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Within the Caribbean and beyond, the independent, liberal nation-state has long been viewed as the ultimate horizon—a final break from colonialism, enslavement, and indenture. Yet as liberal sovereignty promises freedom, it requires difference-making and capture. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the policing of urban communities in Trinidad. In this book, Leniqueca Welcome turns to the multicultural nation to provide a new analysis of criminalization, policing, and the state, and demonstrates how antiblackness and violence undergird post-colonial black sovereignty.
Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with politicians, police officers, news personnel, NGO workers, and residents of state-categorized "crime hotspots" in Trinidad, and contextualized through extensive archival research, Welcome argues that "the gang murderer"—the racialized figure around which the state security project is organized—acts as a container for the conflation of blackness, poverty, pathology, and ungovernability that haunts all postcolonial subjects in Trinidad. By illuminating the convergence of state violence and the intra/inter-community violence it purports to mitigate in the afterlife of British colonialism, Welcome pushes us to question the general investment in security apparatuses that seek to address violence with more violence. Instead, she calls for new methods of reading, mitigating, and responding to harm—methods oriented towards liberation rather than racialized death—and through the case of Trinidad makes the urgency of abolition and decolonization politics apparent.
"This book arrived in my hands as protests erupted over the murder of Joshua Samaroo by Trinidad and Tobago police and the retributive arrest of his common-law partner, Kaia Sealy. Come Out of This Worldexposes the false coin of creole nationalism, which champions racial democracy and inclusion while condemning those it deems criminal, unruly, or dispensable. Welcome's ethnography vindicates those condemned by this world and inhabits the wisdom forged by ordinary people in defiance of state violence in the postcolonial Caribbean. With this wisdom as our guide, another world is possible."—Ryan Jobson, The University of Chicago