Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures

Understanding the Caribbean, according to the editors of this collection of essays, entails pursuing the “elusive ideal of a region meant by its geography to be apprehended as a totality even though it is fractured by history and dispersed by language and discourse” (p. 3). In their eloquent introduction, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo take up Antonio Benítez Rojo’s injunction to acknowledge the dualities attendant on studies of the Caribbean: if fragmentation and heterogeneity inhere, so too do particular historical and cultural continuities. Their response to this challenge has involved assembling a series of local studies on widely disparate issues, distant from one another with regards to subject matter as well as temporal and geographic scope. While this approach might have produced a confusing assortment of chapters, shared methodological and ethical perspectives knit them together into a compelling, if diverse, unity.Eight essays address subjects including environmental change, AIDS, Christopher Columbus’s enslavement of indigenous people, C. L. R. James’s political activism, visual art, music, and the literature of empire. Some of these work to restore neglected aspects of the Caribbean to the historical and scholarly record. Both Peter Hulme and Jalil Sued-Badillo, for instance, place indigenous people at the center of their inquiries. Sued-Badillo’s essay traces Christopher Columbus’s little-known participation in an early version of the slave trade. Although some African slaves may have travelled with him on his voyages, Columbus made more systematic efforts to enact a reverse route: on several occasions, according to Sued-Badillo, Columbus brought shiploads of enslaved Amerindians to Seville. Although hundreds arrived in Europe, many of them perished, and in the end the Spanish Crown outlawed the practice. But that does not diminish the relevance of this episode for the way it might alter received narratives about slavery and the role of indigenous people in the Caribbean. Similarly, Hulme’s study of two novels by American writer Frederick Albion Ober analyzes the complicated plots, which involve, among other things, the discovery of indigenous Cubans by Americans engaged in various imperial enterprises in late nineteenth-century Cuba. Hulme deftly argues for connections between mining, archaeology, and narratives about “vanishing” tribes in both Cuba and the United States.Writing on subjects as unrelated as C. L. R. James’s political activism and accounts of environmental change, Kevin Meehan and Paravisini-Gebert also offer new perspectives. Meehan dwells on James’s participation in radical organizing in the United States to comprehend his changing attitudes towards African Americans. Paravisini-Gebert demonstrates the centrality of landscape and environment to literary invocations of national identity. Both essays introduce fresh material and challenge dominant interpretations of well-known subjects. Another cluster of essays rests on the power of visual art and music, not in their frequently observed role as the glue that binds people into nations, but rather as that which can powerfully express the views of often-silenced groups, or as cultural artifacts that transcend simple nationhood. In two essays, the editors along with Martha Daisy Kelehan argue that visual representations of AIDS or of botpipple speak volumes in politically charged contexts where texts are often suppressed, or at least closely monitored. On the other hand, Yolanda Martínez San Miguel shows that certain songs and musical genres, such as merengue, can be understood as “local” in several places at once, taking on multiple meanings as they travel and becoming “a very clear example of those unequally shared spaces of knowledge and negotiation” (p. 212). If visual art allows particular groups to speak with a powerfully unified voice, music allows many groups to participate in the making of its meaning.Beyond these thematic strands, the essays in this volume share both methodological proclivities and a deeply politicized tone. In their modes of inquiry, they all place texts at the center of their inquiries rather than relying on more social scientific approaches. The emphasis lies on interpretations of Caribbean texts and contexts rather than on variables, outcomes, and predictions. More importantly, the essays are all deeply political. In different ways, the chapters all remind readers that the Caribbean must be understood as a place where the cleavages of inequality and the arbitrary nature of injustice are as critical as geographic or linguistic fragmentation. This book will be useful to a wide array of interested readers, from curious or adventurous undergraduates to graduate students searching for particular pieces missing from the scholarly record or for a language with which to invoke Caribbean paradoxes. For historians and literary critics, it will provide a rich trove of pleasurable reading.

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