37 - Postcolonial Caribbean identities

Summary

With the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492 in his quest for the Indies and the subsequent extermination of the native population of this region, the definition of the region’s identity became an acute and abiding issue. The question of definition became further aggravated by the peculiar nature of the settlement of the Caribbean. Because of the need for repopulation of the islands of the Caribbean archipelago, plantation slavery and later schemes of indentureship left in their wake diverse groups of people who were cut off from their communities of origin. Out of the need for cheap labor to work the plantations, new and undefined cultural and social entities were produced. This phenomenon of ethnic and cultural heterogeneity was further intensified by prolonged periods of colonization. Caribbean societies are some of the oldest colonies in the west and cannot be accounted for without reference to the powerful shaping forces of colonialism. Nevertheless, because of their unusual hybrid genesis, they could neither be seen as “western” or an extension of Europe nor could they be considered “native,” that is distinctly “other.”

These new social and ethnic realities remained an oddity in western scholarship or simply emerged in terms of images of savage otherness: problematic, impure, and unpredictable creations of the ongoing process of historical change and world trade. They were initially relegated by early commentators to a kind of prehistoric timelessness that may have received its most notorious manifestation in the racial theorizing of Gobineau between 1835 and 1853.