UWI scholars bring multidisciplinary perspectives on 21st century Caribbean identity
When you think of the Caribbean, what grouping of countries are you thinking of? For such a ubiquitous term, when you interrogate it, you find nuances in culture, language, history—and so, in inter-Caribbean conversation, some parts of the region are often left out of the narrative. For editors Dr Shelene Gomes and Dr Scott Timcke, while working on the collection of essays for the book Race, Class and Nationalism in the Twenty-First-Century Caribbean, it was important to ensure that the narratives had perspectives from voices across the underrepresented span of the region.
One of the through lines of the book is focussing the discussion not only on the issues of race and class, but also on the dynamics of nationalism across the region.
“The editors, myself and [Scott Timcke], recognised that there's a long debate about race and class,” says Dr Gomes, lecturer in the Department of Behavioural Sciences at UWI St Augustine. “Within anthropology and sociology, that debate has been raging for decades. But... this whole question of nation building and nationalism hasn't really been discussed critically in relation to global capitalism in the post-Independent Caribbean.”
For Gomes' chapter, she worked alongside Ms Antonia Mungal and Dr Maria Gomes on a piece called “Labours of Love, Care-Motivated Return Migration”.
“The three of us had a campus research and publication fund project,” says Dr Gomes. “It was a micro-level study to look at the convergence of migration and care work through the experiences of a small group of women who had done trans-border caregiving for aging parents and relatives, but who had then decided to return Trinidad and Tobago to actually then provide proximate, in-person care, for their aging parents and relatives.”
With a small sample of women, they investigated how women were expected to be the primary caregivers in family units and beyond. While these choices of caregiving were coming from a place of love, there was still a level of personal sacrifice involved, which was disproportionately expected of women.
“It also fits with one of the themes of the volume, that this sort of narrative of sacrifice, whether it's sacrifice of the individual to the family, or sacrifice of a member of the nation to the wider nation, it hides the actual injustices that are taking place,” she says.
The role of gender is woven through several sections of the book, including the chapter by PhD candidate in Cultural Studies Amílcar Sanatan titled “Masculinism and Gendered Power Relations in the Caribbean Left”.
“I review the Grenada Revolution,” he says, “trying to understand the ways that certain biases in scholarship did not make people take up concerns about women... and why we needed to think about past political structures in order to understand the present, especially as it relates to gender concerns and the rights of women and girls.”
He analyses the Grenada revolution as a vehicle to discuss power dynamics across the region: “In order to have a society where people have opportunities to serve in a range of capacities, we need to expand our schema, our understanding, the category of what a leader is, which is often defined by masculine terms.”
The concept of power also looms large in the chapter written by Dr Savrina Chinien.
“My chapter is on Patrick Chamoiseau, who is a Martinican writer, and the title is “Going Beyond the Coloniality of Power,” says Chinien, who is Head of the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.
She looks at the work of Chamoiseau as an examination of “what it means 'to write in a dominated country' and to reject Eurocentric value systems”. Her work is one of several pieces that interrogate non-Anglophone perspectives, which are often excluded from Caribbean discussions.
In many different ways, the book asks us to redefine what we think of as the narratives of the Caribbean region. In his chapter, titled “Moving beyond Narrow Nationalist Historiography”, Dr Jerome Teelucksingh addresses the question of how we define the Caribbean.
“How would we talk about the Caribbean?” says Teelucksingh. “Is it English-speaking? What about the French-speaking Caribbean? The Spanish-speaking? The Dutch-speaking Caribbean?”
For Teelucksingh, the primary consideration of his chapter was the “mythologisation of the Caribbean”, highlighting the role of ethnic minorities in the Caribbean mythological narrative—“The Indo-Caribbean and the Syrian, Lebanese, Chinese, and other ethnic minorities that have been overlooked in history books”.
For Gomes, she hopes that readers come away from the book thinking more expansively about the Caribbean region and its relationship to race, class and nationalism. In many ways, the book asks: what are the power dynamics in the making of the post-Independent Caribbean? And whose interests do narratives of nationhood serve?
Copies of Race, Class, and Nationalism in the Twenty-First-Century Caribbean can be acquired at Paper Based Bookshop, 14 Alcazar Street in Port of Spain, and ordered online at the University of Georgia Press, Amazon, and Waterstones.
