A Double Take on Debt: Reparations Claims and Regimes of Visibility in a Politics of Refusal

Authors

Vasuki Nesiah, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article proposes that the concept of “odious debt” provides an especially fruitful legal framework for the Haitian and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) demands for reparations and debt severance. The concept renders visible different dimensions of the background economic order that have been constitutive of postcolonial sovereignty, and the histories of trade and aid that have engendered debt. In analyzing the work of different regimes of visibility, I have found it useful to think with Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 film Bamako, and the world of Wakanda in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018)—two films that work through the stakes of visibility, recognition, and refusal in the society of nations. Visibility—both as a metaphor for what is explicit and an account of what is before our eyes—is central to the politics of reparations. In this context, the doctrine of “odious debt” and the cinematic considerations that frame, advance, and interrupt the narrative worlds of Bamako and Wakanda provide an interpretive lens through which to make visible the background structural arrangements linking globalisation’s winners and losers, and concomitantly, to contribute to situating reparations in a politics of refusal. The reparation claims of Haiti and CARICOM can be understood as stories entailing law and economics, visibility, and witnessing of the world—stories with a performative function where the telling itself seeks to interrupt how the world functions.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Citation Information

Nesiah, Vasuki. "A Double Take on Debt: Reparations Claims and Regimes of Visibility in a Politics of Refusal." Osgoode Hall Law Journal 59.1 (2022) : 153-187.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.3740
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol59/iss1/6

References

1. Thomas Sankara, "A United Front Against Debt" (Speech at the Organisation of African Unity, July 1987), (27 October 2011), online: Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt [www.cadtm.org/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_article=13533].

2. Preparatory plans for the Congress of Vienna were established in negotiations around the 1814-1815 Treaties of Paris that included a secret agreement that the other European countries would concede to France full freedom in seeking to re-conquer Haiti. See Friedemann Pestel, "The Impossible Ancien Régime colonial: Postcolonial Haiti and the Perils of the French Restoration" (2017) J Modern European History 261 at 264 https://doi.org/10.17104/1611-8944-2017-2-261

Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) at 38, 280, n 103. For more on Baron Mackau's negotiations and its military and political context, see JN Leger, "Haiti, Her History and Her Detractors" (Neale Publishing Company, 1907), online: [archive.org/stream/haitiherhistoryh00lguoft/haitiherhistoryh00lguoft_djvu.txt].

3. For more on the indemnity agreement, its background, and its consequences, see Westenley Alcenat, "The Case for Haitian Reparations" (14 January 2017), online: Jacobin [www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/haiti-reparations-france-slavery-colonialism-debt].

4. There were parallel indemnity bargains struck by colonial powers in other contexts too. The Dutch relinquished claims on Indonesia and recognised its sovereignty when the latter agreed to an indemnity sum of 4.5 billion guilders; Indonesia paid approximately 4 billion guilders to the Netherlands in the first decade of its independence. See Lambert Giebels, "The Indonesian Injection," De Groene Amsterdammer (5 January 2000), online: Histori Bersama [historibersama.com/528-2]. CLR James's observation seems apposite-"The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased"-that at least was the wager that these former colonial powers made and, at least partially, won. The Black Jacobins (Vintage Books, 1989) at 88-89.

5. Thus, at the very moment of its birth as a sovereign nation, and as a condition of that recognition, Haiti becomes less than sovereign. This may be seen in a sense as the tragic reverse of the constative-performative structure that Jacques Derrida identifies as part of the originary hypocrisy that inheres in the "we the people" of the US Declaration of Independence-"We the People" declare themselves sovereign when their constitution as a people is really the outcome of the declaration, rather than prior to it. If the latter case is one of an originary hypocrisy that enlarges sovereignty, the Haitian origin story is an example of an originary hypocrisy that diminishes sovereignty. See Gayatri Spivak, "Constitutions and Culture Studies," (1990) 2 Yale JL & Human 133 at 142, citing Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: I'enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Galilee, 1984), 21-5. Derrida and Spivak are building on Austin's radical observation that declarative statements are not merely constative statements about the world, but also performative-bringing into being the world it describes. See also JL Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Harvard University Press, 1975). In this case, we are considering the 1825 contract declaring that "Sovereign Haiti is indebted to Sovereign France"-a declaration uttered here in the context of international law and European empire, represented for instance by the warships aligned with the power of recognition of sovereignty.

6. Robert Marquand, "France dismisses petition for it to pay $17 billion in Haiti reparations" (17 August 2010), online: The Christian Science Monitor [www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0817/France-dismisses-petition-for-it-to-pay-17-billion-in-Haiti-reparations].

7. I take the term "slow violence" from Rob Nixon's book of the same name. See Slow Violence (Harvard University Press, 2011). Nixon is especially focused on climate change and environmental precarity but the term captures the routinized, attritional catastrophes that threaten the poor on many fronts.

8. Alcenat, supra note 3.

9. Even when there is acknowledgement that the harm is irreparable, reparations are often conceived in terms of repair and building trust, rather than addressing the rationale for distrust in the institutional arrangements of the international economic order. For instance, Pablo de Greiff argues that one of the central goals of reparations is repairing trust. See "Justice and Reparations" in The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford University Press, 2006) 451, online: [oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0199291926.001.0001/acprof-9780199291922-chapter-13]. The concept of odious debt discussed in this paper foregrounds distrust in its diagnostic, as well as its prescription. Moreover, as with the toybox metaphor, it underscores its refusal of closure, situating odious debt as one iteration that maybe revisited yet again.

10. For instance, reparations that followed the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) gave some money to those individuals the commission identified as eligible victims. Not only were these sums inadequate, but they were not part of a process holding accountable the beneficiaries of apartheid because the TRC's definition of victim was predicated on acts such as torture not the system of apartheid. See Mahmood Mamdani, "A Diminished Truth" in Wilmont James & Linda Van de Vijver, eds, After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (David Phillips, 2000) 58-61.

11. Thus "giving victims due recognition" entails recognition within the terms of individualized experience of harm that is acknowledged by the dominant human rights regime. See, for instance, how de Greiff discusses such recognition. See de Greiff, supra note 9.

12. See Robert Howse, "The Concept of Odious Debt in Public International Law" (July 2007) United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Discussion Paper No. 185, online (pdf): [unctad.org/en/docs/osgdp20074_en.pdf ].

13. "You can either talk about it as having a kind of toolbox or also talk about it as having a kind of toybox….In the end, what's most important is that the thing is put in play. What's most important about play is the interaction." See Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013) at 105-106. Harney also writes, "I'm trying to show that I'm playing with something rather than that it's finished." See ibid at 107.

14. CARICOM is the institutional body constituted by fifteen Caribbean countries to address matters of shared concern, including reparations. See "Who We Are" (last visited 4 January 2022) , online: CARICOM [caricom.org/our-community/who-we-are]. In July 2013, these states established the Caribbean Reparations Commission (CRC); the CRC was at least partly inspired by the work of CRC Chair, Professor Hilary Beckles, as captured by his book on reparations that was published that same year. See Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide (University of West Indies Press, 2013). The CRC grew out of the mobilization for (and the disappointments with) efforts to address the ongoing legacies of colonialism and slavery at the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.

15. As elaborated further in Part VI, below, I take the term recombinant legal narratives as a version of what Saidya Hartman has referred to as recombinant narratives to capture an approach to reading the ellipses in the archive. See Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts" (2008) 12 Small Axe 1. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1

16. Alcenat, supra note 3. See in particular the section subtitled "French Indemnity to American Occupation."

17. "Haiti: Free from slavery, not yet free from debt" (last accessed 22 May 2020), online: Jubilee Debt Campaign [jubileedebt.org.uk/countries-in-crisis/haiti-free-slavery-not-yet-free-debt].

18. Indeed it was echoed by demands from Senegal, Mali, and other former French colonies in Africa for indemnity charges that France had imposed in those countries for post-independence currencies structured on the CFA Franc. "Francophone Africa's CFA franc is under fire," The Economist (27 January 2018), online: [www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/01/27/francophone-africas-cfa-franc-is-under-fire].

19. Any effort to keep the spotlight on them was resisted; CARICOM asked for a UN investigation of the coup d'etat and this request was crushed by France and the US. See Anthony Fenton, "U.S., France Block UN Probe of Aristide Ouster" (13 April 2004), online: Información, Derechos [www.derechos.org/nizkor/haiti/doc/hti34.html].

20. See Mark Weisbrot, "Undermining Haiti," The Nation (23 November 2005), online: [www.thenation.com/article/archive/undermining-haiti].

21. "Haiti GDP" (last accessed 10 December 2021), online: Trading Economics [www.tradingeconomics.com/haiti/gdp].

22. CARICOM includes Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Surinam, and Trinidad and Tobago. See "Member States and Associate Members" (last accessed 10 December 2021), online: CARICOM Caribbean Community [www.caricom.org/member-states-and-associate-members].

23. Caribbean Community, "CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice" (last accessed 22 May 2020), online: [www.caricom.org/caricom-ten-point-plan-for-reparatory-justice], citing "CARICOM nations unanimously approve 10-point plan for slavery reparations" (11 March 2014), online: Leigh Day [www.leighday.co.uk/latest-updates/news/2014-news/caricom-nations-unanimously-approve-10-point-plan-for-slavery-reparations].

24. Ibid.

25. As a project of nation-states, the role and status of CARICOM is complex; in the

post-colonial period, the nation-state has been both the vehicle for, and the derailment of, anti-colonial movements. The concept of odious debt is predicated on the notion that parties contracting sovereign debt as sovereigns should be legitimate representatives, governing to advance the people's interests. Against that backdrop, this paper is focusing on the legitimacy of the 1825 agreement, not on state legitimacy more generally-however, these are interrelated issues and draw attention to the paradox of postcolonial sovereigns speaking for the people about how their own ability to represent their people has been impaired by background economic arrangements in the international order.

26. Howse, supra note 12.

27. See Michael Kremer & Seema Jayachandran, "Odious Debt: When Dictators Borrow, Who Repays the Loan?" (1 March 2003), online: Brookings Institution [www.brookings.edu/articles/odious-debt-when-dictators-borrow-who-repays-the-loan]: "As early as the 1898 peace negotiations after the Spanish-American War, the U.S. government contended that neither the United States nor Cuba should be held responsible for debt incurred by Cuba's colonial rulers without the consent of its people and without regard for their benefit. Although Spain never accepted the validity of this argument, the United States prevailed, and Spain took responsibility for the Cuban debt under the Paris peace treaty. The Soviet state repudiated tsarist debt in 1921 using a similar rationale. Legal scholars subsequently elaborated a doctrine of "odious debt," arguing that sovereign debt should not be transferable to a successor government if it was incurred without the consent of, and without benefiting, the people. Some scholars added the requirement that creditors must have been aware of these conditions when they issued the loans to repressive or looting governments (ibid)."

28. See Seema Jayachandran & Michael Kremer, "Odious Debt" (2006) 96 Am Econ Rev 82 at 83. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282806776157696

29. The doctrine of "odious debt" as described by Howse, Jayachandran & Kremer, and extended in this paper's interpretation of "odious regime" as a reference to the domain of global governance (not just national territory), resonates with principles of equity in international law. Equity, present in both common law and civil law jurisdictions, has been invoked in international law through natural law principles, as well as in reference to particular doctrinal provisions built into the mandate of adjudicatory bodies such as the international court of justice and the international criminal court. See Howse, supra note 12; Jayachandran & Kremer, supra note 28.

30. While it does not engage with it directly, this paper is also inspired by another filmic register-namely the documentary Life and Debt, set in Jamaica and with narration from the text of Jamaica Kincaid's book-essay, A Small Place. Life and Debt enacts invisibility with two parallel story lines-one of American tourists enjoying a vacation on the beaches of Jamaica and the other of a Jamaica devastated first by slavery and colonialism, and then, after independence, financially haemorrhaged by debt, loan conditionalities, trade, and aid. The invisibility of the latter is central to oiling the wheels of the former, even as the economic devastation of Jamaica is central to the favourable currencies and tourism dependence that makes the former so enjoyable for the American visitor. The blood spilt to make the margarita on the beach has to be rendered so invisible that it is unthinkable. See Life and Debt (New Yorker Films, 2001); Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000).

31. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin Modern Classics, 2009) at 16.

32. (Art France Cinema, 2006) [Bamako] at 01h:36m:07s.

33. Ibid at 01h:35m:42s.

34. Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Duke University Press, 2004). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822385509

35. Institutions European Central Bank spoke of debt as if it was a virus that could spread from Greece to other debt vulnerable countries and the need to take conservative financial steps so that the EU could inoculate itself from the threat of contagion. See e.g. Vítor Constâncio, "Contagion and the European Debt Crisis" (lecture to the European Central Bank, October 2011), online: [www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2011/html/sp111010.en.html]; Roberto A. De Santis, "The Euro Area Sovereign Debt Crisis: Safe Haven Credit Rating Agencies and the Spread of the Fever from Greece, Ireland and Portugal" (2012) European Central Bank Working Paper No 1419. Similarly, when Mali is required (as one of the witnesses in the Bamako trial testifies) to privatise as a condition of capital transfer, it is a signal to Ghana and Nigeria that privatisation is part of the package-that this is what needs to be internalised for good governance.

36. Yanis Varoufakis, "Greece was never bailed out-it remains locked in an EU debtor's prison," The Guardian (26 August 2018), online: [www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/26/greece-was-never-bailed-out---it-remains-a-debtors-prison-and-the-eu-still-holds-the-keys].

37. Ibid.

38. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003) at 123-51. Sedgewick herself builds on Paul Ricour's critique of critical habits (referring especially to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and the traditions of critical thought associated with them) reliant on what he first described as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (ibid at 124-25). Sedgewick argues that such a hermeneutics can have unintended side-effects that may inadvertently deter reparative readings that attend to "the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the object of a culture-even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (ibid at 150-51). Part of the agenda of the chapter "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You" is an exploration of whether the doctrine of odious debt can be situated in such a reparative reading. See ibid, 123. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smq37.9

39. Berger, supra note 31 at 7.

40. Ibid.

41. Anne Orford, "In Praise of Description" (2012) 25 Leiden J Intl L 609 at 617, citing Michel Foucault "La philosophie analytique de la politique" in Daniel Defert, François Ewald & Jacques Lagrange, eds, Dits et ecrits, 1954-1988, vol 3 (Gallimard, 1994).

42. "Freedom Dreams" is Robin Kelley's term for Black radical visions. See Robin DG Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon, 2002). The Haitian revolutions lays bare the limits of rights talk, the rule of law, and their racial caveats-or in Toussaint Louverture's famous words: "We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentlemen, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man?" Toussaint Louverture, "To Live Free or Die" (1791), online: Verso Books [www.versobooks.com/blogs/2650-to-live-free-or-die-on-the-anniversary-of-the-haitian-revolution].

43. Jubilee 2000, a global coalition spread across forty plus countries, was formed to advocate for debt relief for the global south. There are now a network of national jubilee committees that founded the Jubilee 2000 coalition that continue the campaign at a local level. For instance, the UK organization, Jubilee Debt Campaign, describes their work as "part of a global movement working to break the chains of debt and build a finance system that works for everyone." "Who we are" (last accessed 10 December 2021), online: Jubilee Debt Campaign [www.jubileedebt.org.uk].

44. For instance, in the World Bank's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. HIPC was initiated in 1996 and predicates debt relief on what it refers to as "strict criteria" such as Gross National Product (GNP) rather than conditions of debt acquisition. See The World Bank, "Relieving The World's Poorest Countries Of Unmanageable Debt Burden" (11 January 2018), online: [www.worldbank.org/en/topic/debt/brief/hipc].

45. Howse, supra note 12 at 1.

46. It is a proposal for a delinking from a world order of an odious regime of debt and dispossession. A refusal, a la Samir Amin, "to submit national-development strategy to the imperatives of 'globalization'"-we may take here, globalization as a short hand for that odious regime of debt and dispossession. See Samir Amin, "A Note on the Concept of Delinking" (1987) 10 Review 435 at 435 [Amin, "Note"]. For his seminal work, see also Samir Amin, Delinking (Zed Books, 1990) [Amin, Delinking], arguing for a refusal. See Mike Davis, Late Victorian Famines: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2001).

47. James, supra note 4 at 271.

48. Ibid at 198.

49. Scott sees James as narrating an alternative universal history where Toussaint emerges as a "world-historical hero" with James attending to how "race, colonialism, revolution and self-determination" are emplotted in different approaches to universal history; the stakes of these narrative alternatives involved appreciating the work of the Haitian revolution in an altogether different key: "The problem about eighteenth-century France for James was less as a context for thinking about universal rights than as one for thinking about the universality of revolution." See David Scott, "The Theory of Haiti: The Black Jacobins and the Poetics of Universal History" (2014) 18 Small Axe 35 at 50, 40 [emphasis in original]. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2826443

50. Jayachandran & Kremer, supra note 28.

51. Ibid at 91.

52. Ibid at 90.

53. Joseph Stiglitz, "Odious Rulers, Odious Debts," The Atlantic (November 2003), online: [www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/odious-rulers-odious-debts/302831] [Stiglitz, "Odious Rulers, Odious Debts"].

54. "In the case of South Africa, a poignant example was the case of apartheid debt, which the new ANC government agreed to pay in order to win the trust of global financial markets. Much of that debt bought guns for the apartheid state rather than butter for the wider populace." Ed Stoddard & Tim Cohen, "South Africa's odious debt tale," Daily Maverick (31 August 2020), online: [www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-08-31-south-africas-odious-debt-tale]. The Mandela government took on responsibility for these debts with a sense perhaps of the metaphorical warships of global capital hovering on its economic shores: "It seems to fear that defaulting would hurt its chances of attracting foreign investment and wants to be seen as playing by the rules of capitalism." Michael Kremer & Seema Jayachandran, "Odious Debt," Finance and Development: A Quarterly Magazine of the IMF 39 (June 2002), online: [www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2002/06/kremer.htm].

55. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, "Principles on Promoting Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing," (amended and restated 10 January 2012) at 11, online (pdf): [unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/gdsddf2012misc1_en.pdf].

56. Ibid at 13.

57. For a discussion of the human rights to food, see Susan Marks & Andrew Clapham, International Human Rights Lexicon (Oxford University Press, 2005) at 165, citing Mike Davis, Late Victorian Famines: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2001). Eric Williams also offers pioneering historical analysis of these mutually reinforcing chains of profit and exploitation. See also Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press,1944).

58. Amin, Delinking, supra note 46.

59. Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014) at 107 [emphasis in original]. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376781

60. Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole, Black Panther (Marvel Studios Inc, 2016) at 1, online (pdf): [www.static1.squarespace.com/static/5a1c2452268b96d901cd3471/t/5c2687b74d7a9 c2ebbdb95e9/1546028997301/Black+Panther.pdf].

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid at 2.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid.

67. The term "critical fabulation" was coined by Saidya Hartman to tell a story that is not an alternative history so much as one that offers a reading, both close and imaginative, of the gaps in the archive. See Hartman, supra note 15 at 11.

68. See Amin, "Note" supra note 46; Amin, Delinking, supra note 46.

69. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1973), online (pdf): [www.abahlali.org/files/3295358-walter-rodney.pdf].

70. In the context of the CARICOM reparations proposal, see Ahmed Reid, "How Europe Underdeveloped the Caribbean" (16 July 2018), online (blog): Caricom Reparations Commission [wwwcaricomreparations.org/ahmed-reid-how-europe-underdeveloped-the-caribbean]. See also Alcenat, supra note 3. Huey Newton and the Black Panther party argued further that this landscape's economic and political violence was echoed in the global north, including parallels with the underdevelopment of the inner-city through police brutality on black and brown bodies in the inner-city streets and border zones of the global north, mirroring military intervention and occupation in Afghanistan, Palestine, Libya and elsewhere. As Zuri describes what N'Jobu saw: "Their leaders have been assassinated. Communities flooded with drugs and weapons. They are overly policed and incarcerated. All over the planet... our people suffer because they don't have the tools to fight back."

71. Amin, Delinking, supra note 46.

72. Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World

(Monthly Reviews Press, 2004) at 21. Amin's notion of delinking works with a reference point of autonomous development-a Wakanda-like comprehensive delinking with, he suggests, a target of at least a 70 per cent delinking (ibid). The epistemic markers of this reductive numeric vision of delinking seem to undermine the radical potential of the notion of delinking.

73. Simpson, supra note 59.

74. James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (Yale University Press, 2009) at 126.

75. Ibid at 43.

76. In Scott's words, "hill people are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys-slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare" (ibid at ix).

77. Simpson, supra note 59 at 22. https://doi.org/10.2307/1358737

78. Ibid at 33 [emphasis omitted].

79. Ibid at 11-12.

80. Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012) at 107.

81. See ibid at 238.

82. I borrow here from Partha Chatterjee's use of the term derivative to speak to the contradictions of integration and recognition. Chatteerjee is especially focused on these dynamics in relation to nationalist thought, where he draws attention to the "inherent contradictoriness in nationalist thinking, because it reasons within a framework of knowledge whose representation structure corresponds to the very structure of power nationalist thought seeks to repudiate." Partha Chatterjee, "Transferring a Political Theory Early Nationalist Thought in India" (1986) 21 Econ & Pol Weekly 120 at 121. For a more extended treatment of this issues, see also Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

83. Simpson, supra note 59 at 107.

84. Vijay Prashad describes the proposal from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to establish an International Developing Country Debt Authority. This body would have a dual mandate: first, to oversee any temporary standstills in debt repayments in order to stave off such events as a coronavirus recession; second, to look carefully at the necessity of fundamental debt relief (including debt cancellation). UNCTAD has made similar proposals in 1986, 1998, 2001, and 2015; each time the powerful creditors and the wealthy nations have rejected this approach. In 1985, the Cuban government hosted the Havana Debt Conference, where Fidel Castro made a plea for a Third World Debt Strike to put pressure on the creditors to come to the table; immense pressure on the less confident states derailed that approach. Neither UNCTAD nor the Havana Debt Conference were able to move this agenda. See "It Takes a Revolution to Make a Solution: The Nineteenth Newsletter" (7 May 2020), online (blog): Tricontinental Newsletter [www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/19-2020-debt].

85. The UK Jubilee Campaign argues that "if there has to be a choice between repaying debt to a rich lender and meeting basic needs such as food, water, shelter, or basic services such as healthcare, it can only be right for the money to be spent on protecting human rights and providing for basic needs. Otherwise, debt is being prioritised over life itself." See "Counties in crisis" (last visited 10 January 2022), online: Jubilee Debt Campaign [jubileedebt.org.uk/countries-in-crisis].

86. Prashad, supra note 84.

87. Jawad Moustakbal, "What is the Citizen Debt Audit?" (28 February 2020), online: Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt [www.cadtm.org/What-is-the-Citizen-Debt-Audit].

88. Eric Toussaint, "Joseph Stiglitz shows that a suspension of debt repayments can be beneficial for a country and its people" (20 January 2015), online: Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt [www.cadtm.org/Joseph-Stiglitz-shows-that-a].

89. Stiglitz, "Odious Rulers, Odious Debts," supra note 53.

90. Toussaint, supra note 88, citing Eduardo Levy Yeyati & Ugo Panizza, "The Elusive Costs of Sovereign Defaults," (2011) 94 J Dev Econ 95 at 95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2009.12.005

91. James C Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1985) at 33. In our case then, the CARICOM reparations claims could be the prequel to a larger challenge to the international economic regime along the lines of the third world debt strike proposed by Cuba in 1985. See Prashad, supra note 84.

92. Scott, supra note 91 at 58.

93. For the text of Castro's speech, see Fidel Castro "The Debt is Unpayable" (delivered at Havana's Palace of Conventions, 3 August 1985), online: Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt [www.cadtm.org/Fidel-Castro-The-debt-is-unpayable]. Castro invokes a notion akin to "odious debt" in noting that these were debts contracted by oppressors and should have no legitimate hold on the oppressed: "Do the debts and the commitments of the peoples' oppressors have to be paid by the oppressed? This is the moral and philosophical basis of this idea" (ibid). Equally, he also invokes a notion akin to reparations as a rationale for voiding debt: "We have indirectly contributed to financing Europe. We have done this. We, the countries of the Third World, have historically financed the developed capitalist world. Then why cannot the debt be voided right now?…I believe that we must conquer our freedom and not pay any indemnity to any of our oppressors" (ibid).

94. Coogler & Robert Cole, supra note 60 at 121.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid.

98. In December 2019, in a farcical turn of events that may be a Trump era bureaucrat's vision of that future, the US Department of Agriculture temporarily listed Wakanda as a trading partner not for vibranium fueled technological innovation, but for goods that "included ducks, donkeys and dairy cows." See "US government lists fictional nation Wakanda as trade partner," BBC (19 December 2019), online: [www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50849559].

99. Alcenat, supra note 3 [emphasis in original].

100. Ibid.

101. Coogler & Robert Cole, supra note 60 at 117.

102. McKenzie Wark, "There is another world, and it is this one" (14 January 2014), online: Public Seminar [www.publicseminar.org/2014/01/there-is-another-world-and-it-is-this-one] (quoting the worlds of French Surrealist and Communist poet, Paul Éluard).

103. Simpson, supra note 59 at 33.

104. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995). My thanks to Chris Gevers for introducing me to Michel-Rolph Trouillot's extraordinary oeuvre some years back.

105. Ibid at 73.

106. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti" (2000) 26 Critical Inquiry 821 at 837-38. https://doi.org/10.1086/448993

107. Ibid.

108. Ibid at 821.

109. William Uzgalis, "John Locke, Racism, Slavery, and Indian Lands" in Naomi Zack, ed, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race (Oxford University Press, 2017). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190236953.013.41

110. Indeed, that is certainly how we might see the political fortunes of Aristide and his campaign for reparations-he was unthinkable for the Haiti that is visible to us as ruin.

111. My thanks to Ruth Buchanan for suggesting the resonance with Rancière's discussion of what is seeable and sayable here. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum, 2010) at 37 ("Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and sayable").

112. See Hartman, supra note 15 at 77.

113. Ibid at 78, n 37. Hartman takes the term from M. NourbeSe Phillip and Stan Douglas.

114. See Hartman, supra note 15 at 11, 12.

115. See Hartman, supra note 15 at 12. In thinking with Hartman about the politics of reading the archive, there is again a resonance with Rancière, whose "politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time." Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: Distribution of the Sensible (Continuum, 2004) at 13. (While the play of "fabula" maybe more evident when we make the archive speak against received, authorized interpretations, fabula is always at work. "Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct 'fictions', that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done" (ibid at 39). While Buck-Morss grounds her claims in a more methodologically familiar register of archival reading practices in developing an empirical account about what sources might sources were available to Hegel in the early nineteenth century, one might situate her investment in her reading of that archive for what was obscured, or rendered a "disposable life," as sympatico with the methodological turn to critical fabulation. See Buck-Morss, supra note 106.

116. Hartman, supra note 15 at 12.

117. This requires shifting what it means to think like a lawyer from a toolbox sensibility to a toybox sensibility where even the most canonical legal terms and the most settled interpretation of these terms are put into play. For more on a toybox sensibility, see Harney & Moten, supra note 13.

118. Ibid.

119. Rancière, supra note 111.

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