ABSTRACT
Sensory being is knitted into affective forms of citizenship, themselves structured by national and international modes of government and governance. For many Tinoni Simbo (person[s] of Simbo), their dark skin encapsulates problems of nationhood, globalization, and underdevelopment. Having engaged the distant world since at least 1788, when they initiated Euro-Islander exchange (Dureau 2001), they favor cosmopolitan relationships and perceive their constrained possibilities, as citizens of a small state, in terms of unsolicited independence and embodied inferiority. This imagined inferiority is a form of autoracism condensed in perceptions of Whites physically seeing and thereby judging them. Here, vision is a responsive sense, felt in the body of one who is the object of another's sensory being. Simbo autoracism, most dramatically experienced in sensations of cross-cultural visibility, is rendered somewhat mutable by cultural understandings of personhood and by claims that recolonization would enable fuller involvement in the global community, reversing the “abjection” (Ferguson 1999) wrought by decolonization.
