-
Introduction: From the Foreign-Local to the Caribglobal
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Introduction From the Foreign-Local to the Caribglobal AyoungmaninPort-au-Princeblendsinwithotheryoung,urbanHaitian men; he speaks Kreyòl and does not stand out in manner or appearance. But he is recognized as a foreigner when he stands in the wrong place to wait for a tap-tap; clearly he hasn’t been here since before the earthquake. Imagined in Haiti by the author, 2011 The Caribbean body has consistently been exploited for its labor, in previous centuries through slavery and indentureship, and more recently through cheap labor for multinational corporations. The Caribbean body has also consistently been used for sexual labor, through sexual access to slaves and indentured persons, and now through sexual tourism. But Caribbean people have persistently used their own bodies for pleasure as well as work. Any media perusal confirms that openly addressing sex and sexuality remains taboo in many regions around the world, both in the global North and in colonized and formerly colonized non-European societies. However, analyzing sexuality in post/neo/colonial societies such as those in the Caribbean requires recognizing that these subjects’ sexual behaviors have been derogated, exaggerated, and exoticized by imperial and colonial powers and then held up by those same powers as examples of Caribbean people’s inferiority and as justification of their oppression. In spite of, and perhaps because of this legacy, sex and sexuality appear and reappear in the Caribbean imagination as tools both of pleasure and politics, of oppression and liberation. These relationships are not more complicated than those of other regions, but they are complicated in particular ways as a result of realities such as slavery, colonization, and economies that are often reliant 2 · I s l a n d B o d i e s on tourism and debt. As this book will detail, sex is often more than “just” sex: it has a variety of functions and effects on the political, social, and economic realities of both island bodies—individual Caribbean bodies and Caribbean nations and cultures. Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination examines portrayals of non-normative sexuality in Anglophone, Hispanophone, Francophone, and Dutch Caribbean literary and other cultural texts and experiences. The title of this book refers bothtohumanbodiesfromCaribbeanislandsandtotheislandsthemselves and the isolation and exotica often attributed to them in representations from within and outside of the Caribbean.1 As a whole, Island Bodies’ goal is to reveal and examine the sexual norms and expectations portrayed in Caribglobal literature and popular culture, and to analyze how individuals transgress these norms. From Foreign-Local to Caribglobal Foreign-local is a colloquial Trinidadian phrase that says exactly what it means; it refers to Trinidadians and Tobagonians (or their descendants) who do not live in the country full-time but who know enough about the place, language, and culture to qualify as somewhat local. The young man in the vignette cited at the beginning of the chapter might be called foreign -local. Depending on context and inflection, the term can be endearing or pejorative, much like other labels such as Nuyorican and Jamerican. Foreign-local insists that seeming opposites can coexist in the same body at the same time but paradoxically also insists that those opposites remain fundamentally both separate and different. The term Caribglobal takes the spirit of the foreign-local and shifts it into a broader and more unified concept . The Caribbean is generally understood geographically as “the island groupings of the Greater Antilles, Lesser Antilles, and the Bahamas, plus certain coastal zones of South and Central America sharing a cultural and historical relation to the island plantation societies (for example, Suriname, Guyana, Belize)” and including the political nations and territories within that space.2 The region can be demarcated in various ways: along linguistic lines (French, Spanish, English, and Dutch, with their creoles, are the region’s primary languages); along levels of sovereignty (independent nation-states and nonindependent entities such as Puerto Rico, Bonaire, [54.144.95.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:38 GMT) Introduction · 3 and Martinique); along racial lines (territories with predominantly AfroCaribbean populations, those with large Indo-Caribbean populations, those which are largely mestizo identified, etc.); as well as being divided by physical size or relative wealth. On the other hand, the Caribbean diaspora is typically understood as being separate from the Caribbean, limited to people and cultures in locations outside of the geographic region that have significant Caribbean populations, such as Amsterdam, Montreal, Miami, London, Toronto, and New York City. In contrast, the concept of the...