Racial capitalism, coloniality and the financialization of Caribbean remittances

Abstract

Diaspora remittances are a faithful source of capital, a vital social safety net and a source of local economic investment for many households, communities and states across the Caribbean. But recent efforts by powerful interests to exercise control over these flows of capital are beginning to threaten the continuity and accessibility of this lifeline. As financial institutions, fiscally constrained governments and imperializing states have become increasingly attuned to the value of Caribbean remittances, so too have their efforts to gain control over the volume and flow of these private transfers of funds. For governments, remittances promise the possibility of access to funds that can be used to bridge finance gaps, and among financial institutions they offer opportunities to generate profits from the cross-border movement of money. But for imperializing states, remittances are increasingly viewed as a potential threat to their efforts to control the movement of money. I argue that these different and sometimes conflicting views of remittances reflect the complex forms of coloniality and racial subjugation that continue to reproduce economies of dispossession.

From the plantation to the deep blue sea: Naturalising debt, ordinary disasters, and postplantation ecologies in the Caribbean

“…These actors make financial and political calculations that maintain the racially hierarchical international financial system and promote world-scale accumulation (on the historical origins, see Hudson, 2017). Grove (2021), Mullings (2022) and Witter (2021) usefully point out that the IMF, World Bank, and US Treasury-supported efforts rationalise post-disaster relief through coercive austerity measures after a calamity. In the 'post-pandemic' world, global North environmental NGOs, academic and nonprofit institutions, and third party players/trustees also promote financialized disaster management as they increase their financial leverage, capacity and networks in the context of climate and fiscal crises facing the Caribbean.…”

“…In the 'post-pandemic' world, global North environmental NGOs, academic and nonprofit institutions, and third party players/trustees also promote financialized disaster management as they increase their financial leverage, capacity and networks in the context of climate and fiscal crises facing the Caribbean. Measures are not only designed to lock-in post-disaster welfare spending commitments and market-promoting financial policies but they have differentially racial and gendered effects (Mullings, 2022;Witter, 2021). Like previous periods of indebtedness forced upon the newly decolonized territories, these innovative yet equally coercive products are aimed at responding to 'sovereign debt crises' and disasters created in the wake of climate change impacts.…”

“…I argue that the concomitant role that finance capitalism through debt and future‐oriented mechanisms assumes under the ‘blue economy’ helps to explain how these fiscal, socio‐ecological, and environmental displacements are rendered ordinary through global rules and with elite complicity in the Caribbean 5 (also see Grove, 2012). Given these multiple hazards, risk has shifted from individual to collective subjectivities (Christophers, 2020; Mullings, 2022) and connected to ‘revised systems of profit extraction’ (Meeks, 2007, p. 41). I use the examples of recent hurricanes to illustrate how disaster and debt reproduce uneven racialised geographies through the process of naturalising debt as a postcolonial technology, described here as a post‐plantation ecology.…”

From the racialization of finance to the financing of anti-racism: Tracing the US financial industry’s investments in closing the racial wealth gap

“…Anti-colonial scholarship on the dispossessive logics of “inclusion” in imperial economies (Byrd et al, 2018) and the financial industry’s extension of control over the sustenance of precarious households and communities (e.g. Mullings, 2022) highlights how these processes tend to reproduce, rather than abolish, the racial logics of the 21st century financial system. In studying the relationship between race and capitalism from this perspective, Pulido (2017: 527) cautions against examining racial outcomes without considering racial production, arguing that “racial production.…”

Bringing life's work to market: Frontiers, framings, and frictions in marketised social reproduction

“…In the Global South, microfinance, development finance, and other finance-based livelihood strategies are another iteration of systems of life-making under stress and increasingly governed by markets. Here, marketised social reproduction functions through myriad colonial dynamics such as state and market control of international remittance flows (Cirolia et al, 2022;Mullings, 2022), debt-contingent 'financial inclusion' of agrarian workers (Bernards, 2021), retail consumers (Langley and Leyshon, 2022) and welfare recipients (Torkelson, 2021(Torkelson, , 2022, and the ongoing conversion of subsistence farming into a global financial asset class (Ouma, 2020). As Mullings (2022) illustrates, these forms of marketised social reproduction depend on and reproduce transnational relationships and global power hierarchies (see also Ebner and Johnson, 2020).…”