Anna Schirrer

ANNA KIRSTINE SCHIRRER, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in October 2018 to aid research on ‘Reparative Reason: Redress and the Politics of Land Claims in Guyana,’ supervised by Dr. David Scott. Funding supported 12 months of research investigating postcolonial and postslavery reparation claims at the intersection of race, international law and global governance. The research used interviews and participants observation as well as archival research and photography to explore the following question: How do international claims to redress converge on or diverge from national claims to land in Guyana? Examining ‘reparations work’ among technocrats, diplomats, human rights lawyers and activists, findings from this ethnographic research revolved around two clusters of evidence. One revealed the legal and material complexity of reparations claims across multiple organizational scales. The other mapped out the absence of a legal interpretation of ancestrality in international law, which introduces novel questions about rights and redress in the afterlife of slavery in the Anglophone Caribbean.