Nicole A. Burrowes

"Seeds of Solidarity" explores the historical possibility of a movement forged by those at the edges of empire in the midst of economic, political and environmental crises. This research examines African- and Indian-Guianese youth, women, and men who worked on sugar plantations and led a series of labor uprisings during the 1930s in a context that actively pitted these racialized communities against each other. Joint action did not signal the leveling of difference or the erasure of strong racial identities, rather these identities provided a basis for concerted action at home and globally. The intervention of this work is three-pronged: to center plantation workers and the 1930s in the development of modern politics in the Caribbean; to expand the framework of “overlapping diasporas;” and to counter generations of hegemonic narratives that center conflict by theorizing about the potential basis for solidarity amidst profound structures of difference.