve and potential solution for judges, staff, and administrators of the multistate regional Caribbean Court of Justice, who engage in linguistic strategies that resist ongoing British colonial jurisdictive legacies and seek regional cooperation across 15 member and another five associate member states. Puerto Rican invocations of Taíno heritage to navigate the island's ambiguous status as a US colony point out a legacy of subaltern cultural resistance (Feliciano‐Santos 2019), as do Cuban invocations of resistant marronage and African‐inspired religious practices, even when these are folkloricized in the service of the institutionalized Cuban Revolution.…”

Caribbeanist Anthropology and Minerva's Owl: Lessons Forgotten, Lessons Learned

“…But there certainly are emergent transitions to be studied in the region, and here I would point toward Vanessa Agard‐Jones's (2013) work on environmental toxicity in Martinique, Rivke Jaffe's (2016) work on urban environmental justice in Jamaica and Curaçao, Kiran Jayaram's (2018) work on the social and cultural consequences of export mango production in Haiti, Ryan Jobson's (2021) ethnographies of petrochemical extraction in Trinidad, Olivia Gomes da Cunha's (2018, 2021) work on the afterlife of American bauxite mining in a Suriname maroon village, or the questions of national sovereignty—or the lack thereof—explored by my former students: 11 Greg Beckett (2019), Yarimar Bonilla (2015, 2020), Lee Cabatingan (2016, 2018, 2020), Jeffrey Kahn (2019), and Chelsey Kivland (2020) in the context of Haiti's perennial crisis, Guadeloupe's syndicalist movement, the Trinidad‐based Caribbean Court of Justice, the evolution of the U.S.‐Haitian water border, or grass roots organizing in Port‐au‐Prince, respectively (see Thomas, this issue). Brent Crosson's (2020) updating of the study of Afro‐Caribbean religious traditions in light of post‐Asadian discussions of secularism belong in that picture, as does Stuart Strange's (2018) explorations of Ndyuka “metaphysics of history” and affliction, or Anthony Medina's (2020) dissertation on Cuban “ pandillas ”—i.e., criminalized Black male associations (which Medina carefully disentangles from both the image of U.S. “gangs” and Central American “ maras ”)—that can be profitably read together with Jovan Lewis's (2020) ethnography of Jamaican online scammers.…”