IECL Lunchtime Seminar with Ronnie Yearwood – Towards A Decolonial Method in Caribbean Constitutionalism

The IECL Lunchtime Seminar Series offers our Academic Visitors an opportunity to share their research, exchange ideas, and connect with colleagues on both substantive and methodological aspects of their work. 

Each seminar usually lasts 30–45 minutes, with 20–30 minutes for the presentation followed by 10–15 minutes for Q&A. A light sandwich lunch will be provided.

Dr Ronnie Yearwood
Towards A Decolonial Method in Caribbean Constitutionalism

Abstract: Law as juridical technology has historically shaped and structured coloniality, constituting power (politics and law), knowledge (epistemology), and being (ontology). This raises a question of what does decoloniality, specifically decolonial constitutionalism, as a method look like? In other words, in applying decolonial constitutionalism, what does rupture/change entail?

In my current research, I argue that constitutional reforms in the Caribbean have not meaningfully changed or addressed embedded structures of power, knowledge and being, instead reproducing the Westminster (“Westmonster”). If law as a juridical technology has produced and sustained these hierarchies, then unmaking requires more than reform, it requires rupture, that is, a method that breaks the colonial logics. In my current project I am thinking through the following themes:

• Legal Archaeology and Epistemology - Law as juridical technology of governance and order, e.g., the Barbados Slave Code, and Barbados as “culture hearth”, illustrates an early site of globalisation and global constitutionalism, exporting the plantation complex to the Atlantic Caribbean/Americas. Caribbean constitutions, and legal and political systems remain rooted in these colonial logics.
• Structural Critique - Constitutional reform in the Caribbean fails because it does not engage with the legal archaeology and epistemology, that is, the coloniality that has been (re)produced in the constitution itself. The result is that the “Westminster” or rather “Westmonster” is reproduced/continued. This may explain why reforms do not capture “value propositions of the people”, such as the beach as national patrimony.
• Towards A Decolonial Method - A decolonial method requires ontological/epistemological rupture, that is, a radical re-founding. This may look like constituent assemblies as a form of civic ontological engagement, the development of a Caribbean hermeneutics, and a reckoning, that is, slaying the “Westmonster”, informed by insights from history.