Coloniality, racial capitalism and the financialization of Caribbean remittances

Diaspora remittances are a faithful source of capital, a vital social safety net and a source of local economic investment for many households, communities and states across the Caribbean. But recent efforts by powerful interests to exercise control over these flows of capital are beginning to threaten the continuity and accessibility of this lifeline. As financial institutions, financial elites and imperializing states become attuned to the value and implicit autonomy that remittances animate in the Caribbean, new battle lines have begun to be drawn that increasingly link these capital flows to US national security.

Examining three such efforts – growing market competition to capture remittance flows, the failed proposal to tax Caribbean remittances and the enforcement of Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) policies throughout the region – Beverley Mullings will draw attention to the coloniality of these emerging structures of financial control and their role in maintaining the racial orders that have historically limited the autonomy of Caribbean states and Caribbean people in both the region and the diaspora.

About the speaker

Beverley Mullings is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research is located within the fields of feminist political economy, labour geographies and engages broad questions of social transformation, neoliberal racial capitalism and the politics of gender, race and class in the Caribbean and its diaspora.

She has published articles on neoliberal governmentality, social reproduction, diasporic transnationalism and urban governance that have appeared in a number of journals including the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Geoforum, Gender, Place and Culture, the Journal of Economic Geography, Antipode, Review of International Political Economy and Small Axe. 

Mullings' research seeks to identify how complex circuits of exchange that connect individuals, families and communities across the multiple spaces that comprise the Caribbean might be engaged to challenge ongoing patterns of ethno-racial, gender and class inequality. Her current research contributes to a broad set of debates concerning the relationship between diaspora and social transformation; racial capitalism and social reproduction; and the role of Finance Economies in Caribbean futures.