Preface: The Frame of the Nation

In the age of transnational capitalism, regional blocs, diasporic connections, postcolonial projects gone awry, and in the age of nationalism as the dark stepchild of dangerous fundamentalism, why would anyone want to think critically about the frame of the nation? The nation-state is a relic of early political modernity. What can one find in an inquiry into the frames of the nation other than premodern throwbacks, traditional cultures, and irrationalities? To be modern, these arguments run, is to fix our gaze on political futures that look forward, not backward. However, there is a problem with these arguments. At the base of such positions is an understanding of modernity as a singular universal process that determines all political and social meanings. Modernity drags both the colony and postcolony kicking and screaming into the present age and into a singular uniform process. Consequently, all other histories are merely secondary or derivative, as modernity reorganizes geography, history, and reason into this central singularity. Thus, the present crisis in the different Caribbean nation-states is significantly about a failure to modernize on two fronts. The first is the supposed incapacity of the region to opportunistically insert itself economically into transnational capitalism; and second is the lack of traditional liberal norms and practices in the region's political order.

What is missing from this perspective is a critical examination of how the stubborn legacies of colonial modernity operate, how empire continues to rule the world. What is missing also is another history of modernity, not just a history of its "underside," which has been richly documented by many of the region's twentieth-century intellectuals (from C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins to the New World Group's intellectual labor on plantation political economy to the writings of many novelists and poets). What is missing is a historical view of how human populations in the Caribbean colonies grappled with the consequences of modernity.

The story is a complex one. It obviously involves genocide, racial slavery, forms of indentured servitude and forms of capital accumulation. But human beings are not just victims; they wrestle with their conditions and seek meanings in their lives. Given that the colonial project's overlapping episteme can still be discerned in the hegemonic practices of the Caribbean postcolony, a real difficulty in Caribbean life is decolonizing the mind. This is not to say that the original work done on the economy, history, politics, and social structures of the Caribbean, work generated by the Caribbean intellectual tradition to critique and root out the colonial, has been useless. No. It is instead to indicate that there is a politics of knowledge, a politics of naming, which in the stark and oftentimes horrendous social conditions of our postcolony has been elided. And so, now, when we face the challenges of rethinking and grappling with the nature of collapsed political projects, the work of creating an inventory still remains.

We should by now be aware that we can no longer define politics narrowly. Thus perhaps a considerable part of the region's crisis is rooted in a politics of knowledge: the categories through which we think about politics, about social change, about race, about ethnicity and gender. Categories do not make revolution, but flawed categories can have grave political and social consequences. To discuss the frames of the nation is to critically engage the ways we think about the nation, about the discursive practices of nation-builders, poets, intellectuals and political figures, to see if we can bring to the fore another history. This is not the history of glorious mythic achievements or of rebellion in every action but an alternative history to be found in the ways that ordinary people have shaped their environment.

This issue of Small Axe is organized around aspects of this alternative history. We begin with an investigation of forms of nationalism in the Jamaican colonial state other than the standard narratives of Creole nationalism. From there we move on to discuss the ways in...