ABSTRACT
Although the Caribbean lies at the heart of the western hemisphere and was historically pivotal in the rise of Europe to world predominance, it has nevertheless been spatially and temporally eviscerated from the imaginary geographies of ‘Western modernity’. The imagined community of the West has no space for the islands that were its origin, the horizon of its self-perception, the source of its wealth. Unmoved by the warm Caribbean waters that course through its Gulf Stream, the ‘North Atlantic’ community of nations turns a cold shoulder to its neighbours to the south. As C.L.R. James once put it, the Caribbean is ‘in but not of the West’ (cited in S. Hall 1996: 246). Displaced from the main narratives of modernity, the shores that Columbus first stumbled upon now appear only in tourist brochures, or in occasional disaster tales involving hurricanes, boat-people, drug barons, dictators, or revolutions. Despite its indisputable narrative position at the origin of the plot of Western modernity, history has been edited and the Caribbean left on the cutting-room floor. Having washed its hands of history, the North can now present itself as the hero in the piece, graciously donating democratic tutelage, economic aid, foreign investment, military advisers, and police support to the Caribbean region.
