ABSTRACT
Community is always deeply implicated historical and politically. Located in this way, community occurs within complex, contested and heterogeneous terrains, shaping and being shaped by cross cultural interactions, holding out the potential of being creative sites of dialogue, knowledge reception and knowledge production. This chapter concerns itself with constructions of community and the practice of community in a postcolonial context. It takes the Caribbean region as its site of inquiry as it seeks to explore how the effects of globalization occur in specifi c ways within specifi c local scenarios allowing forms of social action to emerge. These “vernacular discourses” (Appadurai, 2001) are decolonizing in intent and take on an agenda of social justice that seek to interrupt traditional, oppressive discourses of community on the one hand and on the other hand forge “strategies, visions and horizons” (Appadurai, 2001: 3) that promote the centrality of the poor and oppressed and the communities which have given birth to them. It is in this pursuit of democracy, full human development and capabilities and social justice that a practice of community becomes a decolonizing project.
