Black migration and the legacies of colonialism

Blog post by Jamella Gow, Bowdoin College, USA

What makes a migrant ‘Black’? Frequently, negative rhetoric surrounding migrants in the United States and Europe have used race and culture as a means through which to contrast the inherent ‘belonging’ of citizens with the seeming ‘non-belonging’ of migrants. Migrants’ presence and cultures are, at worst, feared due to assumptions derived from 16th-19th century rhetoric which drove the colonization of people broadly conceived as Others. This is particularly the case for Black migrants.
 
We can draw a line between the transformations of nations in the Caribbean under colonization to the migratory waves of the 20th and 21st century. Historically, the colonization of the British Caribbean anticipated the arrival of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants (1948) who sought to build new lives in the centre of Empire. The imperial forays of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean also generated pathways to migration for Haitians who have been coming to the US since Haiti’s founding in 1804.
 
The arrival and reception of Black migrants to the US and Europe, therefore, cannot be understood without these deeper historical links that draw the Caribbean and the West together. These linkages are explored in my Identities article, ‘From colonial subjects to Black nations: racializing the Caribbean within global Blackness’, where I trace the history of Blackness in the Caribbean to better understand how mobility became a feature of Blackness both under slavery and more modern iterations of Black migration today. 

​I firstly trace the origins of modern Blackness to the systemic use of enslaved labour in service of capitalism in the Caribbean in the 16-19th centuries. I show how the transformation of Caribbean nations from colonial outposts to independent nation-states 19th and 20th centuries spurred new forms of mobility as Caribbean peoples chose to seek better work opportunities and lives elsewhere. I suggest that Caribbean nations are ‘made Black’ in order to facilitate the continued reliance on this Black mobility for survival. 
 
I focus on the example of Haiti and Jamaica to elaborate on these themes. Haiti successfully fought for its independence from slavery and established itself as a nation in 1804. Jamaica gained its independence from Britain in 1962. Both island nations drew on Black identity to define themselves as a nation – whether as a direct refusal of bondage, as in the case of Haiti, or the shifting categories of modern Blackness and creole nationalism in Jamaica, as Deborah Thomas explains.
 
At the same time, these nations were redefined as ‘Black nations’ in a negative light. Anti-Black racist tropes were used by US forces in early 20th century to justify its occupation of Haiti. In the present, we continue to see the racist characterization of Haitians by US politicians who draw on recycled tropes of criminality and backwardness to manufacture white fears of Black people. Jamaicans, while a historically important migrant labour force in the US, Canada and UK, has been, according to Vilna Bashi, valued for their labour and not their citizenship. In the UK, the 2018 Windrush Scandal saw the scrutiny and deportation of Afro-Caribbeans who had lived in the UK for decades, and made visible the reality that Black migrants’ presence has always been contested.
 
My Identities article speaks to the importance of thinking through Blackness as part of the larger conversation on immigration, race and politics. The Caribbean remains an important part of the story of global migration and, as recent events show, the urgency of telling that story remains. 

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Image credit: Photo by Siddhesh Mangela on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
​Gow, Jamella. (2024). From colonial subjects to Black nations: racializing the Caribbean within global Blackness. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: ​10.1080/1070289X.2024.2406660

Read further in Identities:

Haitian, Bahamian, both or neither? Negotiations of ethnic identity among second-generation Haitians in the Bahamas
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Reassessing philanthropic cartographies: the Caribbean lens

Emancipating the nation (again): Notes on nationalism, “modernization,” and other dilemmas in post‐colonial Jamaica​