From Myth to Market: Burnham’s Co-operative Republic
From Myth to Market: Burnham’s Co-operative Republic
This chapter discusses Afro-Creole subjectivity in Guyana and the ways in which black postcolonials set terms for an articulation of citizenship by themselves and Indo-Creoles that would constrain Indigenous Peoples. It analyzes the cultural propaganda piece Co-operative Republic Guyana 1970, commissioned and disseminated by the Guyanese government under Forbes Burnham which transformed the economic and political landscape through a socialist program of economic egalitarianism and concentrated on interior affairs, including Indigenous Peoples. The manifesto reveals the political consciousness of the need to integrate Indigenous Peoples into the nation-state as a cultural object, and at the same time mobilizes the poetics of the myth of El Dorado to produce Guyanese nationalism as an inherited right of Afro-Creoles and at the same time create a social template to which all groups seeking power would have to subscribe.
Keywords: Afro-Creole subjectivity, Guyana, citizenship, Indo-Creoles, Indigenous Peoples, Co-operative Republic Guyana 1970, Forbes Burnham, economic egalitarianism, Guyanese nationalism
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