Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment
As an overseas department of France, Guadeloupe is one of a handful of non-independent societies in the Caribbean that seem like political exceptions—or even paradoxes—in our current postcolonial era. In Non-Sovereign Futures, Yarimar Bonilla wrestles with the conceptual arsenal of political modernity—challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution—in order to recast Guadeloupe not as a problematically non-sovereign site but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself. Through a deep ethnography of Guadeloupean labor activism, Bonilla examines how Caribbean political actors navigate the conflicting norms and desires produced by the modernist project of postcolonial sovereignty. Drawing from nearly a decade of ethnographic research, she shows that political participation—even in failed movements—has social impacts beyond simple material or economic gains. Ultimately, she uses the cases of Guadeloupe and the Caribbean at large to offer a more sophisticated conception of the possibilities of sovereignty in the postcolonial era.
LISTEN: Interview with Professor Bonilla about Non-Sovereign Futures for the New Book Network
WATCH: Yarimar Bonilla in conversation with Vanessa Agard Jones about Non-Sovereign Futures at the NYPL Schomburg center for Research in Black Culture.
READ: Book forum on Non-Sovereign Futures Small Axe 21, no. 2 (2017):201-208
PURCHASE: Non-Sovereign Futures on amazon.com
ENJOY: Spotify Playlist for Non-Sovereign Futures
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Media
Yarimar is a frequent contributor to mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and The Nation, and she is a frequent guest on National Public Radio and television news programs such as Democracy Now! She is also a regular columnist in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día and blogs such as 80 Grados.
Digital Projects
Professor Bonilla has a strong interest in the role of digital technologies in the democratization of knowledge. She produces animated scholarly videos, public syllabi, and online scholarly resources.
Academic Articles
Writing broadly across disciplines and fields, Bonilla’s academic articles have tackled questions of coloniality, sovereignty, historicity, racial politics, digital ethnography, cartographic representation, and the politics of memory. At present she is committed to publishing solely in open-access platforms.