Oneka LaBennett is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She’s the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century.
LaBennett argues for the relevance of Guyana as a place that is, as the author says, ‘everywhere and nowhere.’ Wielding her pointer broom, an everyday object used by countless girls and women in Guyana in the daily work of keeping order, LaBennett sweeps the messy, layered detritus of history, politics, and experience into a remarkably personal ethnography that insistently demonstrates the myriad ways in which global traffic in culture and power can be lived and understood. * Elizabeth Chin, author of My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries * 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. * Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto * 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! * Gina Athena Ulysse, author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle *