Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze

Conclusion: The Power of Interpellation

Conclusion The Power of Interpellation This monograph is concerned with how modernity is and has been conceived, lived, and negotiated in the Caribbean and focuses on narratives of modernity from, about, or derived from the encounter with it. The works in question are very diverse in terms of media, genre, and provenance: sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy (chapters 1 and 6); a scientific romance produced at the turn of last century by the king of the small Caribbean island of Redonda (chapter 2); contemporary collections of poetry from the Anglophone diasporic Caribbean (chapters 1 and 4); a historical novel from Guadeloupe that engages with texts by European canonical authors (chapter 3); a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairytale templates, romances from England and Jamaica, and a short story from Colombia (chapters 4 and 5); a long narrative poem from one of the four Caribbean winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature1 and seventeenthcentury , nineteenth-century, and contemporary paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas (chapter 6). Of course, Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze is not the first book that approaches modernity from a Caribbean perspective. As early as 1962, C. L. R. James argued for a redefinition of modernity that privileged dialectic exchange over ethnocentric enthusiasm or preoccupation for technological progress.2 Almost twenty years later, Glissant gave a fascinating account of the New World’s “irruption into modernity”3 in his seminal Caribbean Discourse. Yet his evocative words suggest that the Caribbean somehow gate-crashed what was already an established tradition. Nothing, I have argued in the preceding chapters, can be further from the truth. In Writing in Limbo, Simon Gikandi has indicated that modernity has often forced the colonized people to deny their subjectivity, language, and history and, of course, he has a point.4 136 Conclusion Nonetheless, his position implies that modernity has always been and can only be an exclusively North Atlantic product. In other words, Gikandi does not consider the fact that centuries of interaction have repeatedly sabotaged the fabricated dichotomy between modern and non-modern parts of the world and denied dominant discourses and hegemonic positions the possibility to go unquestioned. My argument, however, does not rely on a crude geographical division: the North Atlantic itself is not reducible to a geographical area but is a way of thinking and framing the world that transcends physical boundaries. What follows, I have argued further, is that North Atlantic modernity is not synonymous with modernity but is rather a pernicious project that relies on an after-thefact self-representation and on one exclusivist point of view that arrogantly equates universality with itself. In order to clarify my argument, I mobilized the myth of Medusa. Similar to Medusa’s gaze, which turned people into stone, the gaze of North Atlantic modernity produces its “non-modern others” by casting a spell that freezes them into a state of (alleged) perpetual backwardness. Medusa’s account of what modernity is actively relies on silencing who and what do not conform to her selfrepresentation . In order to recast modernity as the product of exchange and negotiation , it is crucial to remember that Medusa’s is not the only available narrative and that both she and her spell are not invincible. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy highlights and promotes an alternative counterculture of modernity predicated on double consciousness and transcending both race and nationalism.5 The notion of counterculture, though, implicitly confirms that what I have called the North Atlantic project—that is, a way of living and experiencing the world that thrives on discursive and actual violence (e.g., “othering” practices, genocide, slavery, racism, patriarchy , exploitation of labor)—has the right to call itself modern. The useful concept of a “disavowed modernity” has recently been introduced by Sibylle Fischer to define a cluster of radical formulations of what it meant to be modern that were available—but quickly silenced—in nineteenthcentury Cuba and Haiti/Santo Domingo.6 Regrettably, Fischer’s focus on the Enlightenment era has made her neglect the complexities of early modernity, a foundational moment in the history of the Caribbean and the point of departure of my monograph, which, like hers, constitutes an effort to respond to C. L. R. James’s invitation to redefine the modern from a Caribbean perspective. Rather than exploring Caribbean appropriations of the modern, something that James but also J. Michael Dash has done brilliantly,7 my main concern has...