Welcome and introduction

Welcome, introduction  and opening remarks by by program chair Island(er)s at the Helm Professor Francio Guadeloupe (KITLV &  University of Amsterdam).     

After hurricane's Irma and Maria devastated the SSS islands - St. Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius, in 2017, one heard the Caribbean mantra "Give Thanks" uttered by most who had survived the two category 5+ typhoons. There was also lots of talk about the danger of jumbees and other spirits being orphaned whose abode was uprooted trees. They were looking for new homes and were occupying the heads and hearts of distraught human and other animal individuals. Next to being a mantra and  a way of greeting, "Give Thanks" was also a verbal amulet against these forces. As a mantra "Give Thanks" speaks to a (Dutch) Caribbean worldview, and its corruptions, that were explored in material and ideational ways by the researchers involved in Island(er)s at the Helm.

Give thanks, or "duna gracia" in the papiamentu and papiamento mostly spoken on the ABC islands - Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, promotes a thankfulness and an acceptance of life in all of its absurd complexities. And Caribbean people, most of whom descend from indentured and convict labour, Middle Passage proletarians, and wrongfully accused killers of the Christian messiah, recognize the absurdity of colonialism that brought their ancestors to the rocks sprinkled across the estuary of the Americas; islands inhabited by the remaining survivors of the New World genocide. (Dutch) Caribbeans also recognize that they overcame and are still overcoming based upon their own efforts to make a life and their exertions to repay the debt of being given life by a divine force know by the signifier God. For them colonialism and its afterlives (in terms of politico-economic inequalities) has to also factor in divinities, the Divine, and the threats of hurricanes, extreme heat, coastal erosion, bleaching of corals, excessive rainfall sargassum - the matters that many geo- and techno-natural scientists take as being the exclusive domain of climate change.

Francio Guadeloupe is program Chair of the NWO funded research program 'Island(er)s at the Helm' and Professor of the Public Anthropology of Kingdom Relations at the University of Amsterdam.  Guadeloupe’s academic work and posts span both sides of the trans-Atlantic Kingdom of the Netherlands. Besides holding posts at many of the major universities in the Netherlands and the KNAW, Guadeloupe also served for four years, between 2013 to 2017, as the President of the University of St. Martin on the bi-national island of Sint Maarten and Saint Martin (Dutch and French West Indies).