The Caribbean in the World: Imaginative Geographies in the Independence Age By Joshua Ian ...

176 Pages·2011·2.42 MB·English

The Caribbean in the World:
Imaginative Geographies in the Independence Age
By
Joshua Ian Jelly-Schapiro
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Geography
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley
Committee in Charge:
Professor Michael Watts, Chair
Professor Jake Kosek
Professor Nadia Ellis
Professor Jocelyne Guilbault
Professor Percy Hintzen

Abstract
The Caribbean in the World:
Imaginative Geographies in the Independence Age
by
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Doctor of Philosophy in Geography
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Michael Watts, Chair
“Wherever the sugar plantation and slavery existed,” wrote the famed Trinidadian scholar
C.L.R. James, “they imposed a pattern. It is an original pattern, not European, not
African, not a part of the American main,…but West Indian, sui generis, with no parallels
anywhere else.” These lines appear in James’s 1963 essay “From Toussaint L’Ouverture
to Fidel Castro,” which he appended that year to a new edition of The Black Jacobins, his
seminal history of the Haitian Revolution first released in 1938. Writing at a time when
the British West Indies’ attainment of independence, coincident with the triumph of the
Cuban Revolution, had prompted many Caribbean politicos and intellectuals to propose
that the region’s diverse territories confederate into one regional nation, James argued
that those territories, no matter their divides of language and history, should be
understood to share a common culture and destiny. He also argued that the peoples of the
Caribbean “nation” – belonging, as they did, to societies created and shaped for centuries
by their links to European powers – had a unique and special role to play, among the
world’s formerly colonized peoples, in shaping the future of world civilization.
This dissertation engages with James’s arguments to explore how, across the past
half-century, the Caribbean has been imagined – both in the Caribbean and worldwide –
to be a coherent cultural region. Engaging with broader debates among geographers and
other scholars about the uses and abuses of the “region” as analytic and political tool, I
use the concept of “imaginative geography” to explore why and how various
representative figures – from popular musicians to novelists to theoreticians – have
shaped understandings of “Caribbeanness,” both in the islands and worldwide. Today
James’s dream of formalizing the West Indian “nation” into a unified state is long past,
but the impetus to think in terms of region that he once exemplified has persisted – and
indeed grown – among Caribbean thinkers. Moreover, I argue, his predictions about the
import of Caribbean cultures in the cultural landscape of the wider world, aided by the
massive outflow of Caribbean emigrants to Northern cities, have in many ways come
true. From the emergence of Harry Belafonte as “the first black matinee idol” in North
Atlantic pop cultures; to the rise of Fidel Castro as figurehead of the non-Aligned Third
World during the Cold War; to the emergence and continued salience of Bob Marley as
the “first Third World Superstar”; to the outsized number of brilliant writers, from
Walcott and Marshall to Díaz and Danticat, who in addressing experiences particular to
the Caribbean, have spoken with often unexcelled eloquence to universal themes – these
exponents of the Caribbean as region and idea have succeeded, for better or worse, in
supplying to the world some of our most widespread stories about bondage and freedom;
racial purity and mixture; art and politics. This dissertation offers an account of how and
why this has came to pass, in the decade’s since C.L.R. James published his revised
history of the epochal slave revolt in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue by
which, as he put it, “West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people.”
Courtesy the University of California Library
Maoires Minores que Insulae Hispaniola, Cuba Lucaia et Caribes.
From Beschrijvinghe van West-Indiën (1630) Joannes de Laet, ed.
"The indigenous Carib and Arawak Indians, living by their own lights long
before the European adventure, gradually disappear in a blind, wild forest of
blood. That mischievous gift, the sugar cane, is introduced, and a fantastic
human migration moves to the New World of the Caribbean; deported crooks
and criminals, defeated soldiers and Royalist gentlemen fleeing from Europe,
slaves from the West Coast of Africa, East Indians, Chinese, Corsicans, and
Portuguese. The list is always incomplete, but they all move and meet on an
unfamiliar soil, in an unpredictable and infinite range of custom and
endeavour, people in the most haphazard combinations, surrounded by
memories of splendour and misery, the sad and dying kingdom of Sugar, a
future full of promises. And always the sea!"
-George Lamming
“We’re all in the Caribbean, if you think about it.”
-Junot Díaz
Contents
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………….ii
I. The Caribbean in the World: An Introduction………………………………1
II. Jamaica Farewell: Belafonte’s Caribbean
and the (Political) Erotics of Transnational Pop…………………………...34
III. Brown Girl, Brownstones:
Africa, Islands, and the Migrant Fictions of Paule Marshall………………64
IV. Cuba in the Caribbean/Cuba in the World: Andrew Salkey’s
Havana Journal and the Congreso Cultural of 1968………………………80
V. Geographies of Exodus:
Bob Marley and the Muse of History…………………………………….101
VI. Ground Zero(s) of the New World:
Geographies of Violence in Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat………….119
Afterword: By Way of Conclusion………………………………….…..143
Bibliography…………………………………………………………….147
Acknowledgements
Thanks due, with feeling: To Professor Michael Watts, comrade and chair, whose steady
support and questing critique centered my happenstantial career as a Berkeley geographer
from first to last. To all the members of a splendid committee whose energy and expertise
enlivened this project: Jake Kosek, bee-keeping race man and dear pal; Percy Hintzen,
CSA stalwart and Guyanese eminence grise; Jocelyne Guilbault, soca maven and fellow
Trini-at-heart); and Nadia Ellis, whose arrival to Berkeley, with the non pareil scholarly
care she brings to “thinking the Caribbean,” has been an incalculable boon. To two other
members of the UC faculty, Donald Moore and Allen Pred, from whose humane
brilliance the current project profited at its start, and to dear colleagues and staff in the
commodious department where it happened. To the Social Science Research Council, and
the DPDF Fellowship group in “Black Atlantic Studies,” headed by Percy Hintzen and
Andrew Apter, that got my research started. To the National Science Foundation (and a
Graduate Research Fellowship) that kept me in food and books for the time it took. And
to the American Council of Learned Societies (dissertation-completion fellowship), for
finishing it. To Michael Denning, Vera Kutzinski, and Paul Gilroy, whose generosity of
intellect and time, with a curious Yale undergrad and since, made the questions feel
worth asking. To Bonnie Kennedy, Peter Doig, and their clan entire, and, also in
Trinidad: to Jonathan Ali, Katinka Bukh, Charlotte Elias, Catherine Emmanuel, Ray
Funk, Terry Perry, and Ruth Telfer; to the splendid staff in Special Collections at the
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine; and to the honorable Pat Bishop, Junior
Telfer, and Bruce Procope, Q.C., for sharing so generously of their remarkable lives. In
Jamaica: to Herbie Miller, Annie Paul, Brad Klein, her highness Lady Saw, and the fine
people at the Library of the Spoken Word, University of the West Indies, Mona. In Cuba:
to Carlos Goicechoa, Joseph Mutti, and Nehanda Abiodun. To Raul Fernandez and the
UC-Cuba Group, for invaluable support, grant- and otherwise; and to Sarah Seidman, for
collegial chat and gracious sharing of FOIA-got riches. To Nathan McClintock, in
Martinique and McCone. To Robert Silvers, John Palatella, Nicholas Laughlin, and
Garnette Cadogan, to whose editors’ eyes what’s most readable here owes much. (It
hardly needs stating that whatever faults remain, in editorial and all respects here, are
down to me alone.) To John Gillis, Tina Gillis, and David Lowenthal, for imparted
wisdom on Islands of the Mind, West Indian Societies, and what a lifetime of scholarship
and being gentle-people can yield. To Sandy Levinson, at the Center for Cuban Studies,
in New York, and to the great Harry Belafonte, down the block, for his capacity for
reflection, and his life. To Mark Danner, mentor and friend. To Hilton Als, for sending
me a well-loved copy of Brown Girl, Brownstones, once, and for his Olympian gifts for
brotherhood generally. To my first friend and finest reader, Eli Jelly-Schapiro. And last
but most: to my parents, Katherine L. Jelly and Steven A. Schapiro, to whom I owe quite
simply everything.
Note: Portions of chapters III, IV, and V were published in
The Caribbean Review of Books (“Travelin’ Woman,” May 2011);
The New York Review of Books (“The Bob Marley Story,” April 9, 2009);
and The Nation (“An Empire of Vice,” June 10, 2009). Thanks is made to those
publications for their kind permission to re-publish said material here.
I.
The Caribbean in the World: An Introduction
“There lay the islands in the night, suspended between the stars and the sea's
bottom with the abstraction of thoughts: the stages of a thesis that was still to be
unraveled.”
-Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveler’s Tree1
In November 1963, Vintage Books in New York released a new edition of The Black
Jacobins, C.L.R. James’s celebrated history of the Haitian Revolution. In the quarter-
century from its initial appearance in London in 1938, the book—though already a
touchstone for many Pan-African and anti-colonial thinkers worldwide—had fallen out of
print. Its itinerant author had moved from England to the United States shortly before
World War II; returned to Europe for a few years after being expelled from the US as a
subversive in 1953; and finally, in 1958, returned to his home-island of Trinidad for the
first time since 1932, when he’d departed his life as a colonial schoolteacher to board a
trans-Atlantic steamer with the manuscript of a novel with which he hoped to launch a
literary career in the metropole.
Now 62 years old, James had returned to his homeland as a prodigal hero. Having
abandoned his fiction-ambitions in Depression-era England to become a Trotskyist (“the
world went political, and I went with it,” he would recall), he had become in the
intervening years a key cog in the Pan-Africanist movement. Impelled to return home by
the British West Indies’ coming independence, he arrived to Trinidad at the behest of the
island’s new Prime Minister, Eric Williams, a one-time student of James’s at the island’s
Queens Royal College for Boys. 2 By 1960, James’ involvement in Williams’s party had
soured amidst clashing egos and James’s frustration at his old mentee’s moderate politics.
(After failing in an attempt to establish a rival party to the left of Williams’s Peoples
National Movement, James left Trinidad in 1962.) But the momentous developments
which had prompted James’s return to the Caribbean—the British West Indies attainment
of independence, coincident with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution—suffused his

1 Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveler’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands. 1953. (New York:
New York Review Classics, 2010) 396.
2 C.L.R. James, undated letter to Constance Webb, 1944, collected in Special Delivery: The Letters of
C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 31.