Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community.
Ryan Cecil Jobson’s interest in the Caribbean is personal.
His paternal family hails from Jamaica with ties to the bauxite industry (the raw material refined into aluminum). He’s spent years in Trinidad and Tobago studying oil extraction. On the island of Dominica, he even traveled to a remote village to retrace the footsteps of his intellectual predecessor.
“I always had an interest in the relationship between extractive industries and political futures in the Caribbean,” said Jobson, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.
In his recent book, The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, Jobson explores the relationship between natural resources and political power and seeks to rectify the “general neglect of the Caribbean” as a region of economic, political and cultural analysis.
By elevating what he calls a “big small place” to the world stage, Jobson follows in the wake of another titan of Caribbean studies, the late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot.
Political dissident, musician and UChicago professor, Trouillot is best known for his book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), which investigates how historical narratives—and telling blank spots—are constructed.
On a mission to honor Trouillot’s legacy, Jobson co-curated an exhibition tracing the historian’s life through his personal papers and archives. History on the Edges: Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Caribbean, on display at the UChicago Library’s Special Collections Research Center, is open through Aug. 21.
“To inherit that legacy, as a scholar of the Caribbean here at the University of Chicago, is to continue to take seriously what these small places can lend to a study of the world at large,” Jobson said.
A masquerade of permanence
Trinidad and Tobago is a small place. The dual island nation off the coast of Venezuela is home to fewer than 2 million people. Together, both landmasses stretch less than 2,000 square miles.
Despite its diminutive size, the nation has an outsized impact on the region.
“If you mention oil and gas, usually we think of Saudi Arabia, Norway or even the United States,” said Jobson. “But Trinidad is one of the oldest oil-producing territories in the world.”
Trinidad and Tobago were originally settled by Indigenous peoples from the South American mainland. After Christopher Columbus arrived in 1498, Spanish colonizers followed, then European plantation owners who brought enslaved Africans to farm sugarcane. Once slavery was abolished, the British government brought indentured servants from India to fill the labor gap.
“That history is what shapes how we encounter Trinidad today,” Jobson said. “It's a deeply multiracial society.”
After the collapse of sugarcane, oil and natural gas became the backbone of the nation’s economy. When Trinidad and Tobago gained its independence in 1962, fossil fuel extraction became inextricably linked to its sovereignty.
By the time Jobson began his fieldwork a half century later, production had slowed—but the promise of ever-flowing oil was still alive.
“I was really interested in why the petro-state as an aspiration of the government in Trinidad and Tobago continued to persist even at a moment of decline,” he said.
In Petro-state Masquerade, Jobson discusses the “masquerade of permanence,” or the idea that more oil and gas will always be found; wells can always be drilled. He claims this myth is maintained by “public statements and performances” given by state officials and corporate partners.
Whether sugarcane or oil, Jobson says extraction is something “shared by the Caribbean as a whole.” The dependence on exporting a single natural resource can make a nation’s economy deeply vulnerable.
“The legacy of the Caribbean as an accumulation of small places dependent on single commodities, really starting with sugar in the period of plantation slavery, has continued to define the trajectory of these societies today,” Jobson said.
Jobson’s fieldwork involved talking to oil workers, geologists, engineers, government officials and activists, an approach heavily influenced by Trouillot.
“Trouillot expanded what we understood ethnography to be at a critical moment in the development of the discipline,” Jobson said. “In a lot of ways, I think he makes the kind of anthropology that I do possible.”
Reassembling Trouillot’s legacy
In 2024, Jobson traveled to the island nation of Dominica to literally walk in Trouillot’s footsteps.
To get to Welsey, the remote village where Trouillot conducted his fieldwork, Jobson crossed a forbidding—sometimes treacherous—mountain landscape. Though the village is isolated, Trouillot argues that Welsey has played a crucial role on the world stage.
Born in 1948, Trouillot grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in an academic and political family. As a youth, he composed protest music railing against the Duvalier dictatorship. After fleeing to New York in 1968, he co-founded the theater group Tanbou libete (Drum of Freedom) with other political exiles.
As a doctoral student, Trouillot traveled to Wesley to observe banana farmers and their role in the world economy.
According to Jobson, though Wesley’s farmers “hail from a small place within a small place,” Trouillot argued that their experience trading and traveling between neighboring islands made them experts in global markets. Likewise, Dominica’s lime, sugar and banana exports have influenced the world economy for centuries.
“That speaks to the kind of scholar that Trouillot was,” Jobson said. “He could take an incredibly small place that hardly registers even on maps of the Caribbean, let alone of the Western Hemisphere, and place it at the center of what we understand to be a world system.”
Trouillot’s fieldwork turned into his first English-language book, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (1988). When Jobson mentioned the book had fallen out of print at a conference, the incident kicked off a yearslong engagement with Trouillot’s work and life—including a new edition of the book.
When two undergraduate students stumbled upon the boxes containing Trouillot’s personal papers in an empty office, they contacted library staff to help process and archive them. Jobson and Asst. Prof. Kaneesha Parsard proposed an exhibition bringing together all the parts of Trouillot: songwriter, singer, political agitator, writer and UChicago professor.
Jobson says the final exhibition is a “testament to Trouillot’s own meditations on the archive and the power of history.”
“History-making isn't something that's inert or taken for granted,” Jobson said. “It requires our labor to reassemble.”
