In this episode Familiar Stranger Emma Quilty sat down with Associate Professor Oneka LaBennett to talk about her most recent book, Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond.  

Global Guyana develops a powerful set of heuristics to trace the entwined histories of descendants of enslaved Africans and Indian indentured laborers, alongside the contemporary dynamics of the outsized Guyanese diaspora, and the broad reach of the nation’s extractive industries. 

Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming the world’s highest per capita oil producer—offering a critical vantage point for parsing the environmental consequences of the resource extraction that fuels our modern world, as well as pernicious forms of erasure that structure Caribbean women’s lives. 

The book explores distinct yet interrelated realms, including media depictions, women’s kinship ties, sonic routes, and the circulation of oil and sand, to uncover how this understudied place reshapes transnational gendered racializations and the very topography that has come to be emblematic of the Caribbean region—beaches and shorelines.

About Oneka:

Oneka LaBennett is Director of the University of Southern California’s Black Studies Initiative/Emerging Center, and Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies. LaBennett is the author of Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond (NYU Press 2024), She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (NYU Press 2011), and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (UC Press 2012).

Follow Oneka on X here: @OnekaLaBennett

Feature image
“_DSF7533” by Ramakarran, Nikhil, 2016.
https://flic.kr/p/tm9VAe