Racing climate change in Guyana and Suriname
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211042478 |
| Author | Yolanda Ariadne Collins |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211042478
Politics
2023, Vol. 43(2) 186 –200
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211042478
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Racing climate change in
Guyana and Suriname
Yolanda Ariadne Collins
University of St Andrews, UK
Abstract
Research on the overlap between race and vulnerability to the physical and governance-related
aspects of climate change is often globally scaled, based on extended temporalities, and colour-
coded with non-white populations recognized as being at greater risk of experiencing the adverse
effects of climate change. This article shows how de-centring whiteness from its position as
automatic, oppositional counterpart to blackness can make space for greater recognition of the
role played by the environment in processes of racialization. De-centring whiteness in this way
would form a valuable step towards recognizing how race, constructed in part through shifting
relations between people and the environment, overlaps with climate vulnerability within multiracial
populations. Without discounting the value of global, colour-coded interpretations of race, I point
out the limits of their applicability to understandings of how climate change is unfolding Guyana and
Suriname, two multiracial Caribbean countries. I argue that in the postcolonial period, relations
with the environment take historical constructions of race forward in ways that undergird the
impacts of climate change. Even further, I show how the environment has always played a key,
underacknowledged role in processes of racialization, complicating colour-coded interpretations
of race, whether global or local.
Keywords
Anthropocene, climate change, Guyana, race, Suriname
Received: 8th October 2019; Revised version received: 17th June 2021; Accepted: 3rd August 2021
Introduction
Guyanese historian, academic, and activist, Walter Rodney (1981), commenced his book
A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 with an account of the massive
effort through which the narrow coastland of Guyana, on which the vast majority of its
population now resides, was reclaimed from the sea. He wrote that ‘An enduring Dutch
and European contribution to the technology of Guyanese coastal agriculture was undeni-
able. Yet one must guard against the mystification implicit in the assertion that it was the
Europeans who built the dams and dug the canals’ (Rodney, 1981: 2). Instead, it was
enslaved people from Africa and indentured servants from India who ‘had to face up to
Corresponding author:
Yolanda Ariadne Collins, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9AJ, UK.
Email: yac1@st-andrews.ac.uk
1042478POL0010.1177/02633957211042478PoliticsCollins
research-article2021
Special Issue: Race & Climate Change
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