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Introduction Breaking Medusa’s Spell One of the most feared monsters of antiquity is Medusa, the deity with snakes instead of hair and a gaze that could transform people into stone. Medusa’s myth is expedient for describing how modernity creates its “others”: in order to legitimize itself, it petrifies those who stand before it, freezing them into a state of what she calls perpetual backwardness , primitivism, or non-modernity. In order to distinguish herself from her “non-modern others,” the Gorgon concocts her own periodization, according to which any distinction between the “non-modern” and the “modern” implies a break in temporality and the coming into being of a different social and cultural logic. It is not altogether clear, however, when this break occurs and modernity begins. A number of possible beginnings have been suggested: the Roman or Imperial break, Descartes’ cogito, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, Galileo, the emergence of capitalism, Luther, German idealism, the “conquest” of the Americas.1 In an attempt to come to terms with this confusing picture, Marshall Berman distinguishes three different phases in the history of modernity: the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the revolutionary wave of the 1790s to the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century.2 I will repeatedly refer to Berman’s periodization, because what he omits from his template is as useful to my line of reasoning as what he includes. Despite the fact that he equates the beginning of modernity with the sixteenth century, his disregard for the early modern period is distressing and his Eurocentrism simply untenable, as the American and Haitian Revolutions are never mentioned. It appears, in fact, that if the when of modernity proves tricky to pinpoint, the where has traditionally been less problematic. For example, not only Berman’s periodization but also all possible beginnings more recently suggested by Fredric Jameson in A Singular Modernity are exquisitely Eurocentric. It is significant, of course, that when the Americas 2 Introduction are mentioned, Jameson should resort to the word “conquest”3 rather than “discovery” or “encounter”—I will return to the issue of terminology in my first chapter, yet it is evident that, in this instance, the word “conquest” considers only the Eurocentric perspective. The non-modern, the primitive, and the backward are therefore not simply features of yesteryear but are actively identified with non-European places where Europe and, later, the North Atlantic have exported and still export their own notion of progress and their own economic model. For the purpose of this book and for the sake of precision, I will use North Atlantic modernity to refer to what I have just described simply as modernity. Centuries of interactions between West and East, North and South have simply disallowed easy geographical dichotomies; so by North Atlantic, I do not mean merely a geographical area but a cluster of dominant discourses that do not necessarily belong exclusively to that area and are not the only discourses that circulate in that area. The North Atlantic is in fact more a “project” than a place, and the petrifying narratives of modernity that it produces are an intrinsic part of this project.4 Essentially, Medusa’s objectives are, and have always been, political and cultural domination and economic exploitation; as such, there is nothing intrinsically modern about this. Yet the North Atlantic Gorgon has claimed for herself, and for herself only, the right to be called modern. Arguably, what is needed in order to outstare the Gorgon is a reconfiguration of modernity. Such a redefinition must anchor its own meaning to the ways in which all involved parties have concretely experienced and shaped modernity by negotiating their way through the modern social, political, and cultural framework. The Caribbean region is of particular relevance to the problematic of modernity. Situated in the Western hemisphere, in between the North and the South Atlantic, the Caribbean has traditionally been equated with the non-modern. It is a site where, if we follow Berman’s periodization, the Gorgon first deployed her powers to the full: the genocide of the indigenous population, slavery, and colonization are inextricably linked with what he identifies as the beginning of the modern era. The Caribbean, however, also inexorably exposed Medusa’s vulnerability and contradictions : recurrent slave rebellions and the Haitian Revolution are, of course, primary and embarrassing examples. It is in fact widely acknowledged and not untrue that North Atlantic modernity travels along the routes of capitalist globalization, but this is only half the story. What...

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