Negotiating Caribbean freedom : peasants and the state in development / Michaeline A. Crichlow.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-266) and index.

Development's agrarian culture -- A plantation political context: of peasants, state and capital, 1838-1938 -- Forging nationals out of rural working peoples -- In the name of the 'small man': 'heavy manners' and the creation of new subjectivities -- Maneuvers of an embattled state: neoliberal privatization and the reconstitution of new rural subjects -- Inseparable autonomies: of state spaces and people spaces -- Epilogue: re-making the state and citizen: the specter of formal exclusions.

Michaeline A. Crichlow extends the contemporary critique of development projects by examining the political and discursive relationship of the state to the land-based working people, or "smallholders," in modern Jamaica. The first book of its kind, Negotiating Caribbean Freedom does for Jamaican historiography and sociology what Akhil Gupta's PostColonial Developments did for studies of India. Michaeline A. Crichlow gives us an incredibly nuanced discussion of how development dominates the lives of the subsistance peasantry, not through force, but through the instrumentalization of social relationships that were once ends in themselves. For example, what were once effective agricultural practices--embedded in the every day lives of smallholders all over the island--have, in the interest of serving international capital, been bureaucratized to the point that they are untenable to support the livelihoods of smallholders. Not content to measure the success or failure of development to deliver on its promises, she discloses both the continuities and differences between development projects of very different political regimes and helps to establish why smallholders support development projects even when those projects fail to address their needs.

Self-Renewing 2017 UoY

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