Towards a Reparatory Theory of Creolization

1 Introduction

This article presents a transtemporal analysis of subsistence land cultivation in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Jamaica and British Guiana that unfolds into a reparatory theory of creolization. I examine the transconjunctural, transcontinental tributaries and hybridisation of specific elements of Greek thought and Islam through the Greek Arabic translation movement in ‘Irāq from the mid-eighth century. I focus on the sites where translations, counter-hegemonic political narratives and Ṣufism shaped one another. I then turn to transdisciplinary, academic cultures in Timbuktu from the fourteenth century. I discuss kaleidoscopic, endlessly retheorised ideas of humanness that coiled through these cultural spheres. I chose to analyse the histories of specific materials used in practices of subsistence land cultivation due to their contemporary political reverberations. Contemporary nationalisms across the world separate the history of Islam from the history of Western philosophy. This transtemporal analysis of provision ground cultivation seeks to illuminate, as Haddour argues, how “Islam is part of the fabric of Western epistemology” (Haddour, 2008, p. 206). I write against the binary between Islam and the West that, as Dabashi argues, is “one of the most dangerous binary delusions of the past two hundred years” (Dabashi, 2008, p. 258). I hope to produce a counter-history to the dominant discourse across the arts and humanities and social sciences that “Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution” (Wolfe, 1982, p. 5). This discursive formation that constructs ancient Greece as the sole originary site of the history of Western thought is often left unexamined in work on creolization and this reroutes the histories of the materials used in the production of Caribbean cultural forms. The focus on Islam is furthermore part of a reconstructive project that, as Wynter argues, “must necessarily entail the un/writing of our present normative defining of the Secular mode of the Subject” (Wynter in Khan, 2020, p. 30). I show how colonial taxonomies that were an essential technology of colonial administration and the contemporary, hegemonic systems of categorisation that descend from them erase these histories of cultural invention (Mamdani, 2013).

I rewrite the histories of some of the materials used to produce practices of subsistence land cultivation in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Jamaica and British Guiana. As Benítez-Rojo argues, “certainly in order to re-read the Caribbean we have to visit the sources from which the widely various elements that contributed to its cultural system flowed” (Benítez-Rojo, 2006, p. 440). This rewriting builds on the argument of Wynter that the sphere of the provision ground was “a source of cultural guerilla resistance to the plantation system” (Wynter, 1971, p. 100). I examine how these syncretic cultural forms were creolized with other materials to produce practices of provision ground cultivation, counter-taxonomies to modern racial typologies of humans and subhumans, counter-forms of categorisation and counter-inscriptions and broader counter-cosmologies that defied colonial racial orders (Meer, 2018; Wynter in Cunningham, 2016). I argue that labourers classified as subhuman produced new historical narratives as they counter-classified and counter-inscribed themselves, and how provision ground cultivation was central to transcontinental plantation economies and the formation of modern British institutions.

This analysis of subsistence cultivation in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Jamaica and British Guiana draws from longue durée and transtemporal approaches to world history that are shaped by transnational studies. Transtemporal work illuminates important historical tributaries that flow through the boundaries of a conjuncture just as transnational studies show how significant branches of the history of a nation stretch beyond its borders (Armitage, 2012; Nelson, 2016). As Armitage argues in his argument for “transtemporal history”:

I have appropriated the term transtemporal history on the model of transnational history to stress elements of linkage and comparison across time, much as transnational history deals with such connections across space... Transnational history is both expansive and controlled: expansive, because it deliberately aims to transcend the histories of bounded nations or states, yet controlled in that it generally treats processes, conjunctures and institutions that crossed the borders of those historical units.

Transnational history does not deny the existence of the national even its effort to go above and beyond the determinants of national space. Likewise, I submit, transtemporal history should be extensive but similarly delimited: it links discrete contexts, moments and periods while maintaining the synchronic specificity of those contexts. Transtemporal history is not transhistorical: it is time-bound not timeless (Armitage, 2012, p. 10).

This analysis is further informed by discussions on reparatory history and our responsibilities to reckon with histories of empire in relation to the economic and cultural development of colonial nations (Hall, 2018; Mamdani, 2020). This transtemporal, transdisciplinary discussion of subsistence land cultivation in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Jamaica and British Guiana then unfolds into a reparatory theory of creolization. I argue for the study of subterranean, submarine histories of cultural invention and counter-taxonomisation in the Caribbean that are banished by hegemonic forms of categorisation during the current conjuncture that is defined by new wars, ultranationalisms and internationalisms.

2 The Intertwined, Transconjunctural, Transcontinental Routes of Greek Thought and Islam

Contemporary hegemonic conceptions of progress, during the global age of the “War on Terror,” are defined by ideas of secular modernity and sexual freedom that rest upon inventions of a singular, crystallised, premodern Islam (Butler, 2008). This discursive formation that aligns the secular with the modern and free and religion with the premodern and unfree is fabricated through a separation of the historical trajectories of secular and religious thought (Asad, 2003). Butler observes however that “certain secular ideals could not have been developed without their transmission and elaboration through Islamic practices” (Butler, 2008, p. 20) pointing to the history of the Greek Arabic translation movement and its contemporary importance.^[1] This rereading of the Greek Arabic translation movement focuses on heterotopic sites where translations, counter-hegemonic political narratives and Ṣufism shaped one another as it traces kaleidoscopic discursive threads on humanness. It illustrates how colonial typologies and the hegemonic postcolonial taxonomies that they gave rise to render these histories of cultural formation unimaginable. This discussion broadens understandings of transdisciplinary academic cultures in Timbuktu from the fourteenth century and how multidisciplinary syncretic materials were creolized in provision grounds in modern Caribbean colonies to form rehumanising counter-discourses to modern racial taxonomies of humans and subhumans (Wynter, 1971).

The Greek Arabic translation movement emerged during the rule of the ‘Abbāssid Caliphate and was dedicated to the translation of a vast range of Greek philosophical and scientific texts and others that were written in Aramaic, Hebrew, different Persian dialects and Sanskrit and applying them to different debates (Zadeh, 2017). Gutas introduces the Greek Arabic Translation Movement. He argues:

A century and a half of Graeco-Arabic scholarship has amply documented that from the middle of the eighth century to the end of the tenth, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books that were available throughout the Eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East were translated into Arabic. What this means is that all of the following Greek writings, other than the exceptions just noted, which have reached us from Hellenistic, Roman and late antiquity times, and many more that have not survived in the original Greek, were subjected to the transformative magic of the translator’s pen: astrology and alchemy and the rest of the occult sciences; the subjects of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and theory of music; the entire field of Aristotelian philosophy throughout its history: metaphysics, ethics, physics, zoology, botany, and especially logic – the Organon; all the health sciences: medicine, pharmacology, and veterinary science: and various other marginal genres of writings, such as Byzantine handbooks on military science (the tactica), popular collections of wisdom sayings, and even books on falconry – all these subjects passed through the hands of the translators. (Gutas, 1998, p. 1)

The translations added new material to these bodies of work. Philosophical and scientific ideas were retheorised as they were interpreted, applied to different discussions and harnessed to concepts from other disciplinary discourses. A centre of the translation movement was ‘Irāq particularly in Baghdad, al-Hīra, Mawșil, Kūfa and Bașra. Each site was defined by the syncretised cultures of subjects including those who were classified, using the taxonomies of the authors who I am drawing from, as Aramaic and Persian speaking, Jews and Christians and urban and rural, northern and southern and sedentarised and nomadic Arabs (Algeriani & Mohadi, 2019; Gutas, 1998; Haddour, 2008). The translation movement was not solely the domain of the affluent. This work, that was significantly funded by the political classes, was conducted in different urban and rural localities and subjects of different occupations, ethnicities, religions and sects were chosen to be translators based on their skills, and they all became invested in its development. Translation was not peripheral but central to everyday social life. As Algeriani and Mohadi argue:

The active translation movement during the ‘Abbāsid Dynasty period was carried out in different places such as public and private houses of wisdom, houses of scientific research, private libraries, mosque libraries, schools and institutions that were spread throughout the Islamic peninsula... they were also centres of writing, publishing, reading, copying and storage of books, transcripts, maps etc. (Algeriani & Mohadi, 2019, p. 1302)

Ideas of accessible scholarship were popularised and free materials such as ink and paper and free services such as lecturing and copywriting were offered in some spaces (Cooperson, 2017). The proliferation of translations was intertwined with the production of new syncretised cultural forms such as new calligraphic techniques and rhetorical styles, and they co-existed with political inequalities, different forms of servitude and shifting histories of persecution. As Zadeh notes:

The ethos of this age figures as one in which cross-pollination and multicultural interactions were encouraged by synthesizing disparate traditions of learning within a polyphonic cultural matrix, eventually legitimized through an imperial process of appropriation and naturalization. (Zadeh, 2017, p. 22)

The translations produced new concepts and theories that shaped Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy and theology that were written in different languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. Jewish, Christian and Muslim authors did not approach their studies of Greek philosophy separately. They borrowed ideas from one another as they worked together in spaces such as libraries, schools and houses of multidisciplinary research. In his discussion of al-Kindī who was an interdisciplinary scholar who commissioned and edited translations of Greek philosophy which he synthesised with Islamic theology, Adamson argues:

Figures like al-Kindī and al-Fārābī championed [Greek philosophical] texts and insisted that they contained truths of paramount importance for any reader – whether pagan, Christian or Muslim. Yet these same thinkers pondered the question of how the Hellenic philosophical heritage could be reconciled with the teachings of Islam, and whether it might offer answers to questions being posed by contemporary Muslim theologians. This dynamic too went beyond the confines of the Islamic faith, as Jewish and Christian authors staged their own appropriation of Aristotle and Neoplatonism. (Adamson, 2018, pp. 5–6)

Hybridised monsters of the translations such as serpent dragons were found across Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Zoroastrian writings (Kuehn, 2014). Monstrous and demonic beings in Islamic work resembled creatures that appeared in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts (Zadeh, 2017).

Debates on humanness in the sites where the translations, the counter-hegemonic political narratives of the historically marginalised and Ṣufism bled into one another further shaped syncretic Jewish, Christian and Islamic formations of gender under ‘Abbāssid rule. There were competing discourses on gender and humanness in the translations rather than a singular homogenous shared discourse or three distinct, syncretised ideologies. Ahmed makes a distinction between what she calls “establishment Islam” and the “ethical voice” of Islam which can also be applied to Judaism and Christianity in ‘Abbāssid society. She argues:

Arguably, therefore, even as it [Islam] instituted, in the initiatory society, a hierarchical structure as the basis of relations between men and women, it also preached, in its ethical voice (and this is the case with Christianity and Judaism as well), the moral and spiritual equality of all human beings. Arguably, therefore, even as it instituted a sexual hierarchy, it laid the ground, in its ethical voice, for the subversion of the hierarchy... Unheeded by the dominant classes and by the creators of establishment Islam, that ethical voice was, in contrast, emphasised by some often-marginal or lower-class groups who challenged the dominant political order and its interpretation of Islam, including its conception of the meaning of gender and the arrangements regarding women. (Ahmed, 2021, pp. 238–239)

There is no broad consensus on how class in ‘Abbāssid society can be defined yet there were clear distinctions between the dominant, affluent political classes and the lower classes (Gutas, 1998). The counternarratives produced by marginalised communities, that Ahmed describes as the “ethical voice” (Ahmed, 2021, p. 238), dispersed through everyday vernacular practices and some of the public spaces that were aligned with the local intellectual cultures of the translation movement. There were intricate and incommensurable interpretations of gender within and between classes, and ideas were borrowed across cultural spaces and disciplines to form them (Al-Azmeh, 1993). Arguments for a one sex theorisation which drew from Galenic work in biology, medicine, philosophy and logic circulated. Ideas of porous borders between genders, gender ambiguity, androgyny and sexual continuums were further discussed. These discourses did not divide and align specific bodily features, qualities, duties and entitlements between men and women. The fluidity or immutability of attributes and the connections between gender, humanness, the elements and the universe were debated. There were other formulations of gender that drew from the Hippocratic corpus that variously argued for more binary models and for sexual continuums defined by unalterable properties. Interpretations that advanced a dualistic model of sexual difference and philosophies which sought to fuse one sex theorisations with ideas of two essential sexes circulated through the discursive spheres of the translation movement (Gadelrab, 2010; Laquer, 1990). Scientific and literary discourses dispersed notions of courtly love that did not solely refer to love between men and women and documented collectives that debated ideas of sexual desire, sexual pleasure and love between women (Amer, 2009). There were narratives on gender fluidity, sex work and autonomy from men circulating through the prose, poetry and song of subjects of all classes. As Amer argues:

In parallel to the overt descriptions of lesbian sexual practices in medieval Arabic writings (erotic, theological, or medical) one also encounters numerous examples of eroticized gender bending in Arabic literature. Tales of cross-dressed heroines, including stories of female warriors and Amazons, poems describing slave girls dressed as male cupbearers, little-known Sufi (mystical) rituals, the ambiguous use of masculine pronouns to refer to the beloved in the courtly lyric, and even the social practices of some women in Islamicate courts are some of the unrecognized spaces where expressions of homoeroticism in the medieval Arabic tradition may well have occurred. (Amer, 2009, p. 225)^[2]

Debates on gender were central to discussions on humanness. Ideas of inherent or cultivated attributes and intrinsic rights and roles and whether they can be ascribed to specific genders or a universal human subject were explored. There were multiple discourses on the distinctiveness of the human and essential human needs. Arguments on the responsibilities of all subjects such as common ethical obligations to confront injustice and universal potentiality were debated. There were discussions on the soul, the struggle to master the desires of the self and the correspondence between reformation of the self and social progress. Notions of humanness threaded through debates on justice, love and peace. Numerous discourses on gender and humanness were dispersed through the vernacular and intellectual cultures of ‘Abbāssid society. As Gadelrab notes:

The learned community of medieval Islam possessed a significant quantity of ideas and theories about sex differences, most important of which were the conflicting opinions of Galen and Aristotle. It was not long before medieval Muslim scholarship became engaged in discussions about sex differences and reproduction that had been left undecided by ancient authorities… The medieval discourses on sex differences were in fact a reflection of the complexity of relations and interactions between different intellectual circles in medieval Islam. (Gadelrab, 2010, p. 59)

The “ethical vision” of Islam, that Ahmed defines as “stubbornly egalitarian” (Ahmed, 2021, p. 63) and associates with the marginalised communities of ‘Abbāssid society absorbed and shaped elements of Ṣūfī prose and poetry. Ṣufism has been defined, as the Moroccan Ṣūfī Aḥmad Zarrūq argued hundreds of years later in the fifteenth century, in “nearly two thousand ways” (Zarrūq, 2005, p. 21). Diouf observes however that Ṣūfīs have always tended to “emphasize rituals and devotional practices such as the recitation of the Koran, incantations (dhikr), music to attain spiritual ecstasy (sama), meditation, acts of devotion, asceticism, retreats (khalwa) and fasting as techniques to get closer to God” (Diouf, 1998, p5). Ṣufism is often synonymised with Islamic mysticism and cannot be severed from Jewish and Christian mysticism and asceticism. Ṣūfī principles and practices were, from their beginnings, assembled through drawing materials from diverse sources together. As Solares observes, “from its very origins, Sufism itself includes a primordial, Middle Eastern Islamic assimilation of pre-Islamic practices that incorporated pagan, Christian, Persian and even Hinduist rituals amongst others” (Solares, 2019, p. 2). Counterhegemonic discourses circulated through Ṣufism in ‘Abbāssid society inspiring hostility from the political classes. Philosophical materials from the translations bled into Ṣūfī doctrines on the universe, the oneness of God and humanness (Adamson, 2018). The quest for self-transformation, the pursuit of unification with God and reconciliation with an essential self and the connections between knowledge, intuition and revelation were extensively discussed. Learning through wandering the world alone, the need for solitude and contemplation, the desire to face all other beings with love and the necessity of disillusionment were debated in multidisciplinary writings and other art forms. There were discussions on love as intoxication, enchantment and ecstasy, on longing for another as a metaphor for the desire for unification with God and experiencing divine love through the love of the beloved (Hoffman-Ladd, 1992). Love was defined in terms of alchemy and wonder, magnificence and grace, peace and humility and as a unifying force that dissolved hate. These discussions intersected with others on ethics, bravery and chivalry. Theorisations of divine love and love for all other beings were harnessed to notions of beauty. The splendour of the oceans, skies, stars, planets, flowers and trees were theorised as expressions of a divine presence and a reflection of the interconnectedness of God, nature and all beings (Schimmel, 1977). As Farah argues:

Converts to Ṣufism had known and appreciated love and its beauty, which they now transferred to the Divine. In olden times when spurned, love could sharpen the sense of yearning for the beloved, and denial of access could induce such states as abstinence and chastity, yearning and intense desire. These were simply transferred to God in a Ṣūfī context. An awareness of beauty, appreciated by both God and the Prophet, served to fuel the impulses of love. Admiration for and preoccupation with beauty graces much of Ṣūfī literature. (Farah, 2014, p. 72)

The turn towards Ṣufism was entwined with the desire to become free. This quest was tied to the longing to transcend forms of categorisation such as class and gender as liberation was sought through renunciation of the worldly self. This desire for release from categorisation and the confines of the classified body was connected to the political ideal of classlessness and the project of liberating the consciousness of the self-disciplining subject (Hassani, 2020).

Subjects who were classified into multiple gender categories from urban and rural and prosperous and poor communities were important transmitters of mystical modes of thought (Azad, 2013; Schimmel, 1982). The scholar, teacher and mystic Rābi’a al-‘Adawiyya came from a poor family in Bașra in the late eighth century and was defined as a Ṣūfī in the ninth century (Cornell, 2019). Rābi’a, who was a singer before becoming an ascetic, synthesised ideas of sexual love with notions of divine love that shaped writings on love by later Ṣūfīs such as Al-Rūmī (Adamson, 2018; Farah, 2014). The history of Rābi’a illuminates the mystical or Ṣūfī endeavour to transcend categorisation and how human properties were ascribed across gender (Azad, 2013). Rābi’a was attributed with qualities such as self-mastery and was variously classified as a woman or a man, gender fluid, androgynous or as a man and a woman (Adamson, 2018; Hoffman-Ladd, 1992; Milad & Taheri, 2021). As Schimmel observes:

One should not be misled by the constant use of the word “man” in the mystical literature of the Islamic languages; it merely points to the ideal human being who has reached proximity to God where there is no distinction of sexes; and Rābi’a is the prime model of this proximity. (Schimmel, 1982, p. 151)

Rābi’a was not an exception, and there are numerous Ṣūfī figures who are similarly described as a woman and a man and as androgynous, gender fluid or unclassifiable. The histories of Ṣufism and Islam more broadly are punctuated by mystics and scholars such as Fāṭima Umm ‘Alī who came from a more affluent family and community of scholars from Balkh a generation later, and ‘A’ishah al-Bā’ūniyyah who lived in Damascus in the fifteenth century whose work notably did not replicate binary notions of gender (al-Bā’ūniyyah 2020; Homerin, 2014). This took place as thousands of Muslim women scholars were documented in biographical collections, which became a significant sub-genre of Islamic historiography (Azad, 2013; Nadwi, 2016).

Timbuktu from the fourteenth century was marked by new work that further developed the Greek Arabic translations particularly in the subjects of theology, jurisprudence, Ṣufism, logic, literature, rhetoric, poetry, mathematics and agriculture that furthered discussions on humanness, learning and knowledge and produced distinctive forms of pedagogy (Kane, 2016; Ulam, 2004). This body of work was created before early modern racial ideologies began to circulate across continents, the emergence of colonial empires and the forced removal of multidisciplinary manuscripts from Timbuktu to European cities (Haīdara, 2011; Mignolo, 2011). As Diagne observes, “centuries before Europe colonised the continent and questioned the primitive character of African ‘mentality’, Aristotelian logic was being discussed by local African scholars in places like Timbuktu” (Diagne, 2008, p. 19). Contemporary hegemonic binaries between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, African and Arab cultures, African Animism and Arabian Islam and Judaism and Islam that are shaped by colonial racial taxonomies erase how the history of Islam in Timbuktu and Africa more broadly is a significant branch of African history. As Kane argues:

Islam and the Arabic language are no more foreign in Africa than they are in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. Islam was introduced to the African continent before it spread in Arabia, let alone to the neighbouring countries of the Peninsula. The Prophet Muhammad sent dozens of his companions to Ethiopia before the beginning of the Muslim calendar. (Kane, 2016, p. 208)

Timbuktu was an important trade centre and university from the early fourteenth century. It was “a city of scholars” (Saad, 1983, p. 225) defined in all periods of its history by shifting hierarchies and categories of academics who were specialists in areas such as Greek philosophy and were further classified as scholar traders and scholar farmers. Scholars travelled between different centres of learning such as Cairo, Mecca and Timbuktu forming translocal academic and book trading cultures (Haïdara, 2011; Saad, 1983; Singleton, 2004; Sukdaven et al., 2015). The further development of the Greek Arabic translations and retheorisations of justice and restitution was entwined with the production of new pedagogical practices emerging out of Timbuktu such as teaching in small seminars and methods of conflict resolution that were executed by travelling “ambassadors of peace” (Ulam, 2004, p. 1).

Timbuktu was also an important centre for Jewish scholars, and some of the manuscripts were written in Arabic and Hebrew (Ulam, 2004). Other multidisciplinary academic work, mythology and poetry, including texts on Ṣufism, were written in Arabic and languages such as Bambara, Fulfulde, Hausa, Songhai, Swahili, Tamashek and Wolof using Arabic script. This practice drew linguistic materials from different languages into one another, and local dialects of each language were produced in different areas. New consonants, sounds, words, concepts and forms of calligraphy were invented (Diagne, 2008; Hassane, 2008; Sukdaven et al., 2015). Some texts were written and taught in Arabic with accompanying written and oral commentaries in different West African languages (Ogunnaike, 2020). The same body of ideas was thus discussed in different languages simultaneously. This production of new linguistic forms that was entwined with new cultural identities was erased by colonial taxonomies of race, ethnicity and tribe that began to emerge in the late fifteenth century (Kane, 2016; Mamdani, 2020).

The translations and Ṣufism continued to shape one another in Timbuktu. Islam in the region became progressively aligned with Ṣufism which was defined before the emergence of Ṣūfī orders in the eighteenth century by family and scholarly lineage (Ogunnaike, 2020). Ṣūfī forms in Timbuktu were not only produced through gathering hybridised materials from different Islamic centres. Earlier pre-Islamic resources continued to be used. As el-Bara argues, “they ‘recuperated’ and mobilised former pre-Islamic practices and beliefs” (el-Bara, 2008, p. 196) illuminating how hybridisation and cultural continuity are not opposed to one another. Ṣūfī philosophy in Timbuktu drew from the earlier Greek Arabic translation movement in ‘Irāq and from contemporaneous South Asian traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism which simultaneously absorbed components of Ṣūfī traditions from Timbuktu (Mamdani, 2012). As Ogunnaike notes, “West African Sufism has always been connected to and influential in international networks of Islamic scholarship and spirituality in places such as Marrakesh, Fez, Tlemcen, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Mecca and Medine, Yemen, Baghdad, and even Iran and India” (Ogunnaike, 2020, p. 7). Multidisciplinary discussions on humanness and the desire to transcend categorisation continued. Sukdaven et al. (2015) detail in their discussion of their translation of the Timbuktu manuscript of the Ṣūfī Yusuf ibn Said how Said presented a gender neutral narrative as he advanced an idea of a universal human subject. The desire to unify with God was entwined with the longing to transcend separations imposed by forms of categorisation such as gender and return to an essential self. Diouf observes how these discussions took place during a historical period when girls of all classes were taught to read and write and there were innumerable renowned teachers and scholars who were women (Diouf, 1998). Transdisciplinary ideas of humanness were further developed through debates on the autonomy of the individual and the connections between intentionality and action (Diagne, 2008). Scientific texts on Ṣūfī and other ascetic and mystical practice written in Timbuktu produced new ideas of truth, typologies of desire and love, forms of intellect and prescriptions on how to live in peace and wonder. These theorisations threaded through discussions of knowledge in Ṣūfī texts. The cultivation of the epistemological and ethical practices of students took place through the performance of specific exercises and companionship with a Ṣūfī master. Knowledge was not solely defined by transmission through reading and listening but through revelation which would lead to the transformation of the consciousness of the student and knowledge of and reconciliation with God and the self. Ṣūfī masters and students were simultaneously engaged with the study of other disciplines and their philosophies of teaching and learning continued to seep into other disciplinary discourses.

The transconjunctural, transcontinental tributaries and hybridisation of Greek thought and Islam that can be traced through kaleidoscopic ideas of humanness that coiled through the Greek Arabic translation movement in ‘Irāq from the mid eighth century and the academic cultures of Timbuktu from the fourteenth century document how late eighteenth and nineteenth-century colonial taxonomies and the hegemonic postcolonial systems of categorisation that they gave rise to erase these histories. Divisions between Greek or Western philosophy and Islamic philosophy and theology, Greek monsters and Jewish, Christian and Islamic creatures and the idea of bounded, regional or continental cultures render these histories of cultural invention unthinkable. Binaries between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, African and Arab cultures, African Animism and Arabian Islam, African and Asian cultures, Judaism and Islam, Ṣufism and Islam and urban and rural, sedentarised and nomadic and textual and oral cultures that are tied to colonial taxonomies of race, tribe, caste, religion and sex further conceal these histories and cartographies of cultural formation (Mamdani, 2004). Firm distinctions between the religious and the secular, the monolingual and the multilingual, hybridisation and cultural continuity, the empirical and the theoretical and men and women erase these histories of cultural syncretism. These histories of cultural invention illuminate the transconjunctural, transcontinental, transcolonial production of materials used in practices of subsistence land cultivation and counter-taxonomies and counter-cosmologies. This analysis that traces shifting ideas of humanness furthers understandings of “intertwinements” and “points of entanglement” (Glissant, 1999, p. 26) and the “braid of histories” (Bernabé et al., 1990, p. 887) that define the colonial Caribbean.

3 Transcolonial Subsistence Land Cultivation in Jamaica and British Guiana

The transcontinental, hybridised elements of Greek thought and Islam that travelled through the Greek Arabic translation movement in ‘Irāq from the mid-eighth century and academic cultures of Timbuktu from the fourteenth century were used to produce new transcolonial Caribbean cultural and philosophical formations.

Medieval European systems of slavery preceded the development of Caribbean plantations. Diouf argues:

The development of the European-African slave trade was not unique or unusual; Europeans had been dealing in slaves for centuries. Medieval Europe traded in European slaves on a large scale. Slavs, Irish, Welsh, Greeks, Scandinavians, Russians, and Turks furnished the bulk of the slave population across Europe up to the middle of the fifteenth century. They worked as domestics, in mines, on farms, on the sugar plantations of the Portuguese, and in the harbors. (Diouf, 1998, p. 16)

The beginnings of the universalisation of global racial capitalism, Caribbean plantation development and modern racial ideologies grew out of these histories of enslavement that can be reconnected to Roma slavery in the Romanian principalities (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Meer, 2018; Necula, 2012; Robinson, 2019). Caribbean plantations were settlements, and their borders extended beyond the fields where crops were grown. As McKittrick argues:

As I note in Demonic Grounds, the plantation is often defined as a “town,” with a profitable economic system and local political and legal regulations. The plantation normally contains a main house, an office, a carriage house, barns, a slave auction block, a garden area, slave quarters and kitchen, stables, a cemetery, and a building or buildings through which crops are prepared, such as a mill or a refinery; the plantation will also include a crop area and fields, woods, and a pasture. Plantation towns are linked to transport - rivers, roads, small rail networks - that enable the shipping of crops, slaves, and other commodities. This is a meaningful geographic process to keep in mind because it compels us to think about the ways the plantation became key to transforming the lands of no one into the lands of someone, with black forced labor propelling an economic structure that would underpin town and industry development in the Americas. (McKittrick, 2013, p. 8)

There was great diversity in the structure of plantations and the organisation of labour (Giovannetti, 2006). Each plantation settlement followed similar stages of development but at different times which produced divergent labour needs during the same period. Each planter initially used different combinations of indentured, other contracted, convict, vagrant and legally free yet unpaid European labourers and enslaved Indians before the mass transportation of enslaved Africans.^[3] As Hoefte observes however, “A clear-cut division between different categories of labour – ‘slavery,’ ‘indenture,’ and ‘free’ – turns a blind eye to distinctions at different times and locations” (Hoefte, 2012, p. 4). The agricultural farms and industrial factories of plantations in colonies such as Antigua and Barbados were defined by the production of a singular crop namely sugarcane yet other islands such as Grenada were characterised by the cultivation of several export crops such as sugarcane, indigo, cocoa, coffee and tobacco (Franklyn, 2007). New forms of subsistence agriculture were produced on land in plantation settlements where export crops could not be grown such as hillside and mountainous areas. The cultivation of this land or provision grounds, which were separate areas from the plots of land next to the homes of labourers, saved the planters the cost and inconvenience of importing food which was often disrupted by wars between imperial powers (Wynter, 1971). As Bates notes, “Many planters considered this scheme as a beneficial cost-cutting measure that relieved their dependence on imported provisions and that used land unsuitable for cash-crop production” (Bates, 2016, p. 79). Land in Caribbean colonies such as Antigua and St. Kitts could not however be allocated for subsistence cultivation as it was all used to grow sugar. Land and time were legally accorded to provision ground cultivation yet there was great variability in practice within and between colonies. Time on weekends and Christian holidays were generally allocated to subsistence cultivation and to sell surplus food and handicrafts at local markets to other traders and even to the planter class. As Mintz argues:

Long before the period of apprenticeship (1838), Jamaican slaves were producing not only most of their own subsistence but also an astoundingly large surplus of foods, the bigger part of which ended up on the tables of free people, including the planters themselves. In effect, what had begun as a technique for saving the planters the costs of supplying their slaves with food had then become an essential basis for the food supply of the nonslave population. (Mintz, 1985, p. 134)

Subsistence cultivation practices were produced through fragmenting, combining and reinscribing Indian, European and African landscaping and agricultural methods and broader forms of agrarian life that had all followed transconjunctural, transnational tributaries. Local land cultivation practices in Iberia and Sicily such as techniques of irrigation had been syncretised with agricultural practices from West Asia from the eighth century, and these syntheses led to new innovations across neighbouring regions in Europe and Africa and even the Americas (Kirchner et al., 2023). Indian landscaping practices before European settlement were further creolized as they travelled through regional trade networks that stretched across the Amazon Basin, the Andes and the Caribbean islands (Hill & Santos-Granero, 2002; Whitehead et al., 2010). Methods of land cultivation were honed through continuous long-distance travel and the borrowing of different practices. This history of syncretism in the Americas is erased by the racial, ethnic, linguistic and cultural categories of nations, tribes and sub-tribes that were further developed across nineteenth-century disciplines such as linguistics, archaeology and anthropology. It further contests distinctions between the cultures of the highlands and lowlands and the binary between the civilisations and simple societies of Indians in the Americas.

Different elements of these hybridised practices were continuously combined with others to produce new methods of land cultivation in each locality (Besson, 1987). From the late seventeenth century, enslaved and other forced labourers drew from Indian land cultivation practices and from the resources of maroon peasantries and others who squatted in land outside plantation settlements (Mintz, 1989, 1996). Indian crops in Jamaica and in the lands that would become British Guiana were grown using methods from multiple, syncretic African, European and Indian sources. As Berleant-Schiller and Pulsipher note, “the Maroon groups of the former Guianas... who escaped slavery and forged a new society and culture from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, adopted Indian staple crops during that period” (Berleant-Schiller & Pulsipher, 1986, p. 18).

The formerly enslaved left plantations when land was available elsewhere following the legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape and the expansion of slavery in India and during the period of apprenticeship. Some left as planters began to charge them rent for their houses and provision grounds (Bolland, 1981; Hoefte, 2012; Major, 2012). In Jamaica, many relocated to church communities that had been established by Methodist and Baptist missionary churches, purchased a share of land from the church with capital acquired through subsistence cultivation and became independent farmers as what Hall describes as the “second slavery of indenture” (Hall, 2003, p. 30) was instituted (Mintz, 1996). Some of the formerly enslaved and their descendants migrated to lands that became the colonies of British Guiana, Trinidad and Panama and new villages were created there through the purchase of land by collectives and individuals (Besson, 1987).

The “race-making institution” (Trouillot, 2002, p. 200) of the plantation continued to be “layered” (Mintz, 1996, p. 48) with indentured and other forced labourers from other colonies and nations to meet imperial labour demands. Labourers from China and India were transported to Jamaica in greater numbers in comparison to Haiti and Puerto Rico. Smaller collectives were brought from China and India to Cuba and Trinidad as traders, following the transportation of indentured labourers from the same regions, which led to the formation of distinct classes in each Caribbean colony (Mintz 1996, 2012). German indentured labourers became a separate community from Germans who were a part of the planter class in Jamaica (Zacharias & Mullings-Lawrence, 2020). Indian and Javanese indentured labourers arrived in British Guiana, Jamaica, Suriname and Trinidad as subjects from the Levant were transported to Haiti and Jamaica as both indentured labourers and to provide services needed by existing plantation societies. The transcolonial histories of British Guiana and Jamaica were further marked by continuous multidirectional intraregional migration. The formerly enslaved of Barbados relocated to the plantations of Antigua, St. Croix and British Guiana under forms of indenture that were similar to African and Asian indenture (Brown, 2005; Rodney, 1977). Provision grounds or time allocated to subsistence cultivation were sometimes included in terms of indenture (Adderley, 2006).

These varied and intricate histories of the transportation of labourers from different colonies to British Guiana and Jamaica, following emancipation and the period of apprenticeship, led to distinctive constellations of cultural materials that labourers could draw from in each locality in each colony. Labourers who began to work in each plantation settlement drew from the creolized techniques of land cultivation that had been produced by the labourers who preceded them and who may have continued to cultivate their provision grounds. They further drew from the agricultural practices of the new Caribbean peasantries that were variably constituted by squatter farmers, maroons, fisher folk and indentured labourers who had fled plantations and were based in areas of land outside settlements such as mountainous regions or jungle. Vast amounts of rice, which had become a staple crop in plantation colonies such as British Guiana, were even exported to other Caribbean colonies such as Cuba as Javanese and Indian indentured labourers exchanged types of rice and practices of rice farming with maroons in Suriname further illuminating the transcolonial formation of subsistence cultivation practices in British Guiana and Jamaica (Ramdayal et al., 2021).

The British and Dutch transported enslaved African Muslims before the British moved recaptive and indentured African, Indian and Levantine Muslims to British Guiana. Their arrival to the British West Indies is documented in art, photography and texts such as autobiographies and letters that were written in both Arabic and Ajami (Diouf, 1998, 2009). The philosophical materials that labourers drew from included hybridised Muslim, Christian and Jewish forms. Enslaved Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity as Islam was classified with witchery and paganism yet plantation ledgers, newspapers, fugitive notices and court records detailed how Islamic practices continued to be performed (Diouf, 2009). The categorisation of Islam with sorcery was shaped by the involvement of Muslims in different forms of resistance and revolts. Diouf details how “In the West Indies, they had formed maroon communities under the protection of the Caribs and were particularly destructive” (Diouf, 1998, p. 147). Forced conversions and the unceasing performance of Muslim practices such as the use of Islamic amulets and engagement with Christian and Jewish ideas continued to syncretise Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophical formations. This produced the possibility of multiple religious affiliations in British Guiana and Jamaica that Warner-Lewis (2009) documents amongst African indentured labourers in Trinidad. As Diouf argues:

Reading the Bible could also present a real intellectual and religious interest to the Muslims and be a true comfort, for it enabled them to go back to a spiritual world they had devoted many years of their free lives to study. They all knew the characters and stories of the Holy Book, since the Koran speaks abundantly of the Old and New Testaments... Besides the intellectual interest, the Muslims may have had another reason to be eager to receive Bibles in Arabic: to have them was the most efficient way - when Korans were not available – of preserving their literacy. (Diouf, 2009, p. 112)

Qur’ans arrived amidst the few belongings that indentured labourers were allowed to bring with them and this led to the further creolization of Jewish, Christian and Islamic concepts and the teachings and practices of other religious formations. Warner-Lewis (2009) observes how Islamic philosophical and theological ideas and the conventions that they were tied to were combined with others in religious formations such as “Revival, Zion, and Pukkumina in Jamaica, and the analogous Shakers, Shouters, and Spiritual Baptists of the eastern Caribbean” (Warner-Lewis, 2009, p. 260). New creolized formations of Christianity and Islam and religions and ethnicities which could not be categorised using colonial racial and religious typologies were criminalised (Warner-Lewis, 2009).

The theological and autobiographical writings of two West African Muslims who were enslaved in Jamaica in the early 1800s, namely Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu from the Ivory Coast and Abū Bakr al-Siddīq from Timbuktu and their letters to one another document how West African Ṣufism shaped the philosophical questions that they raised in their writings (Diouf, 1998; Khan, 2020). This can be seen, as Khan observes, in “the tensions between the spiritual and material, the sacred and the profane, and superficial and hidden truths” (Khan, 2020, p. 36). Discussions on the struggle against corruption of the self, the ethics of converting to Christianity and the endeavour to live in accordance with principles of honour and justice whilst enslaved furthered these ideas and philosophies. They adapted and developed West African Ṣūfī concepts of health, healing, love and charity as they synthesised them with other philosophical materials (Ware, 2014; Warner-Lewis, 2009).

Fishing and hunting techniques and practices of creating tools were cultivated in provision grounds. Forms of ridging, sectioning land, fencing and intercropping using different combinations of crops were invented. Methods of tilling soil, preparing seed beds, selecting and sowing seeds, planting seedlings and saplings, arranging and positioning herbs, fruit, vegetables and trees and feeding, pruning, harvesting and preserving crops were produced. Practices of protecting crops from insects, birds and other animals, accommodating wildlife through manufacturing pesticides which did not harm them, raising animals and veterinary care were cultivated. Spaces to sit and wind breaks to shelter growing plants and reduce wind speed were created as the edges of the cultivation ground were marked using borders and paths. New methods of food preparation and preservation, techniques of marketing and saving and local trade routes were further produced (Benítez-Rojo, 2018; Berleant-Schiller & Pulsipher, 1986; Besson, 1987; Mintz, 1996; Wynter, 1971). This cultural production took place as hegemonic forms of classification that ordered subjects into categories and subcategories such as race and tribe erased and replaced thousands of years of migration, cultural hybridisation and fluid taxonomisation (Mamdani, 2013, 2020; Wynter, 2003). Subhumans were invented, through classification and the ascription of defining prehuman or inhuman features and incapacities, as a being who is only able to perform forms of labour such as agricultural, domestic or industrial work. This attribution of immutable, essential biological properties thus left those classified as subhuman with responsibility for the servitude and enslavement that they faced as it absolved the transcontinental imperial British state (Narayan, 2023). Historical narratives that defined each classification using essential physiological, psychological and cultural properties and harnessed each category to a distinct past and future were conveyed through hegemonic taxonomies. This invention of separate histories and cultures further erased the connections between colonial wealth cultivation, land expropriation and enslavement and the formation of modern Britain (Hall, 2018).

Wynter argues however that, “The plot too has its own history. A secretive history expressed in folk songs […]” (Wynter, 1971, p. 101). These techniques of farming in provision grounds were entwined with counter-discourses to modern racial typologies of humans and subhumans. New methods of provision ground cultivation were produced as philosophical and theological discourses such as Ṣufism were drawn from and combined with other materials. Ideas of a singular humanity that did not rest upon inventions of the subhuman were expressed. Fishing, hunting, dividing each provision ground and selecting, combining, planting and protecting assorted food crops conveyed ideas of labourers as beings that require and have the right to sustenance. They did not produce small variations and quantities that would keep labourers alive yet underfed and malnourished. These cultivation practices countered ideas of labourers that exist to be exhausted and replaced and imaginations of beings who have no consciousness or history. The production of methods of animal husbandry and veterinary care further reflected how labourers possessed both cultural, scientific and philosophical resources to draw from and capacities for invention that were denied to them by modern racial typologies and interconnected taxonomies such as tribe, religion, caste and sex. Subsistence cultivation practices that were formed across plantations and colonies countered the idea of a being who does not belong to any social world inside or beyond the plantation.

Techniques of food preparation and conservation, marketing and saving reflected the ordinary need for sustenance and planning for the future. They refuted the idea of a less than human being who has no knowledge of and need for nutrition, no capacity to reflect upon life in the present or contemplate the future and the idea of a being that is defined by an essential simplicity. The cultivation of these agricultural, veterinary, culinary and trading techniques that marked the space of the provision ground was entwined with political desires such as the longing for autonomy which negated ideas of a subhuman who does not possess the ability to devise political demands. These methods thus questioned imaginations of enslaved, indentured, vagrant, convict and captive plantation labourers as less than human, as property and as pure resource. They were counter-inventions to ideas of disposable, replaceable subhuman labour. Counter-typologies to hierarchies of less human races that exist to cultivate the land and the land itself as solely and infinitely exploitable were expressed through subsistence land cultivation. As McKittrick argues, “The plot instantiates relational modes of being, multiple forms of kinship, and non-binary ways of engaging the world” (McKittrick, 2023, pp. 278–279). The plot or provision ground was a site where kaleidoscopic ideas of humanness that had followed numerous, transcontinental trajectories were further creolized. As Wynter argues, “yet that plot... on which the slave grew food for his/her subsistence, carried over a millennially other conceptions of the human to that of Man’s” (Wynter in Scott, 2000, p. 166).

Inventions of the subject as discardable that stemmed from colonial racial typologies were fabricated out of properties such as an essential, immutable low intelligence bestowed through inheritance, an innate biological sexual predaciousness and inexhaustibility or an intrinsic absence of philosophical resources (Kempadoo, 2013; Morrissey, 1989; Reddock, 1994). Labourers produced counter-theorisations of the properties that were used to compose formations of subhumanness. The racialised qualities of essential cultural and philosophical underdevelopment and a fixed, biological, racial inability to invent were contested through the use of philosophical and theological resources such as Ṣufism. Assemblages of elements that formed broader philosophical discourses such as the desire for land to cultivate but not to own and the longing for time and space to rest countered inventions of the human defined by elements of personhood such as ownership of both land and subhuman property and imaginations of the inhuman as a being who is solely a producer of commodities and is resource itself. As Wynter further argues, the “biocentric and bourgeois conception of what it is to be human” (Wynter in Scott, 2000, p. 181) was rewritten. Labourers drew from counter-typologies and inscribed or counter-inscribed themselves with human properties as they carved out new practices of subsistence cultivation (Wynter in Cunningham, 2016). This counter-categorisation and counter-inscription responded to their classification as less than human and to their inscription with subhuman properties. They refuted this categorisation and inscription with characteristics such as a biological predisposition towards violence that held them responsible for their enslavement or servitude and absolved individual planters, plantation corporations and British state bodies. Ṣūfī philosophical materials continued to be drawn together with other resources and were further creolized. Ideas of how to live in peace, how to define freedom, the ethical obligations of humans to one another and typologies of love were retheorised as properties of humanness and subhumanness were redefined. The counter-taxonomies, their constitutive categories and the clusters of properties that formed them and the philosophical ideals that they were entwined with travelled through the “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser, 1990, p. 67) of provision grounds.

They formed the “underlife” of the colonial plantation (Wynter in Cunningham, 2016, p. 117). Subsistence agriculture was essential to the development of transcontinental Caribbean plantation economies as inventions of subhumans were central to imaginations of the human that circulated through the discursive spheres of the planters. As Besson illustrates, “by 1774, at the zenith of Jamaican slavery, the slaves controlled twenty per cent of the island’s currency” (Besson, 1995, p. 77). The commodities produced on Caribbean plantations were central to the lives of subjects of all classes in Europe. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chocolate, coffee, tea and sugar became central to bourgeois forms of leisure as tea and sugar became vital elements of working class cultural life (Hall, 2017). Crops grown on Caribbean plantations were sold to other colonies as profits from commodities produced there financed the further development of Caribbean plantation settlements (Hall, 2022). This transcolonial wealth formation funded the development of European industry and manufacturing, banking and insurance, urban and rural developments, cultural institutions and philanthropic bodies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Hall et al., 2016; Patnaik, 2017; Williams, 2010). As Patnaik argues:

The West European powers transferred economic surplus from their colonies on a very large scale, and this substantially aided both their domestic industrial transition from the eighteenth century and the subsequent diffusion of capitalism to the regions of recent European settlement. (Patnaik, 2017, p. 277)

The entwined histories of subsistence land cultivation and the development of European institutions are erased by colonial typologies that tie each invented race and nation to separate historical, cultural and economic trajectories. They are further erased by contemporary, hegemonic systems of categorisation that are reproduced in multidisciplinary debates on cultural invention and colonial violence. This transdisciplinary, transtemporal analysis of provision ground cultivation in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Jamaica and British Guiana unfolds into a reparatory theory of creolization that can be illustrated by a cartography of transcontinental Caribbean cultures without borders or centres. As Benítez-Rojo argues:

The Caribbean flows outwards past the limits of its own sea with a vengeance, and it’s Ultima Thule may be found on the outskirts of Bombay, near the low and murmuring shores of Gambia, in a Cantonese tavern of circa 1850, at a Balinese temple, in an old Bristol pub, in a commercial warehouse in Bordeaux at the time of Colbert, in a windmill beside the Zuider sea, at a café in a barrio of Manhattan, in the existential saudade of an old Portuguese lyric. (Benítez-Rojo, 2006, p. 4)

This reparatory theory of creolization is further defined by a denaturalisation of colonial taxonomies and contemporary hegemonic systems of categorisation that allow transconjunctural, transcontinental histories and cartographies of cultural invention, counter-hegemonic taxonomisation, counter-categorisation and counter-inscription to appear. It is further marked by the endeavour to contribute to the reconstruction of the histories of “people to whom history has been denied” (Wolfe, 1982, p. 23).

4 Conclusion

This article presents a transdisciplinary, transtemporal analysis of provision ground cultivation in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Jamaica and British Guiana that unfolds into a reparatory theory of creolization. I examined the transconjunctural, transcontinental tributaries and hybridisation of specific elements of Greek thought and Islam through the Greek Arabic translation movement in ‘Irāq from the mid-eighth century focusing on the sites where translations, the counter-hegemonic political narratives of marginalised communities and Ṣufism shaped one another. I then turned to transdisciplinary academic cultures in Timbuktu from the fourteenth century. I discussed the kaleidoscopic ideas of humanness that coiled through these cultural spheres and how they were endlessly retheorised as they were recombined with multidisciplinary materials from multiple sources. I argued that colonial typologies and the contemporary hegemonic taxonomies that descend from them render these histories of cultural invention unimaginable. I then considered how hybridised agricultural forms from transcontinental sources were synthesised with other materials to produce practices of provision ground cultivation. I argued that earlier, syncretic ideas of humanness were creolized to produce counter-taxonomies to modern racial typologies of humans and subhumans and broader counter-cosmologies in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Jamaica and British Guiana. I discussed how subsistence land cultivation was central to the formation of modern Britain and to broader cartographies of resistance to colonial violence. This analysis furthers discussions on provision ground cultivation as a subterranean sphere during a conjuncture defined by uprisings, rebellions and mass disobedience across the empire as it reconnects this form of land cultivation to colonial wealth formation and the development of European institutions. Glissant argues for a notion of “submarine roots” which “float … free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches” (Glissant, 1999, p. 67). This analysis illustrates and opens into a reparatory theory of creolization that offers another way of reading provision ground cultivation and Caribbean cultural invention more broadly. It can be defined by the deconstruction of colonial systems of categorisation and contemporary global hegemonic taxonomies which disappear transconjunctural, transcontinental, histories of cultural production, counter-taxonomisation, counter-classification and counter-inscription. This article can further contribute to debates on the vernacular, anticolonial, antinationalist and internationalist cultures of labourers, counter-histories of racialised subjectification and inventions of gender and humanness (Borda-Niño-Wildman, 2019; Gutiérrez Rodríguez & Tate, 2015; Narayan, 2023). It can join conversations on international histories and cartographies of state and corporate negligence and violence in relation to historical reconstruction and reparation. This is not a tale of cultural continuity but a transdisciplinary history and theory of endless, discontinuous cultural transfiguration, metamorphosis and synthesis, which reveals how work on creolization and colonial violence has a central role to play in the dismantling of nationalist mythologies of separate histories and cultures. Wynter argues:

The high standards achieved by a Greek play, a Chinese poem, an Indian song, the Japanese theatre, an African Benin head are all relevant to our present experience. To deny any of these is to maim a part of ourselves. To reject any one is to reject a part of ourselves. Yet to insist as we have hitherto done on any one part i.e. the European – to the total exclusion of any or all of the others, is to humiliate and exile a part of ourselves... To understand West Indian history we must turn to the history of Africa, Asia, of the indigenous peoples of the American continent, Europe. (Wynter, 1970)

This article details a transdisciplinary, transtemporal analysis of subsistence land cultivation that opens into a reparatory theory of creolization that does not demand that we “maim... reject... humiliate and exile a part of ourselves” (Wynter, 1970) in the name of a separate history, racial essence or cultural purity that do not exist. It urges us to excavate and recognise counter-histories of cultural formation and political collaboration and sanctuary that are vital to cartographies of colonial violence and that lie underneath hegemonic colonial and postcolonial taxonomies during the current conjuncture defined by new wars and ultranationalisms and the urgent need for antinationalist theorisation.