Percy C. Hintzen

Reproducing Domination Identity and Legitimacy Constructs in the West Indies

Emerging from the historical conditions of colonialism, educated elites from middle strata groups were able to mount successful challenges to colonial power almost everywhere. This was accomplished in the West Indies through the shaping and fashioning of an ideology of Afro-creole nationalism. The latter catapulted the political leadership of these groups into positions of control in post-colonial institutions of government1. Once achieved, such control was employed to satisfy the accumulative power, prestige, and status interests of their middle strata supporters. Afro-creole nationalism served also to legitimise the continued dominance of international economic capital while making available to this ascendant elite international resources of power. In this manner, the penetration of international economic capital was intensified in the post-colonial state. Such penetration was both direct and orchestrated through diplomatic representatives of governments and representatives of bilateral and multilateral...

Creoleness and Nationalism in Guyanese Anticolonialism and Postcolonial Formation

An analysis of the postcolonial formation of Guyana (formerly the English colony of British Guiana) and its relationship to belonging (peoplehood) raises profound questions for the analytics of nationalism. Th ese relate to the state’s “power of delimitation through exclusion and of empowerment through inclusion.”1 Th e inscription of race into Guyana’s politics may very well challenge propositions about the homogenizing agenda of the state through discursive deployment of ideology. Th is refers to the historical production and reproduction of the “nation” as a “coherent populace.” From the analytics of critical theory we have come to understand the racial state as the antithesis of heterogeneity. But a coherent peoplehood may be troubled by the politics of race especially when claims to belonging by each of the instrumentally organized racialized groupings are universally recognized and uncontested.2 Th is, I argue, was precisely the case in Guyana. Such racially heterogeneous, but nonetheless legitimate, claims to national belonging emerged at the conjunctures of economic, ideological, political, social, and cultural forces that need to be historicized. Th ey were forged in the crucible

Bases of Elite Support for a Regime Race, Ideology, and Clientelism as Bases for Leaders in Guyana and Trinidad

The attitudes, patterns of alignments, and composition of the most powerful and influential leaders in Guyana and Trinidad—selected by a two-stage positional-reputational method—are compared and the findings related to the different developmental strategies adopted by the two governments: third world socialism in the case of Guyana, and capitalism in the Trinidadian case. It is shown that clientelistic co-optation and, to a lesser extent, appeals to race can and do overcome ideologically rooted opposition to a ruling party; however, when the regimes ideological position, as reflected in its policies, is compatible with elite interests, the importance of race and clientelism declines, except for co-optation of leaders representing lower class interests. In both countries, the composition of the group of elites shows a proliferation of those representing middle- and upper-class socioeconomic sectors of the society.