Re-Thinking Self-Optimisation: Power, Self, and Community in the Global South

Abstract

Our objective in this article is to expand established sociological conceptualisations of self-optimisation. We do so through an analysis of the complex histories and institutional uses of self-optimisation in the Anglophone Caribbean, with a particular focus on Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Self-optimisation, as a recent concept in sociological enquiry, has been bound up with research on therapeutic cultures in the Global Northwest and, to a significant degree, with critiques of neoliberal forms of power and governance of the self. Through two case studies, we move beyond this relatively narrow frame of reference in socio-geographic and historical terms. First, we look at the role of self-optimisation in the plantation system of economic production and political domination in colonial Jamaica. We then consider the contemporary role of discourses of entrepreneurship and self-optimisation in the organisation of gendered social inequalities in Trinidad and Tobago and the broader Caribbean. In doing so, we contribute, first, to the analysis of institutionally situated modes of subjectivity and underlying dynamics of social power in the Anglophone Caribbean. More broadly, second, we move debates on self-optimisation beyond their current focus on the Global Northwest and explore how self-optimisation may be bound up with the social, political, and economic organisation of power in the Global South.