Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone

Introduction. Caribbean Spaces: Reflective Essays/Creative-Theoretical Circulations

Introduction Caribbean Spaces Reflective Essays/ Creative-Theoretical Circulations “Caribbean Spaces” is my way of describing plural island geographies , the surrounding continental locations as well as Caribbean sociocultural and geopolitical locations in countries in North, South, and Central America. A Caribbean diaspora, we can now assert, has also been created in countries via various waves of migration to particular areas that became Caribbean Space. These are social and cultural places (spaces) that extend the understanding of the Caribbean beyond “small space,” fragmented identifications . The claiming of Caribbean Space captures ontologically ways of being in the world. It assumes movement as it makes and remakes the critical elements of Caribbean geography: landscape and seascape, sky and sun, but also music, food, and style. Caribbean diaspora spaces, in the continental context, refer to those locationsinwhichtherearedistinctlyidentifiedre -creationsofCaribbeancommunitiesfollowingmigration .Essentialingredientsinclude asizabledemographic shiftinthepopulationtothisgivenlocationandthedevelopmentofCaribbean business communities: travel agencies and barrel-shipping agencies, locs and braid hairdressers, botanicas, assorted businesses, restaurants, bakeries, and shopsdedicatedsolelytothepreparingorsellingofCaribbeanfoodproducts— fresh produce and ground provisions, roti and patty shops. Entertainment in theformofexcursions,dances,Caribbeanblockparties,parang,concerts,fetes, and other similar activities contributes to the re-creation of Caribbean culture in diaspora. These extend the notion of Caribbean Space as a larger ontological referent as they attempt to reproduce a decolonized set of arrangements. But there is more: Caribbean record shops, music producers, and related networks 2 . introduction fortheproductionofshows;communicationsmediarangingfromnewspapers in London, New York, or Miami; blogs and e-journals, newsletters, party fliers and cards, radio and television stations; soccer and cricket clubs and matches; language diversity, including Creole, patois, Spanglish, and specific Caribbean forms of Spanish; and a public or street-oriented culture manifested in “liming ” and its associated stories and boasts, street banter and calling out, loud talking, conspicuous (sometimes ridiculous) clothing styles, and public malefemale flirtation and promises. A certain intergenerational camaraderie and socializing, particularly in relations that have to do with the care of children and the elderly, shopping for foods and their preparation, beach outings, and other transgenerational family celebrations with food, music, and dance also create Caribbean space. Caribbean Spaces then are locations that preserve certain versions of Caribbean culture as they provide community support in migration. A product of diaspora, one can call it, Caribbean spaces are clearly marked by their own self-identification: in London not only Brixton but also Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road; Powis Square, where there is a Carnival Village and the launching site for the Notting Hill Carnival, and Finsbury Park and the cultural space created in the area around New Beacon Books; Brooklyn, which hosts the Labor Day Parade annually, and Harlem, with its early history of Caribbean businesses, bookstores, and creative expressions and still an island salad bar; Miami, with its complexity of neighborhoods—Little Haiti, Little Havana, and Lauderhill, the 441 strip in North Miami; the North Side of Chicago, around Rogers Park; the Baltimore–Washington, D.C., corridor; Hartford, Connecticut; Toronto, Canada, with its Caribana festival . . . Amsterdam . . . Paris . . . we could go on. Indeed, noting the public celebrations of Carnivals in diaspora is one way of recognizing Caribbean space. Zones of family interaction also reveal Caribbean space: weddings and funerals, the migrations of children and adults in consistent ways in both directions; the care of elderly and its implications in geographically divided community and family contexts; long-maintained childhood and neighborhood friendships and other fictive kin relationships; the development of generationsincommunitiesandavarietyofintermarriages—cross-Caribbean/ cross-Americas—and other ethnic communities; and the purchasing of property and other residential markers, such as the planting of ackee, banana, mango, and June plum trees in Miami. Caribbean island spaces provide a certain set of well-documented cultural interactions and neighborliness in community, an assumption of reciprocity, a set of cultural formations produced by waves of migration to the Caribbean introduction · 3 from India, Africa, Europe, North and South Americas, northern Africa, the Middle East. History ensures some distinct markers on land, in and on the bodies of the people, in and around the created communities. A certain geography of interconnection in archipelagoes ensures the repetition that Antonio Benitez-Rojo identifies as well as the consistent politics of creolization as articulated by scholars and writers such as Kamau Brathwaite and Edouard Glissant. And the reach into continental locations such as Guyana, Venezuela, Belize, and the United States ensures the set of spatial extensions already identified. But following Alejo Carpentier, one can also think of a Caribbean Mediterranean (83), in which the sea is basically...