"Where Randy?" Education, nationalism, and playful imaginations of belonging on Sint Maarten

When Sint Maarten became a constituent country in the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 2010, questions about sovereignty, independence and nationalism resurfaced. A renowned and increasingly influential nationalist vanguard imagined and promoted a strong, independent St. Martin nation, with one people, one culture and one language. This vanguard popularized Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Community’ and the idea that this particular form of national belonging could and should be reproduced in public schools. Fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around primary schools taught me that mobility, transnational ties, religion and anticolonial struggles (have) shape(d) imaginations and practices of belonging in numerous ways, remaking Sint Maartenness.
Inspired by the works of Caribbean scholar Edouard Glissant and North American educational Philosopher John Dewey, I show that pupils also unmade the national order and its underlying logic. They did so through playful performances, grounded in the conviviality of their neighbourhood, endlessly enlarged through on- and offline encounters. Being playful proved a valuable characteristic, not only, as expected, for pupils but also for members of their extended families who worked menial jobs in the tourist playground that Sint Maarten has become. Ultimately, this research proposes that a lasting, shared imagination of the ideal Sint Maartener exists only in the playful act of looking for him/her. Inspired by performances of a popular local song in which people were looking for the allusive Randy, I suggest that similarly, the looking and finding of the ideal Sint Maartener, exists only in creative performances of the question – “Where Randy?”