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CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003) 151-174



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Imperial Geographies and Caribbean Nationalism
At the Border between "A Dying Colonialism" and U.S. Hegemony

Carole Boyce Davies
Florida International University

Monica Jardine
State University of New York, Buffalo


THE CONQUEST AND TRANSFORMATION OF HISTORICAL SPACE IS A FUNDAMENtal narrative of the capitalist West represented in classical political economy by Europe's plundering of Africa and the "New World" for the creation of a single world market. 1 Progressively conceptualized and written as a Western narrative of exploration and science, bringing with it modernity, the long-term objective of Western imperialist expansion has remained the preservation of the ideal global conditions for capitalist accumulation. 2 At the height of Europe's political and military expansion into the modern colonial world, imperialist discourses defined the concentration of capital as the main force behind the carving up of the entire world by a few dominant European nation-states. 3 In the contemporary period, however, discourses of imperialism must engage with the economic hegemony of the United States and its drive to maintain a monopoly of the use of force, on the one hand, and, on the other, the emergence of counternarratives of modernity and freedom. [End Page 151]

In the most popular readings, the construction of European territorial empires laid the foundation for the incorporation of dependent economies in the world economy. However, as both Mandami (1996) and Guha (1995) have argued, Europe's implantation of particular forms of capitalist rule have been at the center of the redrawing of contemporary ideological and spatial boundaries in the world-system. Thus, we assert from the outset that the mapping of the world-system constituted within the British/European field of hegemony would be adapted by the United States to its own particular set of imperial/colonial relations and agendas in the Caribbean region. 4

This paper argues that the possibility of a modern Caribbean nation was thereby caught between a retreating and a rising regional imperialism: the first bowing before the military and economic expansion of the United States in the Caribbean region, after the U.S. takeover of the Spanish Empire following 1890; the second seeking to accommodate a series of dying colonialisms with the need for a modern nationalism. We consider three major Caribbean thinkers—Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Claudia Jones—who articulate decisive aspects of the thematic discourse of Caribbean nationalism at this border between "dying colonialism" and advancing U.S. imperialism. Next, we consider geographies of empire in their spatial configurations, with particular emphasis on the Caribbean region. Finally, we look at contemporary articulations of dominance by the United States in the Caribbean region.

Reading the New Imperialism

Western imperialist self-movement into the construction of "a world space" has adopted three orderings of the modern world-system. Firstly, all land space has been converted into a potentially malleable open space for the production of value. Secondly, appropriated space must be planned and managed so as to facilitate the circulation of commodities. And thirdly, historical space is to be re-imagined and experienced as a national community of equal and loyal citizens. 5 This history of spatial transgression and its larger assumptions of control of large geographic areas have consistently assumed empty space for conquest (terra nullis) and movement, as well as a systemization of ocean space. Older European states successfully constructed [End Page 152] the Middle Passage and managed the development of new trade routes, triangular trade, commercial activity (i.e., the economics of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism coterminous with the rise of European modernity). 6 It is the United States, from Bretton Woods onwards, that took charge of opening the borders and managing the institutional conditions of entry into contemporary capitalist space. These conditions, as we already know, prefigure contemporary notions of globalization as therefore always already economic, assuming open borders for the production and movement of goods and resources. Thus, narratives of "postcoloniality" must necessarily be grounded in the...

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