Preface: Remnants, Exigencies, . . . Islands

Each past, of course, once was present, and our present will one day be but another past. But some parts of the past are endowed with astonishing vitality because the living validate those parts, reenact them, regret them.

—Sidney Mintz

On Richard Price's account of it, when they were colleagues together at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Sidney Mintz used to tell him that he was beginning to have a distinct fear that when he opened his mouth to say something in a seminar, moths might fly out.¹ It is a strikingly vivid and perhaps even somewhat distressing image. For as Price seems to suggest in his own suitably brief reflections on the remark, we are all, those of us at least who make our livings as teachers, at the mercy of this particular anxiety. Still, it may be that Mintz's moths are worth having, more so than the moths of others, anyway; worth having because of what reminders, remainders, remnants, they carry with them in their sighted flight. Sidney Mintz has been, for more than half a century now, a distinctive voice in anthropology generally, and in the anthropology of the Caribbean most especially.² Indeed, Mintz might say that thinking about the Caribbean as an historical region has been inseparable from his ability to formulate an idea of the critical challenges of contemporary anthropology. And the varied tones of this voice of anthropological reason we can hear at work in his recently published W. E. B. Du Bois lectures, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations, in which Mintz offers a reflection—meditative, personal, almost elegiac, but, still, learned—on the making of a Caribbeanist experience.³

One way, perhaps, of reading Three Ancient Colonies is as a memoir on method, on the theory and practice of ethnography, on the protocols by which anthropology has classically gone about getting its work done. And in this sense, Three Ancient Colonies can well be read as a consideration of a particular way of learning, namely, a way of learning by coming to know ordinary people in the course of going about their quotidian lives, people like Tom and Leah Belnavis in Jamaica, Nana and Gustave Adrien in Haiti, and Taso Zayas and Eli Villarronga in Puerto Rico; coming to know them in such a way, as Mintz puts it warmly, that "by their personalities and by their acts" they become "agents of our own self-respect, and contributors to our own identities" (xii).⁴ These ordinary people offered Mintz their spoken memories, not of abstractions but of particular experiences, of what happened to them. "Recounting an event from long ago," he writes, "the speaker draws on memory to compose a story," and often, he continues, "it is in the timbre and volume of voice that we hear (if we are listening) how the past is summoned" (17). For Mintz the methodological task in Three Ancient Colonies was not to reach for a comprehensive account of the islands he had studied. Rather, he describes it thus: "[I] try to fit the everyday people who I knew into what I understood of their history, a history no longer present, if not yet quite past" (185).

Another, connected way of reading Three Ancient Colonies is as a sort of historiographical memoir of the inaugural world-historical place of the Caribbean, a place we are apt to forget, Mintz thinks, amid the geopolitical conceits that structure and authorize contemporary understandings of what counts as historical significance. It is undoubtedly one of the many virtues of Sidney Mintz's work that the Caribbean has never been a mere scholarly curiosity, a mere geographical location, a mere . . . anything. Almost from the beginning of his work in the late 1940s the Caribbean has been understood as unusual and distinctive as a place in relation to which to think precisely because, as an historical region-formation, it constitutes a singular exemplification of something seminally world-historical, namely, the processes involved in the making of the modern—capitalist—world. Here is one of the ways in which he underlines this thought:

The history of the Caribbean region...