The Caribbean in History

Our concern here is not with the vast and complex issue of Caribbean history itself, but rather more with the means by which the history of the region has been thought: and even in this rather more modest objective, we have necessarily been hugely selective. In HWJ 34 we explored the making of the New World, and its impact on the Old, in relation to Latin America. Here we continue the theme in terms of the Caribbean, emphasizing the range of interactions between the 'New' and the 'Old', and the commensurate need for a historiography which has the power to examine through a single analytical lens many competing temporalities and locations.

The articles we publish here introduce some glimpses of the dialogue in which the Caribbean engaged with its former colonial masters, through interpretations of three decisive intellectual figures. Two of them—Frantz Fanon and Elsa Goveia—were Caribbean, while the third, Sidney Mintz, originated from the United States. All had a deep concern with Europe's legacy of slavery in the Caribbean, whose histories still reverberate in the present. For Fanon, as David Macey shows, there was an ambivalence about his own position as a Martinican, even as he theorized the existential issues of black Caribbean selfhood, or manhood. By contrast, the Guyanese historian Elsa Goveia—virtually unknown amongst historians in the metropolis—writing in the same period focused, as Mary Chamberlain argues, not on slavery's legacy in the self, but on the very structure of the Caribbean as it struggled to achieve and consolidate nationhood. Both responses represented the tension between what Paget Henry, in his influential recent volume, Caliban's Reason, identifies as the 'poeticist' and the 'historicist' response to the Caribbean dilemma. Does reforming the institutions which so long have supported racial divisions, we are forced to ask, make whole the split in the Caribbean psyche? Or must this psychic healing predate the creation of socially supportive institutions? A different—but no less pioneering and influential—analysis of the Caribbean is presented by David Scott in his discussion of Sidney Mintz, one of the region's foremost historical anthropologists. Mintz pointed early on to the historical distinctiveness of the Caribbean region, and to its relation to modernity. For Mintz was at pains to show the degree to which the plantation regime functioned as a modern mechanism, and it is in the context of this modernity that slave resistance and survival should be located. Caribbean peoples, in this reading, were the first modern people.

The other articles point to different manifestations of this dialogue—to what Rebecca Scott calls representations of 'the national narrative'. In the case of Cuba, the national narrative of Independence, which centred a collective Cuban identity, obscured the fault-lines of race. This race-blinded-ness was reflected in the archives, complicating for the historian the task of teasing out the social nuances of the War of Independence. As Scott herself explains, a combination of archival research and oral history suggested a way through this impasse. For Alissandra Cummins the national narrative of independence in the anglophone Caribbean exposed bitter choices over which history to represent, and how each should be represented. She traces the origins and development of the museums in the region, from the retailing of empire in the nineteenth century to the conscious fashioning of Caribbean nationhood in the twentieth century.