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Shortlisted, 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Nonfiction
Exposes the global threat of environmental catastrophe and the forms of erasure that structure Caribbean women’s lives in the overlooked nation of Guyana
Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in which intersectional race and gender formations circumscribe Caribbean women’s lives.
Drawing from archival research and oral history, and examining mass-mediated flashpoints across the African and Indian diasporas—including Rihanna’s sonic routes, ethnic conflict reportage, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking—Global Guyana repositions this marginalized nation as a nexus of social and economic activity which drives popular culture and ideas about sexuality while reshaping the geopolitical and literal topography of the Caribbean region. Oneka LaBennett employs the powerful analytic of the pointer broom to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and global racial capitalism. She illuminates how both oil extraction and sand export are implicated in a well-established practice of pillaging the Caribbean’s natural resources while masking the ecological consequences that disproportionately affect women and children.
Global Guyana uncovers how ecological erosion and gendered violence are entrenched in extractive industries emanating from this often-effaced but pivotal country. Sounding the alarm on the portentous repercussions that ambitious development spells out for the nation’s people and its geographical terrain, LaBennett issues a warning for all of us about the looming threat of global environmental calamity.
"Global Guyana exposes and challenges political economies of erasure, deftly sweeping into our frame and inviting us to reckon with the everyday practices upon which our current global order depends. Guyana materializes in this carefully rendered story as an important point of departure for attending to the transnational circuits of ecologies, economies, and embodied relations, tracked through transnational itineraries of generations of Guyanese women."
"Seeking to reorient the distorted gaze on this wealthy oil hotspot, LaBennett skillfully deploys Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics with keen ethnographic sensibility and nuanced analysis as she sweeps up entangled histories of gendered racialization, extractive economies, and environmental degradation. Along the way, she reminds us of the constructive power of feminist autoethnography, the significance of demystifying the popular, and why political economy matters now more than ever. Global Guyana is both an urgent new Caribbean narrative and scholarly act of reclamation!"
"Timely and necessary, Global Guyana is an incisive call for reckoning with the nature of modernity and capitalism in Guyana and the Caribbean more broadly—not as a failing of Guyanese citizens, but as an indictment of the impossibility of the conditions of modernity itself."
"The work is especially strong when exploring the complex status of Dougla women, those of mixed Indian and Afro-Guyanese origin. Referring to her own experience as a woman of mixed heritage to complement archival and documentary evidence, LaBennett offers a troubling portrait of Afro-Guyanese women’s marginalization."
"This major contribution to Afro-Asian dialogue in the Caribbean takes seriously the specificity of Guyana, the archive, the personal, and the diasporic. It also crafts a trajectory that reminds us why the Caribbean is itself a global formation."
"With Global Guyana, LaBennett reminds readers that we cannot tell the history of Guyana without careful attention to its women and girls. Using the pointer broom analytic, she sweeps stories, some hidden and some in plain sight, into view together to sketch the relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and racial capitalism. Hers is an urgent, necessary new text in Caribbean scholarship and a powerful reclamation of a country she knows well and wants us readers to know better."