Main Currents in Caribbean Thought

"For the Caribbean, composed as it is of some fifty or more separate and different island socitie, is of such variety and complexity that...From the very beginning of its history in the late fifteenth century there has been various confusion concerning the definition, both geographical and cultural of the Caribbean region."

pp. ix,x,1.

The Problem

"the island outskirts of the legendary Cathay." so thought Columbus even at his death.

"a new cultural puzzle continued, in the sense that the peoples and cultures of teh Caribbean archipelago were indiscriminately mixed up with the romanic idea of the New World of the Americas as a whole."

Fir example the most famous, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

stories portrayed the Antilles as the place of cannibals, El Dorado --as the city of gold--, and lairs of heroic pirates

Today the stories remain portraying the region as a tourist's paradise.

"...a set of island in the sun full of sun, sand, and sex."

p. 1.

The confusion about Caribbean identity....

backward in need of modernization (westernization)
a part of the African Diaspora
persistant Creole, Arab, European and Asian subcultural influences
"American Meridionalis " midribs of the Americas
"it was in the Caribbean 'sugar islands' that the agrosocial system of slavery developed into its fullest and most harsh form."
engineered northwest passage (Panama Canal)
Ilses of contention: Greater and the Lesser Antilles
Tropic archipelago stretching from the Guiana's to Yucatan linking the Amazon to Mexico.

Conclusions

Political fragmentation grew out of:

Conquest and the Columbian exchange as ecological imperialism

Colonization, and the Manilla galleons

Slavery, and the triangular trade

Sugar monoculture, mining and export trade

racial and ethnic "admixture" in the creation of Creole & Criollo society

recolonization and resistance

Revolution

This then is the time frame, or temporal sequence in which the area must be seen to be best understood as a doorway to the European conquest of the twin Americas and the mediterranean sea of the new world.

The Caribbean was the crucible of European, Renaissance and Enlightenment ideas in the harsh light of ecological conquest and human bondage; an ultimate mixing ground, testing place, staging area and recurrent illusion of what we may become.