Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context

Franklin W. Knight, Teresita Martínez-Vergne, Franklin W. Knight, Teresita Martínez-Vergne

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807876909
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Caribbean ranks among the earliest and most completely globalized regions in the world. From the first moment Europeans set foot on the islands to the present, products, people, and ideas have made their way back and forth between the region and other parts of the globe with unequal but inexorable force. An inventory of some of these unprecedented multidirectional exchanges, this volume provides a measure of, as well as a model for, new scholarship on globalization in the region. Ten essays by leading scholars in the field of Caribbean studies identify and illuminate important social and cultural aspects of the region as it seeks to maintain its own identity against the unrelenting pressures of globalization. These essays examine cultural phenomena in their creolized forms--from sports and religion to music and drink--as well as the Caribbean manifestations of more universal trends--from racial inequality and feminist activism to indebtedness and economic uncertainty. Throughout, the volume points to the contending forces of homogeneity and differentiation that define globalization and highlights the growing agency of the Caribbean peoples in the modern world.
Contributors:
Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2004)
Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University
Juan Flores, City University of New York Graduate Center
Jorge L. Giovannetti, University of Puerto Rico
Aline Helg, University of Geneva
Franklin W. Knight, The Johns Hopkins University
Anthony P. Maingot, Florida International University
Teresita Martinez-Vergne, Macalester College
Helen McBain, Economic Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean, Trinidad
Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University
Valentina Peguero, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
Raquel Romberg, Temple University

1

Introduction

TERESITA MARTÍNEZ-VERGNE AND FRANKLIN W. KNIGHT

The Caribbean is truly like no other place on the globe. This is not hyperbole. It is the historical reality. Before 1492 the Caribbean was marginal to the populous established landed empires of Aztec, Maya, and Inca that flourished on the American mainland. Then the arrival of Columbus changed everything everywhere in the Americas. The change was not immediate, of course, but inexorable and inevitable. For more than a century the Iberians dominated the region, moving outward from their newly created enclaves to subordinate the surrounding indigenous inhabitants wherever they could and eliminate them where they could not. For the scattered autochthonous peoples of the Caribbean islands, the post-Columbus changes constituted a veritable metamorphosis. Everything changed—their lives, their world, their physical environment, their relations to themselves and the outside world. By the time other non-Iberian Europeans arrived to establish their colonies in the seventeenth century, the societies of the indigenous people were totally shattered. Moreover, where the indigenous peoples survived, their numbers were considerably reduced by disease, warfare, and relentless exploitation by the European newcomers. The Europeans extensively repopulated the region and created a new Caribbean. Over time, concomitant with the fortunes of war, tropical staple production (especially sugar), and the slave trade, the region would move from periphery to center and back to the periphery of European affairs. That complex history, up to the end of the twentieth century, is rich and has been splendidly detailed in the recently published six-volume general history published under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).¹ The volumes illustrate well the nuanced and ever-changing variety of the Caribbean social condition, and the pivotal roles played by slavery and the sugar plantation complex. The various European imperial powers abolished slavery over a long period of time, ending with the emancipation of the Cuban slaves in 1886. The sugar plantation culture continued until the latter half of the twentieth century.

During the twentieth century, the majority of the Caribbean societies stopped living under colonial political and economic systems and began constructing their own independent states. Most Caribbean states have adhered to a democratic political framework despite their diverse populations. The political changes reflected as well as stimulated the literary output across a number of fields. It gave voices to all sectors of the Caribbean peoples, and they were not reticent in expressing themselves. Political independence, however, has been like a double-edged sword.

The new societies of the Caribbean grew out of their European colonial and imperial past. Over time, Haiti created a distinctive language of its own—Haitian Creole, or Kreyol. But the principal languages of discourse for most territories remained largely the major European languages of the politically dominant groups that shaped the genesis of Caribbean history since 1492. The Caribbean peoples have dominated and enriched these languages. Almost every island and territory has had at least one distinguished writer, and the tradition goes back well into the nineteenth century with the great works of José Martí, Thomas Madiou, Eugenio María de Hostos, Ramón Emeterio Betances, and J. J. Thomas. During the twentieth century the literary scene flourished with an impressive list of creative writers including Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Luis Palés Matos, José Luis González, George Lamming, Cynthia Wilson, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Vidia Naipaul, Wilson Harris, John Hearne, Curdella Forbes, Derek Walcott, Jacques Roumain, Jamaica Kincaid, Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferré, and Edwidge Danticat.

In common with the creative writers, the scientific writers have also been exploring the changing Caribbean condition and reevaluating its place in the broader scheme of things. The trajectory has not been surprising. Much of Caribbean social scientific and humanistic writing has been engaged in exploring the development of the Caribbean plantation society and the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade on the societies, economies, demography, and mentalities of the peoples of the region. Recently it has also had to examine and define its position vis-à-vis the inexorable, multifaceted influence of the United States of America. Articulating a Caribbean identity has been a major preoccupation in the twentieth century. Inescapably, given the emerging role of the United States of America on the region, North American-Caribbean relations have attracted considerable attention. But the world from the perspective of the Caribbean has become considerably more complex over the past fifty years.

With the arrival of the twenty-first century, scholars and policy makers felt the urgency of redefining the boundaries within which they would analyze currents of thought, implement development programs, examine movements of goods and population, measure ideological influences, and so on. Globalization (as the unprecedented back-and-forth transfer of products, people, and ideas evidenced in the latter third of the twentieth century has been called) left its particular mark on the Caribbean too. Looking back on the various islands’ trajectories to assess the impact of technological advances and new attitudes, social scientists and humanists have assembled a number of seemingly contradictory impressions regarding these processes. By way of inventorying the panoply of observations around the changing global landscape, we explore some of these responses in this book. No single volume, however large and well constructed, can ever do full justice to the wide range of Caribbean realities. Our focus has, of necessity, to be selective. Although our examples reflect only the perspectives of the larger islands, we hope that they are sufficiently illustrative of the varied Caribbean responses across the region as a whole. More important, these essays should encourage further explorations of the phenomena of global impact, especially in the smaller island communities.

Globalization, some commentators have observed, is nothing new to the Caribbean region. Not only as ideology but also as material practice, its effects are similar to those brought about earlier by the ebb and flow of the regional experience under colonialism and imperialism. The political domination of one group of people over another, the exploitation of the oppressed for the material advantage of their “superiors,” the elaborate philosophical framework that supported such a setup—these are the building blocks of the Euro-American nineteenth-century edifice, of U.S. expansion in the twentieth, and of the unfettered flow of goods and cultural practices in the twenty-first. Globalization, in short, has not so far resulted in a market relationship between the various participants that is more equitable and just. Rather it has accentuated hegemonies and manifestly reinforced global inequality.

Likewise, some would argue that the Caribbean was continuously defined and redefined to suit the purposes of its various “masters” under any one of these organized systems.² Both contemporaries and historians have treated the Commonwealth Caribbean more as the property of Great Britain than as specific islands with particular needs and development trajectories. For policy makers, strategic and geopolitical considerations have traditionally assumed greater priority than humane considerations. To this day, history books characterize the early twentieth century as the era of U.S. expansionism. And recent events in the area point unequivocally to the generalized nature of change, the facility of travel, as well as the boundless quality of the transformations experienced locally.

As self-evident as these statements appear, their antitheses and other refinements to their postulates demand equal attention. Globalization, other experts would assert, is indeed very new because the world is experiencing unprecedented changes. The mind-boggling speed of travel—by ground, air, or cyberspace—has reduced time and space so as to make almost instantaneous the transfer of speech and nearly immediate the exchange of goods. The web of players in any one transaction has become correspondingly complicated, as modern technology makes it possible for communication to take place simultaneously on a global scale among infinite parties. The battery of responses to economic, political, and social forces, internal or external, has become not only more numerous but also more diverse, as experience and the flow of information facilitates visualizing various scenarios.³

The more optimistic students of the territories of the Caribbean, helpless before global forces as they may seem to some, will argue that these processes have historically resisted simplistic classification. Quite the contrary. Many of these essays argue that Caribbean people are currently redefining the relationship between state and society in order to manipulate more effectively the effects on their populations of the powerful avalanche of imported goods, services, and ideologies. Caribbean societies are in fact reclaiming their space in the global map and reassessing their priorities with the same rapidity, although with less visibility, that external forces alter the playing field. Simply stated, if the modern Caribbean as a region was an invention of the twentieth century that served the interests of the United States and, less so, of Western Europe, a new conceptualization seems in order, with increased if not dominant input from the regional territories themselves.

One particular aspect of the globalization literature that has been challenged consistently, as this volume makes evident, is the emphasis on economic forces. Many studies detail the impact of so-called free trade, reduced fiscal deficits, lower inflation rates, and other neoliberal reforms on the Caribbean. Without exception, they call for a reexamination of the accompanying unemployment and underemployment, deterioration of health, environmental degradation, deeper inequality, and financial instability. Less so, authors turn their attention to the social and cultural effects of the transfer of commodities. The world has also been shrinking for narco-traffickers, for example, and some of the money these transactions generate enters and distorts the conventional political and social processes of Caribbean democracies. The dire conditions faced by the area’s poorer people, encapsulated for some in the 1980s in the phrase “the feminization of poverty,” have become so generalized as a result of the international movement of capital that the more farsighted and progressive commentators attach emergency status to a number of social and cultural manifestations of the absence of social and political controls: black urban plight, the “feminization of export processing zone industries, part-time work, domestic migrant workers, refugee camps, and the sex tourism industry.”⁴

Another commonplace in the writings of globalization analysts is that homogeneity—and, worse, conformity—is the logical corollary to the indiscriminate exchange of articles that are vested with material and ideological value. As more and more people have access to information and to commodities in the market, they will inevitably desire to acquire the same products in an effort to improve their lives—or so the argument runs. In its most abominable incarnation, “glocalization” (global localization)—to employ the term used by Raquel Romberg in chapter 7—connects cities with strong corporate transnational interests with each other, thus networking centers of capital and influ-ence and reinforcing their concentration to the exclusion of old configurations.⁵ Either way, the ominous prediction is that there will be less room for diversity and, on the contrary, enormous pressure to adopt and an equally compelling eagerness to embrace uniformly Western First World tastes and values.

The Caribbean scholarly response to this argument has been twofold. In the first place, the assumption appears simplistic. Although there is evidence that U.S. influence in the Caribbean has resulted in precisely the erasure of cultural forms that were considered autochthonous, it is also true that other cultural forms have remained virtually untouched and that some of the newly introduced practices and items have obtained a highly localized reformulation and meaning. Second, many scholars have challenged the one-way quality that characterizes the process described. In other words, the Caribbean has not been a simple tabula rasa on which the powerful foreigners have consciously imported and inscribed variants of their cultures. The Caribbean people have not been merely passive recipients in the process of cultural transformation, in neither the past nor the present. Nor is agency easily attributable, given the way that culture develops. As this volume seeks to demonstrate, music, food, celebrations, and daily practices have moved with people and sometimes independently of population movement. The Caribbean diaspora communities in the United States, for example, retain organic links with the populations back home and recreate, with local variations, their cultural patterns with such compelling insistence that they have become an integral part of the community’s dominant economy.

This is not to say that any one of the island-states of the Caribbean and the United States, to take the obvious “trading” partners, are equal participants in the exchange of commodities. Not only is the latter the most powerful country in the world because of its economic wherewithal; it is also true that the material and ideological flood that is the trademark of globalization has weakened local state controls to the point where resistance to the relentless flood of “superior” products and ideas becomes almost impossible, if not highly irrational.

It is not our purpose here to assess the (negative) impact of powerful economic and political forces worldwide and directly north of the Caribbean region. It is the underlying premise of this volume, instead, that realignments, political and economic, are both empirically and theoretically relevant insofar as they impact political, social, and cultural forms. Given the reduced importance of physical space to the men and women in government and in industry who are jointly, if not harmoniously, constructing a new world order, it is incumbent on the people who inhabit that narrowly defined physical space to reconfigure the edifice upon which social life and culture are molded. Perhaps a more secure sense of identity can be found in culture, race, language, ethnicity—notions that transcend and indeed fragment the old bonds imposed and cultivated by the nation-state. Understood in this way, the security of the region is assured not only by military and political forces, but also by environmental protection, responsible border controls, community-based decision making, supportive nongovernmental organization (NGO) collaboration, and other organized agencies with direct social impact.

At the heart of this understanding, and at the center of this volume, lies an attempt to redefine societies according to their felt needs and aspirations, and not to market forces beyond their control. This is not to say that any so-called nation-state in the region can reconstitute itself overnight according to newly fashioned parameters, such as racial mix, use of language, cultural practices—these kinds of loyalties take a relatively long time to form and reform, and it is unlikely that national allegiances, despite the alarmist cries of antiglobalization advocates, will weaken to the point of extinction in the immediate future. Geography will always continue to constitute a fundamental dimension of identity. What appears more probable, and may already be in evidence, is that notions of citizenship are changing from the bottom up—that talk of democracy in the Caribbean embraces much more than elections and now regularly includes “participation and policy choice on a continual basis and beyond parties, [and also] interest groups and other social movements.”⁶ When seen in such a way, globalization, although not exactly a mere ideological construct of the industrialized world that requires demystification, appears much more manageable and humanly amenable. It is in this spirit that the contributing authors of this volume approach their themes—in studying the impact of the forces of globalization in Caribbean geopolitics, they have found extraordinary richness, both theoretical and empirical, in the social and cultural manifestations of these phenomena.

Certainly the common implication of all these essays is that the Caribbean is a region of unusual resilience and remarkable creativity. Yet the fascinating variation across the region remains profound and the ways in which the Caribbean people confront the forces of globalization will vary according to the nature of the challenges presented as well as to the local conditions. In any case, the region remains an ideal location to examine and analyze not only the challenges of diversity but also the powerful imperatives to coalesce. Old issues of Caribbean life, history, and identity have not been obliterated by the challenges of globalization. But they have not remained static either. Economic dependence and political instability have, in the Caribbean as elsewhere, proved themselves compatible with cultural dynamism and creativity.

NOTES

1 UNESCO, General History of the Caribbean.

2 Not the least of these efforts has been delimiting the region for scholarly purposes, a task Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, 5-8, and Hillman and D’Agostino, Understanding the Contemporary Caribbean, chap. 1, take up with verve.

3 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents; H. James, The End of Globalization; and Gwynne and Kay, Latin America Transformed.

4 . Filomina C. Steady, “Introduction: Revisiting the Black Woman Cross-Culturally,” in Steady, Black Women, 19.

5 Menno Vellinga, “The Dialectics of Globalization: Internationalization, Regionalization, and Subregional Response,” in Vellinga, The Dialectics of Globalization, 8.

6 . Ivelaw L. Griffith and Betty N. Sedoc-Dahlberg, “Introduction: Democracy and Human Rights in the Caribbean,” in Griffith and Sedoc-Dahlberg, Democracy and Human Rights in the Caribbean, 3.

PART ONE

The Economi...