Absence of white Creoles pushed Guyana toward Africa-centered institutional nationalism

Evidence

In Trinidad, the struggle for the nation occurs in the field of symbolic production. Representations and practices of purity are raised as challenges to Creole nationalism. In Guyana, symbolic representations of nationhood are less important than practices of institutional solidarity. The reason has, partly, to do with the historical absence of white Creoles in the color-class order of Guyanese social construction. After 1955, nationalist organization in Guyana became integrally associated with racialized practices of institutional inclusion and exclusion. These two combined to place a much more Africa-centered stamp on Guyanese nationalist Creole expression. During the 1960s the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA) had become highly integrated into the structure and organization of the black nationalist Peoples National Congress (PNC) that had run the country since 1964. Its leaders enjoyed powerful positions in the government and it had become a major recruiting arm of the party. Without question, these leaders saw their role as ensuring the location of the black lower class at the center of the country’s nationalist agenda. In the color-class hierarchy of Creole society, this was the class identifically tied to the representations and practices of Africa. In the process, the country’s foreign relations became quite closely related to the African continent from which it adopted, almost wholeheartedly, Tanzania’s version of cooperative socialism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3262

Categorization

• XREF: The Trinidad-vs-Guyana contrast echoes a similar symbolic-vs-institutional comparison from Milgrom’s work on reputation institutions vs. formal institutions, and the distinction between symbolic and material nationalism is broadly transferable. — connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3262