TINGS BROWN!

Abstract

In Barbados economic hardship has a color. Ask Barbadians ‘how're you doing?’ and, if things are difficult in any way they might answer, ‘Tings brown!’ This seems to be an especially appropriate phrase for this paper which explores the inter-relations between contemporary racialized identificatory strategies and economic hardship in the Caribbean. My interest is in exploring the challenges Caribbean citizens and governments face in trying to pursue both democracy and economic sustainability at this time. One way in which these challenges continue to manifest themselves is in the overt and covert debates about who has the right to claim the protection of state institutions. Within these debates ‘brown’ surfaces as a way of drawing a line between those claims which are deemed legitimate and those which are deemed illegitimate. This paper focuses on four ways in which ‘brown’ defines the borders of dominant nationalist projects in Barbados. At the center of this article is an exploration of the difficulties facing Guyanese migrant workers in Barbados.

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