A World among These Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America

Introduction

Introduction Foundational site and crucible of the European colonial (and later United States neocolonial) enterprise in the Americas, the Caribbean is also the world pioneering locale of that complex process of transnational globalization and “modernity” that was there first set in motion. It was in this archipelago of isles (rimlands, enclaves, and territories)1 coupled and swung between our hemisphere’s two continents that the worldwide reach and integration of the planet’s once mutually isolated spheres had its most decisive early modern birthing. The unaccustomed intimacy, assorted content, and commingling of different geographies, peoples, economies, cultures, intrasocietal conflicts and the brusque convergence of their respective histories which came of that original encounter evolved eventually to become an enduring aspect of the ordinary experience of all humanity. The alchemy of that fateful beginning also, in due course, saw in the Caribbean the emergence of a world all its own, wholly distinct, of many worlds constructed, ebullient, integral, and new. That process of commingling, predictably enough, became a patent constant and unique attribute of the archipelago’s own distinctive historical development, individual character, and cultural personality. A region of continuous human commerce and exchange, of fusions fraught or fruitful, of a ceaseless and ubiquitous Creolization, the Caribbean is thus also a more than ordinarily privileged and compelling location for sustained engagement with and rewarding study of that initial encounter’s subsequent and broadly American New World unfolding . Its legacies are, certainly, still evident in our own contemporary train of multinational clash, transnational encounter, domestic structural displacements, periodic social reconfigurations, and variable convergences , with all that train’s no less dramatic freight of demographic shifts, unprecedented population transfers out of ancestral homelands, and burgeoning (multi-)metropolitan Caribbean (im)migrant enclaves and Antillean postcolonial diasporas. The reciprocal cultural force and 1 2 Introduction energy of these diasporas’ emergent New Creoles who, in Aimé Césaire’s (Martinique, 1913–2008) apt and canny phrase, so evidently “belong to no nationality ever contemplated by the chancelleries” inescapably bring fresh dimension, novel conceptions, alternative definitions, and uncommon challenge to more traditionally accented discussions and debates about the precincts, confines, encompassing reach as well as inclusive scope of “the nation,” its apposite citizenry, authoritatively communal “identity,” culturally emblematic icons, “national” concerns and priorities. In tandem with all the many other historic changes which likewise marked the Caribbean’s passage through the last several centuries, these transitive New Creole communities’ very existence and increasingly selfassertive vigor “abroad” and “at home” resist as, partially or entirely, inadequate all but unavoidably neologistic identifiers—AmeríRican and Dominican-York are just two examples—of their bi-directional reality and so doubly maverick condition. They thus vitally and provocatively stimulate reassessment, new (re)historizations, and critical revisions of previously customary and commandingly select, too patricianly exclusive notions of the proper—territorial, linguistic, ethnic, racial, or cultural—frontiers of “the national” and its proper sphere(s). An area and subject so richly protean and vibrantly effervescent would seem a point of singular attraction and keen interest to an American academy so frequently drawn, in triumphal content or apprehensive disquiet, to “melting pots” and “the clash of civilizations,” lately enticed by the topical appeal of a sometimes hazily grounded, fitfully or irregularly accentuated “Atlantic Space” and increasingly absorbed by the chic theoretical seductions of the postmodern turn. The Caribbean, for all that, is still most often positioned on the tangential outer banks and subsidiary margin of its endeavor’s accustomed focal core, scholarly provinces, and sustained concentration—save as it periodically erupts in disconcerting portent, unsettling revolution, or natural catastrophe, abruptly to thrust itself unbidden to stage center of a then suddenly rapt attention. More often than not generally approached in isolated single country or sectoral fragment fashion, the archipelago’s more fully dimensioned complexity, heterogeneous coherence, overarching integrity and cohesion are just as frequently likely to be all but virtually ignored, to remain largely veiled, effectively disregarded. The more obvious virtues of this time-honored single country or individual provincial subdivision stress and concentration notwithstanding, the comparatively Introduction 3 restrictive ambit of its otherwise appropriate particularizations can thus similarly diminish vital recognition of the parallel significance, the shaping weight and importance, of a more amply comprehensive, equally definitive Caribbean context and landscape; and even, to some extent, a sufficient appreciation of its own selected terrain’s unique idiosyncrasy and personality as at once inextricably constituent element and discrete expression of that...