Only the Bitter Come: Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean
Organisateurs: Holger Henke, Karl-Heinz Magister, and Alissa Trotz (eds.)
"Our colour beats a restless drum
but only the bitter come."
Kamau Brathwaite, The Emigrants (1967)
With the growth of global migrations and the dissemination of new ethnic visibilities in "Trans-Caribbean" spaces migrating cultures as well as host cultures can be conceived as becoming even more hybridized than they are already. The Caribbean, which has been a crucible of permanent migration since the early modern of European conquest and slavery, remains uniquely positioned to spur dynamic processes of hybridization engendered in American in-between spaces and transatlantic trajectories.
In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and displaced, transnational space. It considers the imagined community in the islands as its psycho-social homeland, while simultaneously pursuing different cultural strategies of redefining and resisting colonial "homeland" conventions (which Kamau Brathwaite appropriately termed the "inner plantation"). Thus, the Trans-Caribbean is suspended in a double-dialectic, which opposes both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the romanticized, yet colonialized, "inner plantation," whose transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an illusion. Given this, cultural production and migration remain at the vortex of the Trans-Caribbean.
The construction of cultural products in the Trans-Caribbean - understood as a collection of social and new migratory practices - both reflects and contests post-colonial metropolitan hegemonies. Following Arjun Appadurai's distinction, these homogenizing and heterogenizing counter-trends in Trans-Caribbean spaces can be observed through cultural transactions manifesting themselves as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, cityscapes, ideoscapes etc.
For the purposes of this book we invite anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, liberal arts and gender studies specialists, as well as cultural and literary historians to begin drawing some of the trajectories on the huge canvas of cultural production throughout the Caribbean Diaspora.
Critical analyses engaging interdisciplinary and multimedia perspectives in these fields are especially encouraged.
All articles and contributions must be submitted by June 30, 2005.
However, if interested, please contact us early in order to facilitate the planning process. Manuscripts have to be submitted via email attachment to the editors at either hhenke@metropolitan.edu (Holger Henke),khmagister@web.de (Karl-Heinz Magister), or da.trotz@utoronto.ca (D. Alissa Trotz).
Editors:
Holger Henke is assistant professor of political science at Metropolitan College of New York and editor of Wadabagei. A Journal of the Caribbean and its Diaspora (Lexington Books). His most recent book is Modern Political Culture in the Caribbean (University of the West Indies Press 2003).
Karl-Heinz Magister is a researcher at the Center for Literary Studies in Berlin and has widely published on English literature from Shakespeare and the British socialist novel to Paule Marshall, Erna Brodber, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace und V.S. Naipaul.
Alissa Trotz teaches in sociology and equity studies and the Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Studies. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of intersectionality and social inequalities, migratory circuits and diasporic identities, feminism and transnationality, and Caribbean Studies. Among other works, she has published Gender, Ethnicity and Place: Women and Identities in Guyana (with Linda Peake), Routledge 1999. She is currently engaged in a research project "The Sensation of Moving While Standing Still: Gender and the Reproduction of Caribbean Identities Across Place."
Possible themes to be explored:
the reconceptualization (by native writers) of the Caribbean as an expression of cultural and political resistance and emancipation
the reinvention of the concept of Caribbeanness as transgressing geographic, national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, literary, ideological, religious, sexual and gender boundaries
the negotiation of (Trans-)Caribbean identities of an "imagined community" of Africa, India, Middle East, or China etc. - as against diaspora experience of cultural disruption and community fragmentation within a "vernacular modernity", e.g. creolization and the "cultural revolution of Rastafarianism" (Stuart Hall)
the emergence and contestation of a Caribbean iconography: the reinvention of new symbols, images and the reshaping of new icons of Caribbeanness like cricket, kaiso, reggae, Rasta, Dancehall, chutney, zouk, beguine, sculpture and other forms of cultural production etc.
the representation/stereotyping/fetishization/commercialization of "Caribbean" values and identities through respectability and reputation - as in parts of Trinidadian Carnival, Jamaican dancehall etc. - in contrast to African-American value-systems
the representation and practices of gender and sexuality in the Trans-Caribbean
the place of arts and culture in the Caribbean: "labor is not the center-piece of emancipatory hopes", but 'artistic expression', 'individual self-fashioning and communal liberation'" (P. Gilroy), Caribbeans being focused on imaginative achievement
the wide spectrum of Caribbean popular culture in relation to dominant values and religions of the post-independence nation-state (e.g. Rastafarianism in relation to mainstream Jamaican Protestantism): issues of Rasta and creolization, on angagé songs, on Jamaican reggae and dancehall, on Trinidadian carnival and steelband, calypso, soca and lyrics, on Bajan tuk band music and cricket - interrogating theCaribbean popular culture of the Trinidad carnival as a "model for a Caribbean political imaginary, [.] a democratic space [.] and non-hierarchical performance", the popular in "its carnivalesque mobility and its border crossing propensity" (Nadi Edwards)
transnational, globalized carnivals: experiences of "All Ah We Is One" migrating between Trinidad & Tobago and other Caribbean places to metropolitan locations of the U.S. and Britain (e.g., the West Indian American mas in Brooklyn as an important source of pan-Caribbean unity in New York City, and a link between W.I. home and the diaspora, as well as across variously constituted diasporic places)
studies of Caribbean popular music (also new music videos) and the Caribbean film, and literary film versions; non-Hollywood films as local or with cross-over appeal to Caribbean audience and to international market - film as "an art-form in which an open-ended dialogue with the narrative/visual text is transacted" (Carolyn Cooper 1993)
the relationship between visuality, orality and textuality; the visual and the narrative; the invention of a new grammar of decoding the visual alongside the historical, social, cultural, oral, and literary text
ethnic issues of visibility/invisibility, of new visual practices (e.g., [de]masking and mimicry in West Indian Carnival
interrogating the persistence of racial hierarchies and subjectivities across the Trans-Caribbean; for example, the "continuous and 'mutually transformative' live dialogue among black diasporic populations that . [often] entails a process of mutual conditioning (Jemima Pierre 2003)
the Prospero/Caliban dialectic in the diversity of Caribbean intellectual disputes; the Caliban figure as a symbol of creativity and resistance to European and North American imperialism; Ariel as "educated slave or freedman open to 'white' creolization" (Brathwaite), the "voice of a proto-ecological discourse" (Henke), or "the ideal toward which human selection ascends" (José Enrique Rodó)?
the reconceptualization of Caribbean social mobility creating a genealogy of migration and diverse migratory subjectivity from the exile to the migrant, the traveler, the dweller, the homeless, the refugee, from the tourist to the nomad, the shift from the West Indian subject to the postcolonial cosmopolitan diasporic traveler (challenge of traditional modes of West Indian migratory behavior; exile as an essential component in the construction of modern Caribbean self)
migration to metropolitan places, performing "transnational diasporic cultures" (Mary C. Waters) and transnational urban neighborhood communities "islands in the city" (Nancy Foner); the North American and European metropolises as a site of arrivals and departures, of transience and transition;
the Caribbean itself as integral part of the Trans-Caribbean: e.g., through "marginal migrations" of the "Caribbean Postcolonial" (Shalini Puri 2003) or "prefigurations of postnationalism" (see Charles V. Carnegie 2002)