Moving History in the Aftermath (review)

Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies, Mimi Sheller. New York: Routledge, 2003. ISBN: 0-415257603

In Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies, Mimi Sheller has composed more than what she labels a "historical sociology." In the course of surveying five hundred years of a regional history often fabulous and often frightful, Sheller has effectively set up a historiographical signpost, a work that indexes some of the major thematic, conceptual, methodological, and stylistic turns that have occurred within the academy in the last two decades. The book's promiscuous interests bear the influence of the "cultural studies" wave that unsettled, then consolidated, professional history writing during the eighties. Trees, tea, tourists, and theoretical constructs are all here analyzed with impressive fluency. Equally indicative of the contemporary academic moment is Sheller's sustained and skeptical engagement with the representation of the objects, practices, and concepts under consideration. Reflecting the ascendancy of "discourse analysis," she writes with a keen consciousness that texts and images strategically operate in the construction of particular versions and visions of reality. Indeed, nothing better betrays the book's indebtedness to constructivism than references to the Caribbean as "fantasy" and "idea." No less à la mode is the import assigned to the concept of "modernity." Virtually unavoidable in the current vocabulary of social scientists and historians, the term frames Sheller's political and intellectual concerns. "Modernity," in fact, appears in the introduction's first, and the conclusion's final, sentence. Consuming the Caribbean is symptomatic: Caribbean history made by and for our so-called post-colonial scholarly times.

Yet however topical, Sheller's telling hardly represents an irreconcilable break with previous historical narratives of the Caribbean. Her book, to the contrary, shares with classic interpretations of the region the critical premise that these little islands lie at the heart of modern global history. So that when Sheller on the very first page commits to correcting defective scholarship that has "eviscerated" the Caribbean from the "imagined geography of Western modernity," she places herself in a venerable scholarly tradition that includes the likes of Eric Williams.¹

But while her attitude toward the "West" resembles Williams's, Consuming the Caribbean is cast in a political and intellectual climate quite unlike From Columbus to Castro. The heated academic days of inciting "third world" nationalism and indicting "Western neocolonialism" have largely cooled off. Castro himself seems to have become more political curiosity than charismatic counter to colonialism. How, then, it is worth asking, do the past five hundred Caribbean years appear in this context? How are professional historians of the comfortably "posted" sort, scholars who write (to paraphrase David Scott) after Bandung, plotting the region's past? Consuming the Caribbean offers an opportunity to consider the developing contours of this new history.²

One of the most striking issues provoked by this study is the very status of the Caribbean, or more precisely, what some people might call its ontology. Taking cue from a body of scholarship that has bared and embarrassed the regulative power of colonialist language and imagery, Sheller's book is interested in the Caribbean primarily insofar as it is a "projection of EuroAmerican fantasies and desires." Like the late Edward Said, she explores an imaginary place. And like much of the tributary literature that has swollen into the flooded field of "postcolonial studies," Consuming the Caribbean is a left-handed compliment to the sheer inventiveness and industriousness of imperialist imaginations.³

Euro-American explorers, cartographers, travel writers, filmmakers, and even scholars, Sheller shows throughout this study, have tended to effectively prescribe—not describe—the Caribbean. Seventeenth-century images of "tropical fecundity" and "excessive fruitfulness" in the Caribbean, she argues, served the rhetorical needs of Europe's colonial adventurers, who sought financial backing and willing workers. Two hundred years later, the Caribbean continued to appear in Western literature as a "site of luxuriant profusion." This time, though, with a difference; these representations, according to Sheller, were meant to draw US capital and guide...