Caribbean American Regionalism at the End(s) of Empire(s)

In The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Barbadian author and critic George Lamming provides one of the most compelling exhortations in the twentieth century about how, through self-imposed exile, West Indian intellectuals in the British colonial milieu can develop strategies for decolonizing their minds, bodies, and art. The Pleasures of Exile is less remarked upon for the ways in which it glimpses, from Lamming’s mid-century vantage point, what international political economist Anthony Payne in the context of the late twentieth century describes as “the many linkages between the US and the Caribbean [that] have reached a sufficient depth and intensity across such a range of issues that they must be seen to have created a novel structural context . . . an emergent ‘Caribbean America’” (241). More attentive to geopolitical and economic entanglements than to cultural linkages between the US and the Caribbean, Payne’s phrase “novel structural context” is nonetheless highly suggestive. In The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming enacts his belief that art, literature, and other cultural forms of expression considered in the structural context of the uneven Caribbean American development that shapes them and to which they respond might provide a unique foothold for imagining strategies for critiquing and perhaps even redressing the unsustainable, catastrophic effects of “patterns of trade, financial flows, [and labor] migration” in the Caribbean American region that unfold “in a fashion that is far from being symmetrical or mutually beneficial” (Payne 238). Central to my first book Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006) is the argument that the “emergent Caribbean America” that Payne locates in the late twentieth century in fact emerges from the late eighteenth century onward. Accordingly, attendant cultural forms and patterns of trade and labor migration of an emergent Caribbean America are coterminous with neither Lamming’s relatively late mid-twentieth-century recognition of, and participation in, them nor Payne’s late-twentieth-century vantage point. Instead, they develop across two centuries, reaching an especially palpable manifestation as early as the late nineteenth century, a moment characterized by the mutually dependent phenomena of a dying European colonialism and a rising US imperialism in the Caribbean.¹ As Lamming provocatively remarks, “we have always been mixed up in America’s business” (154)—a multivalent grammar of identification according to which West Indians are actors in and acted upon by “America’s business,” thus suggesting the urgent need to limn the business of Caribbean American cultural relations and the cultural relations of Caribbean American business across space and time.

Appropriately, Lamming evokes Alexander Hamilton to demonstrate the long history of Caribbean involvement in America’s business: “We have a big stake in the building of America. Alexander Hamilton, the federal guy who contributed so richly to their constitutional literature, was a West Indian” (154). As Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury and chief architect of the US as an “empire for commerce,” Hamilton embodied the great uneasiness that many Americans expressed about the unpredictable, potentially disastrous effects on the nation and national character of extensive relations between the slave colonies of the West Indies and the putatively free and democratic states of the independent mainland, what I have termed elsewhere the New Republic’s “creole complex.”² Accordingly, Lamming’s offhanded reference to Hamilton as “the federal guy” perhaps betrays his ambivalence about Hamilton’s role in the literary history of Caribbean America as founding author of the vision for US commercial empire that Lamming admonishes for its material excesses and inhospitable treatment of the West Indies and West Indians. Writes Lamming, “It’s a different America that the West Indies can explore. . . . America is very much with us now: from Puerto Rico right down to Trinidad. But America is one island only; and we are used to many islands . . . the less money and the more islands, the better it may be for America herself” (152, 154).

This project treats the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century period when Hamilton’s century-old vision for the US as the dominant empire for commerce in the hemisphere...