Desire, with Angelique Nixon

What’s behind the reductive pursuit of “paradise” in travel to the Caribbean? How does tourism continue the legacy of colonialism? And how is this being resisted? We’re joined by Angelique Nixon, a scholar and activist at The University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, whose book “Resisting Paradise” examined how tourism shapes Caribbean life and identity, including via deep-rooted notions of “paradise” grounded in colonialism and exploitation. Angelique describes how the Caribbean, a region of such diverse islands, has been constructed a site for the fulfilment of particular desires, while other forms of desire have been suppressed in mainstream narratives. Angelique joins us to discuss this, as well as her new project, “Submerged Freedom”.

Plus: Angelique reflects on writing as a “black sexual intellectual”, and describes how Franz Fanon led her to reflect on tourism as “the stagnation of decolonisation” – as reproducing and reinforcing existing racialised inequalities. Also, we celebrate thinkers including the sociologist Kamala Kempadoo, authors Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid and Erna Brodber. And we profile the radical Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter, whose work challenged the assumptions of western liberal humanism and highlighted the importance of working on ourselves as part of decolonial work.

Guest: Angelique Nixon; Host: Rosie Hancock; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Angelique Nixon

• Resisting Paradise (2015)
• On Being a Black Sexual Intellectual (2019)
• Angelique’s academic profile, including information on her latest project, “Submerged Freedom”
• CAISO – feminist non-profit civil society organisation committed to ensuring wholeness, justice and inclusion for Trinidad and Tobago’s LGBTQI+ communities

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes on: Europeans, with Manuela Boatcă (2023) and Margins, with Rhoda Reddock (2024)
• Len Garrison: Archives and Self-Esteem – audio essay by Hannah Ishmael (2025)

Further resources

• “Island Futures” – Mimi Shiller
• “An Eye for the Tropics” – Krista Thompson
• “Sexing the Caribbean” – Kamala Kempadoo
• “Paradise and Plantation” – Ian Strachan
• “The Repeating Island” – Antonio Benítez-Rojo
• “The Wretched of the Earth” – Franz Fanon
• “After The Dance” – Edwidge Danticat
• “A Small Place” – Jamaica Kincaid
• Sylvia Wynter: Beyond Man – short introductory video by Al Jazeera

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

Transcript

Rosie Hancock  0:05 
Hi, welcome back to Uncommon Sense. Last month we talked about love and reproduction, and today we're talking about desire, but not as you know it. And that's because this is the podcast that takes everyday things that we think we know how to define and gives them a sociological twist. It comes to you from the Sociological Review Foundation, which is a charity, and part of our aim is to celebrate the power of the sociological imagination and to show that it is so great to think like a sociologist and that, I think I'm allowed to say this, you don't need a degree to at least start doing that. So I'm Rosie Hancock and I'm in Sydney, Australia, and I'm here solo today. Alexis is away. And we're going to be thinking about tourism and desire, the ideas we have about certain places and those who live there, and how that happens, what it does to people and also how it's resisted. And we're focusing on the Caribbean, which is a region that has such powerful imagery attached to its name. Its diverse islands are often reduced to one homogenous, ubiquitous image: the flat palm-lined, people-free white beach, devoid of time or politics, otherwise known as paradise. To reflect on this, we're joined from Arima in North East Trinidad by Angelique Nixon, a senior lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies. Angelique's earlier book, Resisting Paradise, looks at how tourism shapes Caribbean life and identity, including via complex ideas of paradise. But it also shows how cultural workers, writers and others, including the diaspora too, have resisted such reductive ideas and their impact. Its themes include culture, sex, colonialism, resistance, all threads that continue in Angelique's current work. So, hi Angelique, thanks for joining us. Do you want to paint us a little picture of where you are today, just to help us start to undo perhaps the image of the white sands and the palm trees?

Angelique Nixon  2:23 
Hi, good day, and thank you so much for having me. Yes, I am in Arima in Trinidad. It is raining. It is rainy season. It rains like six months of the year. So, you know, that gives you a different picture. I think folks think of, you know, the sun, sand and sea, that it's always sunny. Trinidad and Tobago are right above South America. We are very, very south, very close to the equator, so it is hot and rainy right now.

Rosie Hancock  2:54 
Angelique, you do so much more than academia. I gave you an introduction that was so minimal. You're a very public scholar, and you're involved in activism in the arts, and you also write of being a Black sexual intellectual, which is a really unique way of describing yourself. And I know that there's a, there's kind of a story behind that, and that you foreground that, you call yourself that very deliberately and that it's sort of part of an important trajectory. So I was wondering if you could introduce yourself a bit more and tell us more about that?

Angelique Nixon  3:27 
Well, for me, it's about writing with a certain vigilance and attentiveness to race, class, gender, sexuality, location. And for me, when I was in graduate school, I was a part of a really great cohort of fellow students. And we were in a very predominantly white department and university where we found each other and realising that we all were writing about gender and sexuality and race, and so we had a writing group. We supported each other through the process, because being in grad school is hard. It was meant to be something that helped us define ourselves, but it also helped us to think about the importance of the work, especially for me doing Caribbean Studies – and we'll continue to talk about this today, I'm sure – is that sexuality is such a huge part of who we are, just as human beings. And what is, I think, particularly challenging and unique about Caribbean spaces, and I think maybe the Pacific Islands as well, that we get defined through bodies and through sex, not in comfortable ways and very uncomfortable ways. But we're also very desired, right? Our bodies, our spaces. And it is, it can be really, all really, really challenging but important for us to understand and say something about.

Rosie Hancock  4:55 
I'm pretty sure that we're going to return as we go to kind of the Black feminist tradition and the importance of sharing stories of survival and resistance. And you've just kind of mentioned some of the key things that we want to talk about today, right? Desire, tourism, sexuality, the Caribbean. And, as I understand it, you worked in the tourist industry in the Bahamas, and I'm going to quote from you here, you write about the extent to which the "burden of creating and sustaining notions of paradise for tourism drastically affects people, culture and identity across the region". I would love to hear, I guess, more of your own story about your, how your personal experience of tourism shaped your interest.

Angelique Nixon  5:43 
I started working in the tourism industry at 12, during summers, and that's when I was growing up in the Bahamas. There were two ways you could go in terms of, especially if you're poor and working class, either you work in tourism or you work in banking. So yeah, I worked, I've had many, many jobs in the tourism industry. I've worked at different kinds of restaurants, in retail, in bars. And that experience, one – it did, did a number of things, I think, in my trajectory to end up studying tourism – was that it literally afforded me this socio-economic mobility to be able to even go off and study. I dropped out of high school when I was 16 because of various challenges, but I was able to because I took my GCE exams early, and I ended up getting a job in a bank as a junior accountant, so. But I was also, because I needed to make money, so I also still bartended. And so working these two jobs because I really wanted to go to university, I wanted to go to school, and so I worked in that world to make enough and save enough money and then I ended up getting funding and a scholarship. And all of that led me on my trajectory into academia, which I wouldn't have if I didn't have these opportunities through the tourism and banking industries. So by the time I got to grad school, I was, you know, thinking about what I wanted to write about different things and I became very, through reading postcolonial writing and Caribbean women's literature in particular, guided me to a fairly sharp critique of tourism as a form of neocolonialism, tourism as an extension of the plantation system, which, when I was in it, I didn't think of it that way. And so when I was a worker in the tourism industry, of course, all the things, the inequity, the way that tourists treat locals, it was all there. I didn't have a language for it. I didn't have a way to understand or talk about it, until I was away from it. And I wanted to investigate more of this double bind, because I also realised that it's very difficult when you're in it to critique it, because it's your bread and butter. It's your day-to-day. Just as me, it might feel contradictory or even hypocritical that I, you know, gained my own mobility and a chance at life and an education by critiquing the very thing that allowed me to do that. That's always the double bind of these formerly colonised spaces and so many, so many situations in the Global South.

Rosie Hancock  8:27 
I mean, you used two related words there, neocolonialism and colonialism. And I think, you know, we've already sort of set up the idea that this notion of paradise is, is associated with the Caribbean, and in, in your work, you argue that it's also grounded in histories of slavery and colonialism. I wanted to kind of, I guess, kind of poke you a little bit, right? So if some, some might say, hey, isn't colonialism over now in the Caribbean? How would you, how would you respond to that? And, and if you could do this by perhaps helping, helping us to understand a bit more about neocolonialism as well, that would be wonderful.

Angelique Nixon  9:10 
Yeah, neocolonialism is just a really big word for saying new forms, right, of colonialism, and colonialism is the relationship, right, of one powerful country over another, and quite literally the lingering effects of that colonial relationship in terms of structures, from legal structures, political, to education, to culture, to you know how economies run, right? So it is the case that colonialism in its structured form might be over or its formal relationships. And yes, Caribbean countries, like other countries in the Global South, have, quote unquote, achieved or been granted independence, right? And some haven't. I mean, the Caribbean is a very unique space in that way, where there are countries that, yes, are independent, but you have countries in the Caribbean that still have formal colonial relationships, right? Turks and Caicos, for example, the British Virgin Islands, the American Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico. So these are colonial relationships. I know folks use the language of territory now, but it is still, because you know, colonialism is a bad word, nobody wants to go back to that history because it's connected to indentureship, very uncomfortable and very clearly discriminatory and oppressive systems like slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, that that is why we use the word post and neocolonialism, and it's why we say things like coloniality, because it didn't just go away. This is, we're talking 50, 60, 70 years is not a long time. And so even independent countries, had formal colonial relationships, still end up being very much tied to the former colonial powers across Europe. I just want to give one example of very material, like very materially that you can see, as I said, right, you can trace the quite literal wealth that was generated across Europe. And in particular, let's just talk about, you know, Britain, British plantation owners were paid to release the enslaved, enslaved Africans, right? So they benefited from the system of slavery all the way up, plus they got a whole bunch of money in 1834 to 1838 during the so called apprenticeship period. And already by that time, so many companies and businesses and the government of Britain benefited from having all of the free labour and also extracting resources, not only labour, but so many goods and agriculture. The list goes on and on, but just to say, and folks have done, scholars have done that work. Mimi Scheller has done that work, connecting companies that made so much money, right? So there are very tangible ways that we can show those connections, but tourism is also another place where you can absolutely see the connections, that tourism emerges – and Krista Thompson talks about this in  Eye on the Tropics, and I talk about it in my work, and so does Ian Strachan in Paradise and Plantation, which I built on, Kamala Kempadoo talks about this in her work too – that there's, there's absolutely connections, that tourism is built on and from the remnants of the plantation system. And that was a very deliberate move on the part of plantation owners and folks with lots of power trying to figure out, what else can we extract? The Caribbean was transformed from a place where, you know, plantations and death and despair, and especially during the abolition period, people didn't want to think or talk about it. It was a place where people went to die, and they transformed that into this, the tropics and even the myth of paradise was that paradise operates in so many fascinating ways, and this is where desire comes in too. Paradise is, at the same time, something that you want and desire and it's also this something that is mysterious. And so the tropics were transformed through tourism discourse into the place where you wanted to go. You were going to be rejuvenated. You're going to go on your vacation, and you're going to go on a long boat trip and be restored, and you're going to go through the fountain of youth, right? All of these things that we already know, it comes to mind because it's wrapped up, you know, in the discourses of paradise. So tourism is built on colonialism. It is a form of colonialism.

Rosie Hancock  14:00  
It kind of brings to mind, you've, you've used the work of Frantz Fanon, who I just, before we dive into it, I feel like we need to acknowledge that we talk about Frantz Fanon in nearly every episode, we love him. So I know that you use some of Fanon's work and you write about how tourism is, or you use his work, it's like the stagnation of decolonisation, I think is perhaps how you put it. And I was wondering if you can reflect on that in terms of the Caribbean today?

Angelique Nixon  14:32  
Yeah, I mean, I build a lot of my, my foundation and my and my concepts through Fanon. Fanon did the work for us. Fanon, you know, in the 1960s already saw what was the future. So, you know, it was already very clear that, that decolonisation was a project that we all, you know, that the independence fighters and an anticolonial, the anticolonial struggle and the movement for independence, that there was a thing that we had to tease out and we had to break apart these systems and, you know, move away from colonial structures. But that was a really hard task and there were so many things that were enmeshed. And I think that Fanon also, and he writes about this right in Wretched of the Earth, that what he foresaw, if we continue down a particular path – I mean this in terms of Caribbean countries, but also he meant postcolonial nations generally – the cost of independence, when a country was trying to figure out how to be in the new world order, how to be in this, in the face of what Europe would say, oh, you can get independence, but can we tie your money to ours? Fanon saw that the investment in tourism, right, and this business of travel would create and reinforce the inequalities that already existed. So that, you know, European tourists would travel to the Caribbean at these massive, because the hotels were already starting to be built, and the resorts and these transnational corporations would end up benefiting, but it would never shift the dynamics of power, because that racialised, in many ways, white supremacist capitalist systems and relationships would already be in place. So when predominantly European and white tourists would go to predominantly Black spaces, those racial dynamics would still be there. And he says that the Caribbean become, would become the brothel of Europe. But also, he talks a lot in his work about what does it mean for us to decolonise? What does that really mean? And he talks about it being, because colonialism was a very brutal system, that decolonising would also be difficult and it would take a long time, otherwise the same kinds of systems would sneak back in. And so that's what I mean when I say that tourism embodies the stagnation of decolonisation is because it looks different, right? It's like, oh, look, oh, you all are making money. But the reality is, who makes most of the money from from tourism – and I talk about this in the book, in Resisting Paradise – that the majority of the funds are, go to multinational corporations. It costs a lot for the environment, for people, for the economy.

Rosie Hancock  17:42  
So Fanon, like you, was not a sociologist by training. He was actually a psychiatrist and a philosopher. And that's kind of like a bit of a segue to talk about how your work is kind of – even, even though you're not a sociologist – it's quite sociological, and you draw on a lot of sociologists, and among them Kamala Kempadoo, who you've already mentioned, and we wanted to talk a little bit more about her and her work. She writes about the construction of black Caribbean sexual identity, and we're hoping to hear a bit more about this and how you work with her ideas in your own thinking.

Angelique Nixon  18:25  
Yes, Kamala Kempadoo's work was very instructive for me, it was foundational. In her book Sexing the Caribbean, she talks about how sexual labour is so pervasive, but we don't necessarily, and she calls on us – especially for sexuality studies scholars – to really investigate and interrogate sexual labour. And so I took that very seriously in my work, because what I saw, and what I continue to see especially in representations of the Caribbean, is this overt, you know, sexual, and in a very exploitative way, that bodies and people are just available in the tourism package. And we see that again and again, sun, sand, sea and sex. And Kempadoo takes that up in her work, and she invites us to think seriously about it. But she also said, there's a double bind, just like the double bind of tourism – that I interrogate in my work, I take that all the way to sex and sexuality – that, you know, Kempadoo asks us to think about, what does it mean to be represented and thought of in these overtly or hypersexual ways, that it also has affected our sense of self and sexuality. And so I went, I took that question as well in my work to see and look at, in terms of our cultural production, how people talked about tourism, talked about ourselves through literature, through culture, to say, okay, where, how do we understand sexual labour now? Kempadoo talks a lot and has done extensive research with sex workers and people engaged in the sex industry. And she is a pioneering scholar, because she, you know, she spoke with folks engaged in sex work, prioritises their stories and made us think differently about it in a very everyday way. And so I also, I built on that work to say, okay, how do we, how do we interrogate the ways that we think about and what has tourism done to us around our sense of our sexual selves? And I ultimately say, I think, in the book, you know, through talking about my own experience in tourism, that sex is everywhere, but at the same time we, you know, we also get to be ourselves, like we have to figure out who we are. And I think one of the things that I come to is that we have to contend with sexual labour in the Caribbean and that's a kind of, me calling in our region and Caribbean people to say, yes, we've been hyper-exploited and represented as hypersexual but we also have to contend with what has it meant for us to grapple with that in the context of also wanting to be super respectable. So we have these tensions and these contending forces. Oh, we have to be respectable to be, you know, good postcolonial citizens, but then we also have to perform all of this hypersexuality for tourism. And I'm saying, we're all of these and that we have to contend with the fact that sexual labour is a part of our economy, from sex tourism to engaging in transactional sexual relationships, to the ways that our sexualities are diverse and complex and that we've, you know, Kempadoo says we've long had diversity in Caribbean sexualities, but the respectability politics and the religious conservative belief systems and structures want to tell us, oh no, we have to be super straight. But that's actually not who we come from, that's not our ancestry and our ancestors, and it's also not our own histories and stories, so we have to contend with it. That kind of pushes my argument also around how do we decolonise, that we have to get at some of these root belief systems and we have to do some of our own work.

Rosie Hancock  22:36 
I want to keep digging into this, you know, like how this kind of line on sexuality in the Caribbean, because I was wondering if you have an example of how sexual stereotypes manifest in the region, like through or in tourism, but also – and I know that your work kind of examines this quite a bit – how they've been resisted by particular artists or writers or the people that you've studied?

Angelique Nixon  23:00 
Yeah. I mean, I see stereotypes that are racialised and gendered and sexualised and classed as being particularly harmful, because then they reduce entire groups of people, so the Caribbean becomes – you know, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo says, right – repeating islands. And we see this in how tourism packages are promoted, you know, islands are just, you go to any island, it's all the same, it doesn't matter, right? So we are reduced. And so any complexity is also not taken up, so I think that that's really harmful. And then when it comes to sexuality, folks are being, from the Global North, are being fed this and then they come to, say, the Bahamas or Barbados or Jamaica. You know, Jamaica also comes to stand in, oh, Jamaica/Caribbean. It's a whole other thing. And the phenomenon around the availability of, in particular, black and racialised bodies, there's like a fetishising of bodies and that's where it becomes really, really harmful. And whether or not, because of course people are also seeking sex, so it's not about that, but it's also the assumption that, the assumptions that are wrapped up in that. And I think that those are really, really harmful because then it also creates, it creates environments where, what are the options and how people are then treated in that system. And one of the things in my work that I try to grapple with seriously is, what are the ways that folks who work in the tourism industry, what are some of the ways that Caribbean cultural workers and artists and writers and activists, how have we spoken up? So you'd ask, what are, what are some of the other kinds of representations that counter that? And I have seen it or examine it in my work, in a few ways, one through cultural workers who create different models of tourism. So I look at what Erna Brodber in Jamaica calls educo-tourism, which is educational tourism, through her Blackspace project. And also in the Bahamas, edu-culture, which is looking at Junkanoo, and Junkanoo festival in the Bahamas is a place where we can actually learn about Bahamian history and culture. Similarly, in Jamaica, Erna Brodber's educo-tourism is also about a relationship. You come to Jamaica, you come to learn. It's not just about an extractive or exploitive experience. Also, I look at writers who give us a different way of thinking about travel, from Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, which is a supercritique, a supercritique of tourism, to Edwidge Danticat's travel narrative about Jacmel Carnival in Haiti. And what better way, I mean Haiti of course is painted as such, you know, the darkest place of paradise, especially now. And she writes this beautiful travel narrative that refutes some of the dominant narratives of history, the dominant ideas that we think about these places and spaces and she rewrites that. All the way to Audre Lorde, who just is, you know, African American Caribbean, but she spends the last years of her life, you know, in St Croix.

Rosie Hancock  26:32 
I mean, I think, you know, we've been talking about this idea of desire and, you know, I think it's quite relevant to what you've just been saying about how, for some people, there's this, like to desire, is there's like an agency implied in that and there's a, there's an excitement to fulfilling it. But then there's also, you know, you can think of the other side, I suppose, where for other people, it's, desire entails a kind of a reduction, being reduced either to a commodified and desired object, but even to be sometimes, there's something about being a desiring subject, a particular kind of desiring subject, let's say. And I was, I really wanted to talk about how kind of taking up questions of queer desire and kind of affirming that queer desire can be a form of resistance, so like resistance to a, let's say, reductive or colonial gaze that that we've just been talking about. Do you have examples of how that could work?

Angelique Nixon  27:33 
For me, queer desire is about resisting a particular way of being in the world, the dominant, you know, straight, cisgender, heterosexual sexuality. You know, one of the things that I investigated in my work, partly because of my own situatedness, my own positionality as a researcher, but it's also what I ended up seeing, that there's a whole lot of queerness and a lot of non-normative sexualities and genders in the Caribbean. It's everywhere. But you know, the dominant narrative, or the dominant story, is that, you know, super conservative and where, you know, that, that the Caribbean is an unlivable place for queer people, right? But we're here. Queer people are everywhere, just like everywhere on the planet, right? But there's also something really, I think, because of the histories of slavery and colonialism and indentureship, that all of that control over bodies, that's, you know, Kempadoo's work again comes in here, Sylvia Wynter, Fanon, so many others who you know remind us that that affected us too, those hundreds of years. So I do think you know, Carolyn Cooper talks about repressive respectability, yes, so there's, there has to be, that's why decolonial – I know, big word – decolonial and decolonising is important because sometimes we have to do that work to grapple with how we've been understood from outside, what that has done to us. You know, one of the things that I am really interested in my new work is that I think Caribbean artists and writers are giving us these really powerful representations of queer relationships and identities and visual representations that help disrupt that idea of, you know, a binary thinking about gender or sexuality. I think that when we offer space for us to tell our own stories, we see it, we see it in our families. This is something that I write about at the end of, in the end of Resisting Paradise, I say if we're a little bit more honest about, just thinking about our own families, then we realise, oh yeah, there's, there's lots of queerness. Maybe we don't use that word, and that's where language comes in, right? So I think what's happened more recently is that the LGBTQI+ language, especially in the last ten years, you know, a lot of folks in organisations, you know, we use it. I work with an LGBTQI organisation and it's a, it's a useful acronym, but also we have to be really clear about we have different ways of defining ourselves, so using language like same sex loving or same gender loving, or using language that is a part of different spaces helps affirm, you know, sexuality and queerness. And queer is a word that is becoming, yes, folks use it, but it might not be the language that people are using. And I think we want to be attentive and attuned to that, to how people define themselves, and that's the really exciting work of Caribbean sexuality studies scholarship right now.

Rosie Hancock  31:07 
You kind of, you flagged there some themes related to your new work, and I, and I just kind of, lastly, wanted to touch on this, because you're working on a book titled Submerged Freedom, looking at the aesthetics of decolonial justice, and I think in that book you're looking to offer decolonial models for social and ecological justice by thinking about sites – we might get you to just explain for us what you mean by sites, because that kind of feels like, sort of, like a specific sociological or kind of academic kind of concept, right – where a more liberatory Caribbean futures might be forged, sites that work to a form, affirm really kind of messy, slippery understandings of Caribbean identity and representation. So, it sounds so great and I was hoping that you might be able to unpack this project for us a bit?

Angelique Nixon  32:06 
Yeah, well, I'll start by saying that sites, for me, are specific places and spaces, and it's also sites of cultural production, from music to visual art, to festivals like carnival, uh, but also soca – and I've been, you know, living and working in Trinidad for over 10 years, so that's really, and living back in the region and being able to travel around the region has also grounded me in the space. So I'm also thinking about sites in terms of the environment, from mangroves to forests to beaches to different ecosystems, so that's also a site. So I hope that that's helpful. And I'm studying, yeah, I'm studying and thinking about these different sites, and I'm building upon my work in Resisting Paradise, where I say that, you know, what does it mean for us to think about sustaining our economies? Like, how do we think about sustainability right now in the context of the climate crisis and climate catastrophe that we are in. The Caribbean, we are on the frontlines of climate crisis, we, we bear the brunt of it, like so many countries and spaces across the Global South, but yet we have done the least to produce the crisis, right, but we also have the least amount of power. So I describe this moment that we're in as a condition of submerged freedom, and I think about that in relationship to not only our environment, but I'm thinking about it in terms of rights, justice and sovereignty. We are really vulnerable in the region, and this is produced through neocolonialism and new forms of colonialism, and the effects of the climate crisis. And so I think about submerged as a reality for countries in the Caribbean, especially small island countries and states and our coastal regions. But I'm also interested in as like a metaphor for what I'm calling limited freedom, and how would I explain that to someone who's just coming to visit, or I want to travel to the Caribbean? I would say that my work is really helping us to think about the most pressing issues of our time, that's not only just affecting the Caribbean, but when we think about migration crisis, climate crisis and rights crisis, I say sexual rights crisis, but we're really at a, really at a difficult moment right now around human rights generally. So, you know, whatever you're feeling in the country that you live in, we're feeling it in multiple ways.

Alice Bloch  35:05 
Hi, I'm Alice, producer of Uncommon Sense. Thanks for listening to Angelique Nixon talking about desire, tourism and the Caribbean. And as ever, we have a request for you. The Sociological Review Foundation is, as you might know, a charity and we believe that sociology is for everyone. We'd be so grateful if you consider contributing to help the Foundation keep bringing this show to you. Just head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense, where you can directly support the making of this show and learn more. And if you're enjoying hearing this episode, why not check out our archive and head to series two, where you can catch Manuela Boatcă on the theme of Europeans. There she challenges mainstream ideas of Europe to show how its borders extend to the Caribbean and beyond, something that's obvious if we acknowledge colonialism's past and present, but is inconvenient for some in political power. That's a great episode that embodies really everything that this show is about, seeing things sideways, more critically and more sociologically. Thanks for listening.

Rosie Hancock  36:14 
Angelique. Here's where we turn to some, either some ideas or thinkers that have given you a kind of uncommon sense yourself. And today we're going to talk about Sylvia Wynter, who I know has really inspired you. For those of you who hadn't heard of her – and I have to confess, I had not heard of her before I was prepping for this episode, and it's so delightful to find out about her – would you be able to tell us who she is and what she's known for? I think she's 97 years old, born in Cuba, one of the region's foremost artists, writers, thinkers. She's a professor emerita at Stanford, I believe. So, if you could just tell us a bit about her and also how you use her in your own work.

Angelique Nixon  36:55 
Yes, Sylvia Wynter has been really a grounding force for my work, since I discovered her and started reading her work in graduate school. She has an essay called "We must sit down together and learn a little about culture", and that was a really foundational essay for me. Her, along with Kamau Brathwaite and others, and Frantz Fanon, really foundational thinkers. So Sylvia Wynter is, you know, a well renowned, I think, the you know, the go to cultural studies and cultural theorist born in Cuba, but Jamaican, yeah, and her work has really interrogated the idea of western liberal humanism. And she has spent, you know, a long, an amazing career in giving us lots of concepts and theories to help us think about who are we, I think, as human beings, like, where do these ideas of being human come from? And she's really grappled with that. She says very plainly, I think, but in also very, very complex ways, that we need to critique the genre of man. And there's something about liberal humanism that is inherently dehumanising for brown, Black and indigenous people, colonised peoples have not been included in the definition of what it means to be human, and in particular the genre of man, quite literally, right? That man was the definition of what it meant to be human. So not only were women all left out, but also all people of colour, right? And she says, we have to grapple with that, and that colonisation and the, you know, and white supremacy, these systems and structures were built on that very concept. And so how do we deal with that? And so I take up her call and her theories to say, how do we challenge this oppression? How do we battle with it? And I draw on her here because I think that she's a core, a core thinker around how do we decolonise? And she says that we have to start with ourselves, right, that we have to resist the structural oppression that actually is already embedded in us, because of education, because of all of the knowledge, the ways of thinking about western knowledge production has been rooted in a number of things, one being that white people have created everything and that Europe is the pinnacle or the height of knowledge, and that anything else is not. So we have to disrupt that thinking, particularly in our educational systems and structures. And so when she says decolonise, she says we have to start with ourselves. We have to root it out and we have to decolonis e everything, and that might mean that we have to dismantle and deconstruct the systems that are around us. And so I take that very seriously in my work and I say, okay, what does that look like and where do I see, in the Caribbean, people doing that? Where can we look to find those places and spaces for inspiration, for momentum, for the stories that help, to help us to create a different sense of self that begins and is for ourselves. It's not for anybody else.

Rosie Hancock  40:32 
Yes, so this, this idea of working on yourself or working on your, on your consciousness in order to resist structural oppression. It's such an interesting one, and it's got some very deep roots, like I'm thinking about that line, emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, which is attributed to Marcus Garvey. But I wonder whether some people might find it maybe confusing about how starting with the individual or thinking about the individual could lead to change. So could you explain to us your take on this?

Angelique Nixon  41:07 
Yeah, I think, you know, for me, this really started, especially in the last, I would say, in the last ten years of living and working in Trinidad over these years. Perhaps it's also my own process of ageing, you know in my 20s and 30s, it was much more organising, being in political and community organising and different kinds of activist circles, and learning myself through that, especially when working with people who experience marginalisation and oppression in very deep and visceral ways, that I see the harm that's caused us, and if we don't do the care work for ourselves and we bring some of that harm into our work, or we burnout. So, for me, I experienced a lot of burnout in, in activism and in organising, and I realised that to sustain ourselves in movements, we have to do some of that care work. That isn't to say that things can't be happening at the same time. And so one of the things that I've done in the last few years, I've really tried to be rooted in the healing justice, for my organising work, for my activism in leading an LGBTQI+ organisation – CAISO: Sex & Gender Justice – with my team, I want us to be rooted in healing because what I think happens is that we just burnout, or we're not able to sustain the movements. And so that's where it came from and I think really, really being influenced and guided by, you know, thinkers and scholars, but also in Caribbean literature and in Black women's writing and women of colour, more broadly, from indigenous to Black women writers, I have found the inspiration to say, okay, we have to do that work with ourselves. And I've developed something called, in workshops and sharing this work, decolonial healing justice. So I've added decolonial to it, because it's not, healing justice is already a practice of thinking about, you know, how oppression affects large groups of people or affects communities. And the decolonial for me is also about that, rooting out and recognising that colonialism did a lot of harm and that some of those ideas about who we are, they're actually not coming from, from us. They come from outside, from, you know, racialised and gendered and sexualised stereotypes. So how do we figure out who we are? It's also about embracing a love of blackness and a love of queerness, you know, contesting some of those dominant narratives that are really a backlash against some of the progress we've made in the last 20, 30, 40 years.

Rosie Hancock  44:02 
I really like how some of what you said there, you know, takes healing really seriously as, as, like a political project. Because I think, you know, it's been, that word healing has maybe been appropriated a bit by the wellness industry, let's say, it's been, like, commodified a bit. But I think, I think you're really flagging some of the political potential and significance that it has, which is, yeah, it's super important. And kind of staying with this theme of healing and support, you did mention right at the very start of the show that you were part of a particularly supportive writing group as a grad student, and that that experience, you know, fed your insistence on being an embodied writer that brings your whole self into your work. So, before we say goodbye, we wondered if you had any tips for students writing today, perhaps people who feel isolated or who work and write alone?

Angelique Nixon  45:00 
Yes, well, I think that we're in a really, in times where there's a lot of isolation. So my tip, my tips would be, find your community, find your people, find spaces, whether it's online or in person, and share, and share your work. I think that especially if you're writing, you know, sharing it and getting feedback is super important, so, but at the same time, you know, writing is, it's an independent and, you know, a process that sometimes you do need that, that time. So, I think there's a balance, right? And then my last suggestion would be, whatever your area is, engage, engage in something else. You know, cross, cross genres, if you will. You know, read fiction if you're thinking about nonfiction. Check out some art if you're working primarily in theory or whatever it is. And I think that's one of the things for me and my, my new work, Submerged Freedom, you know I look at everything from visual art, to J'Ouvert as a cultural expression, to, to literature. You know, writers like Nalo Hopkinson, who give us these beautiful, speculative worlds, you know, to Audre Lorde. So be inspired and, you know, find something you're passionate about and think about what is the thing that you want to shift and change in the world?

Rosie Hancock  46:30 
Well, that's such a beautiful point to end on. Angelique, thanks so much for joining us today. It was really wonderful to get to speak to you.

Angelique Nixon  46:37 
Thank you. Thank you so much. This was a really great experience, and I'm grateful. Thank you.

Rosie Hancock  46:44 
It was so fun. That's all for today. Thanks for joining us to hear Angelique Nixon talking about desire, tourism and the Caribbean. We'll be back next month. Our producer is Alice Bloch, our sound engineer is Dave Crackles. And, as ever, please head to thesociologicalreview.org to learn more about our work, read our manifesto and catch every past episode of Uncommon Sense. That's all on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. Thanks for listening, bye.