# Resistant labours: the space and time of Black Indigeneity  
In the majority of scholarship on black enslavement and freedom in the Americas, the process of black transformation is largely articulated as litigious, cultural, and phenomenological. In the United States of America, it is the process of national becoming and belonging by which the slave/nigger evolved into citizen/subject/African American. In the Caribbean, it is widely interpreted as the process of becoming Creole and a sovereign subject of the postcolonial State. ${ }^{5}$ The cultural and legal dimensions of black transformation obscure the fact that both during and after slavery, blacks underwent a process of active Indigenization that subtends them. In 1970, Caribbean humanist philosopher Sylvia Wynter rejected the singularity of Creolization - the yoking of European and African cultures within the mechanism of the plantation social structure to describe the shift from African cultural to New World belonging, precisely because it obscured the dynamics of black Indigeneity. Creolization, for Wynter, is in fact distinct from what she identifies as the resistant element of black transformation or 'rooting':  
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[^0]:    4 Byrd borrows the term "arrivant" from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1973).
5 This is still true for the roughly one dozen non-independent Caribbean territories.  
For the more total alienation of the New World Negro had occasioned a cultural response, which had transformed that New World Negro into the indigenous inhabitant of his new land. His cultural resistance to colonialism [...] was an indigenous resistance. The history of the Caribbean islands is [...] the history of the indigenization of the black man. And this history is a cultural history - not in "writing", but of those "homunculi" who humanize the landscape by peopling it with gods and spirits [...] (Wynter, 1970, p.35).