ABSTRACT
The Caribbean, that complicated and unruly invention of empire, devastated and impoverished by the sugar industry, often seen to be crime ridden and dysfunctional, has become one of the most vibrant examples of postcolonial transformation. Conceived in what Kamau Brathwaite calls the “catastrophe” of slavery, the region has produced some of the most powerful examples of literary and cultural selffashioning. The habit of postcolonial critics to focus on the catastrophe of colonization is deeply ingrained and resistance is the cause célébre of much discussion of the region. But more widespread and more deeply rooted is a radical hope, a belief in the future that underpins the region’s ebullient capacity for creative invention. Visions of the future are not necessarily models of a utopia and we continue to be alert to the dierence between “utopia as compensation, as escapism, as fantasy” and “utopia as a vehicle of criticism and utopia as a catalyst of change – that which Ernst Bloch called anticipatory thinking” (Levitas 2000: 199). The strategies developed in the Caribbean to reshape self and society, strategies based on a critique of the history of slavery and its consequences, oer some of the most powerful examples of utopian thinking by enacting a belief in radical transformation. This belief results in a demonstration of political “resistance” as it has always been most eective in postcolonial literatures: transformative, innovative and future thinking. What gives this transformative urge its force and scope is what may be called an “archipelagic consciousness,” a sense of the vibrant multiplicity of the region that embeds itself in every individual cultural production.
