“White homemaking”, poverty & pirates: The afterlives of settler colonialism on Saba 

Presentation The afterlives of settler colonialism on Saba, Dutch Caribbean, by Island(er)s at the Helm researcher Dr. Anna Younes.

This presentation will meet at the intersections of Indigenous Studies, Settler Colonial Studies and the Black Radical Tradition and views European (Spanish) conquest from 1492 as a precursor to later imperial take-overs in the Antilles. I hence argue for a merger of theoretical optics to broaden the theorization of modernity and its afterlives. 

This paper specifically will focus on the way white Sabans narrate “nativeness,” here referred to as “white homemaking” (Sarah Heinz, 2020), which is often narrated with claims to white innocence via alternative economies of “piracy”, “white poverty”, or the often pro-claimed “we worked the fields together”-mantra when talking about African enslavement. On an island, that until today holds a 50-50 population of mainly white and black residents (next to migrant workers and Dutch technocrats) with “mixing” only being recent, Indigeneity is either relegated to the pre-modern margins or serves as cultural reference to nativeness in the post/colonial Creole state (see Shona Jackson, 2012). 

This paper will show how the ghosts of Indigeneity however surface through recurring debates on “nativeness” – differently narrated and projected onto white or black bodies – and how settler technologies continue to structure debates around “sovereignty”, claims over land, property and rights. 

Anna Younes has worked and published on processes of racialization in Europe, with transnational readings between the Middle East and Germany. Her focus is on settler colonialism, critical race theories and psychoanalytic approaches, while thinking transnationally and transhistorically.