Book review : Routledge handbook of Caribbean studies

Abstract

Specialists on the Caribbean increasingly define the archipelago as a palimpsest. Contributors to the Handbook share this conceptualization, allowing them to bring their diverse perspectives to issues ranging from class, gender and ethnic relations, to politics, literature, culture and the environment. Consistent with this approach, several of the contributors to this volume portray the region as possessing a complex, layered history containing traces of a past of “live inheritances” powerfully shaping the newly present; and not as one of lost traditions. In large part, the Handbook continues the innovative reframing of the region’s identity as discontinuous, multi-layered, polychromatic and even fractal. An intellectual upshot of this perspective is the original insight and recognition that the Caribbean is not where cultural contradictions wrought by history are present; but, rather, a distinctively liminal arena marked by “plurality” and the indeterminacy of being “betwixt and between” as its core identity. This existential vagueness is evident across all dimensions of Caribbean life, as several contributors in the Handbook make clear. In Caribbean politics, for instance, it is arguable that many anti-colonial rebellions result in ambiguous outcomes, with no clear winner or loser. The Handbook recognizes such a political duality in post-revolt Caribbean aftermaths in which – barring the notable exceptions of the Haitian and Cuban revolutions – there is neither transformational change nor undisputed political victory by one side or the other. Such is testimony to Caribbean studies’ alertness to the phenomenon of the “changing same” and to the glacial character of change in the region. The Caribbean as icon of existential indeterminacy appears to be the shared analytical assumption of several contributors. In looking at the region’s quest for transformative political change, clean breaks with the past remain elusive. Hence, no matter the onset of disruptive revolts and even of social revolutions against empire, the multidimensional coloniality of European power hovers, ghostlike, over the colonized peoples’ newly won reconfiguration of the balance of power in the region.