Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Introduction: The Structure of the Enlightenment

Introduction The Structure of the Enlightenment While the questions of modernity and postmodernity have been posed with regard to Latin America and the Caribbean on numerous occasions and in a variety of forms, less discussion has been generated in this context about the putative origins of Occidental modernity , the Enlightenment. Moreover, while conversations about modernity and postmodernity in Latin America and the Caribbean often take place in a highly theoretical realm, the Enlightenment in the region is usually discussed in a much more concrete language of economic, administrative , military, and penal reforms. If the idea of modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean can be described as a burden, something simultaneously (or alternately) wished for and rejected1 —or, in García Canclini’s memorable formulation, as something that in these regions has not entirely arrived while tradition lingers on—then by examining modern interpretations and representations of the Enlightenment from this perspective, we gain insight into how recent Caribbean writers view the origins, with all their metaphysical trappings, of their own modernity. The specific texts by the writers discussed in this monograph question, through a historico-fictive representation of the Caribbean during the ages of reason and revolution, these elusive origins of their Caribbean modernity. The wide divergence of forms and articulations of the Enlightenment among the various European countries was retained and reproduced among the colonial societies of the Caribbean, making a coherent definition or outline of the Enlightenment in either hemisphere a challenging endeavor. If classic studies such as those by Ernst Cassirer and Lucien Goldman already emphasized important ideological differences rather than uniformity among the ranks of Enlightenment thinkers, more recent interventions such as those by Jonathan Israel, Louis Sala-Molins, 2 Introduction Tzvetan Todorov, Sankar Muthu, and, in a specifically Caribbean context , by Nick Nesbitt delineate even more forcefully the distinction between Enlightenment philosophers of a timid ilk, ideologically speaking , and those who advocate, overtly or by extrapolation, what Nesbitt calls “universal emancipation.” For Todorov, even the idea of an inherent faith in historical progress, which seems like such a commonplace legacy of the Enlightenment, was not something viewed with unanimity among the philosophes. Rousseau especially, who was probably the most influential of the philosophes in Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean, viewed human progress ambivalently.2 For Sankar Muthu too, “Rousseau looms over the latter half of the eighteenth century as an ambiguous figure who both impedes and enables the development of anti-imperialist political thought.” Muthu devotes a monograph to the perhaps surprising idea that several Enlightenment thinkers, especially Diderot and, more arguably, Kant were essentially anti-imperialists. Despite the fact that, according to Muthu, there was no precedent for this anti-imperialist thought prior to the Enlightenment, nor were there any clear and prominent anti-imperialist successors in the nineteenth century (Muthu characterizes Marx’s thought as “agnostic on the issue of imperialism”),3 the anti-imperialist tendencies of the Enlightenment are mostly viewed with skepticism by the Caribbean writers studied here. In a text that I will have occasion to discuss in detail in chapter 2, C. L. R. James refers to the tirades in the Encyclopédie against slavery in the colonies to physicians who can only prescribe invectives against the malady from which the patient is suffering. This skeptical attitude toward the universal applicability of the Enlightenment might be said to constitute a founding principle for the historical imagination of especially Hispanic Caribbean writers, taking their cue from Alejo Carpentier. The complexity of the reforms in the Caribbean colonies in the eighteenth century and their mixed results exacerbate the difficult of characterizing “the Enlightenment” there. Despite national, regional, and linguistic differences (delineated by Arthur L. Stinchcombe),4 for modern Caribbean writers of disparate languages and traditions, I argue, the idea of the Enlightenment implies first and foremost a reckoning with the structural dynamic that emerges when Latin America and the Caribbean are included within the Enlightenment’s ambit (and vice-versa). To elucidate this structural situation, it is helpful to hearken back to a key moment of this philosophy and historical epoch, crystallized in Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay “Was ist Aufklärung?” This essay is not only 3 Introduction core reading for the Enlightenment; Michel Foucault has traced the very origins of European modernity back to this notoriously ambiguous text: “[This text] . . . marks the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy...