Possession: An Ethnographic Phenomenology of American Colonialism in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands

Sewer, Hadiya

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Overview

Year:: 2018
Contributor:: Sewer, Hadiya (creator); Bogues, Anthony (Advisor); Perry, Keisha-Khan (Reader); Henry, Paget (Reader); Brown University. Department of Africana Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: race & ethnicity; Phenomenology; Colonialism; Sovereignty; Caribbean Studies; Ethnography
Extent:: xiii, 301 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/41sg-xr80

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Abstract:: The United States of America annexed the Danish West Indies via a twenty-five-million-dollar purchase in 1917, forming the U.S. Virgin Islands. On March 31st, 2017, the residents of this predominantly Black unincorporated American territory commemorated the Transfer Day Centennial, one hundred years under the American flag. The people of these Caribbean islands occupy a liminal space in the American empire. U.S. Virgin Islanders have truncated voting rights, limited political sovereignty, a peripheral economy that caters to the metropole, and no constitutional right to citizenship. Yet, as one of the seventeen remaining non-self-governing territories in the world, this American colony lacks an ostensible independence movement. This ethnographic phenomenology aims to contribute to theories on decolonization in the Caribbean and discourses on American racism by posing a set of critical questions about race, empire, governmentality, and the construction of contemporary colonial subjectivities in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. Possession uses interviews, participant observations, digital archives, and autoethnographic narratives gathered during the year preceding and the year of the Transfer Day Centennial to examine conceptions of freedom and the human. This work grapples extensively with Sylvia Wynter’s theories on the human and finds that questions of self-determination produce a Derridean hesitation (aporia). This political uncertainty illuminates some of the ideologies that normalize American colonialism through a shaping of Virgin Islanders’ desires.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018

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Rights: In Copyright
Restrictions on Use: Collection is open for research.

Citation

Sewer, Hadiya, "Possession: An Ethnographic Phenomenology of American Colonialism in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands" (2018). Africana Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/41sg-xr80

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Africana Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Africana Studies department.
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