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Negotiating Caribbean Identities

• Caribbean culture and identity are intertwined with political mobilization, cultural and economic development.
• Understanding these questions and problems is vital to understanding the struggles of societies with limited resources.
• Cultural identity often poses a challenge for Caribbean people.

The Issue of Identity

• Identity is a key political issue in the 21st century due to the re-emergence of ethnicity and nationalism.
• Despite the challenges, Caribbean people offer valuable insights into negotiating identity.

The Search for Essence

• There is a prevalent narrative in the West regarding cultural identity.
• Cultural identity is rooted in its essence and fundamentals, providing a sense of belonging.
• Caribbean cultural identity has increased in importance due to the effects of conquest, colonization, and slavery.

Cross-Currents of Diaspora

• Locating an origin for Caribbean peoples is impossible due to the search for origins in identity.
• The indigenous peoples largely disappeared after European contact.
• Questions of identity always involve representation and invention, not just the discovery of tradition.
• Identity questions use selective memory and often silence certain aspects to allow others to be heard.
• Silencing and remembering both contribute to producing an account of the past.

Caribbean Diversity

• Resolving the problem of identity in the Caribbean is impossible by simply observing the people.
• The ethnic and cultural diversity across the Caribbean islands is remarkable, with varied ethnic compositions, genetic features, languages, and cultural traditions.
• Some Caribbean islands have black populations that are not in the majority, while others have Indian majorities.
• Cuba shows a persistence of white Hispanic and mestizo populations.
• Haiti is a symbolic island of black culture, with mulattos playing a vital role in its history.
• The Dominican Republic has a strong Spanish influence.
• The melting pot of the British islands has created unique combinations of genetic features and ethnic cultures, and also a mix of Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, Portuguese, and Jewish elements are present.
• Everyone in the Caribbean originates from somewhere else, with varying motives for coming to the region.

The Caribbean as Diaspora

• The true cultures and traditions of Caribbean peoples primarily originate elsewhere.
• The Caribbean is the original and purest diaspora.
• The people are twice diasporized, representing a break from original cultural sources due to violent rupture.
• Migration, whether forced or free, has resulted in the populations' cultural traces being interwoven with historical violence.
• Populations inserted into colonizing plantation societies became instantly polarized.
• In the Caribbean, cultural characteristics have been linked to class, color, and race for centuries. Cultures were ranked in order of cultural power.
• Caribbean society was culturally graded.
• Over time, cultural relations became open to integration, assimilation, and cross-influence, and they became diasporic societies with negotiation and transculturation.

Survival and Assimilation

• Enslaved populations retained old customs and cultural traits from Africa, allowing them to survive the trauma of slavery.
• These customs were always surrounded by the colonizing culture.
• Retention was a characteristic of both colonizing and colonized cultures.
• Assimilation is a profound process that pulls society into an imitative version of another culture.

Identity as a Narrative

• Identity is not just a story but a set of stories that change with historical circumstances.
• Identities come from outside: they are the way in which we are recognized.
• The positioning of Caribbean people in terms of cultural identity is an enigma due to the skewed structures of growing up in a society and negotiating complex stories.

Africa and Modernity

• Political movements in the New World in the 20th century rediscovered and re-encountered with Africa.
• African diasporas of the New World needed a symbolic return to Africa to find their place in modern history.
• The notion of Negritude, the discovery of blackness, and the affirmation of an African personality, associated with Aimé Césaire, were essential.
• Césaire identified the strands that related to the valorization of the African connection, consciousness, personality, and cultural traditions within Caribbean culture.
• Césaire recognized the continuity of the broken tradition and the inspiration from a Caribbean consciousness with the African past.
• Paradoxically Césaire spoke exquisitely formed French.
• Césaire never argued for the independence of Martinique.
• Martinique's status as an internal department of France means Martiniquan people have better conditions.
• Césaire was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, influencing Caribbean writers, poets, and artists.
• The Harlem Renaissance emphasized the cultural and aesthetic distinctiveness of the black American contribution to American culture and claimed a central place for American blacks in modernism.

A Cultural Revolution

• Africa cannot be relived or rediscovered by New World blacks who are irrevocably diasporized.
• During the rise of Rastafarianism in Jamaica in the 1960s, nostalgia and sentimental nationalism arose.
• Africa is grappling with modern issues.
• Rastafarianism used the language and rituals of Africa, Ethiopia, Babylon, and the promised land.
• Rastafarianism is a chiliastic language that expresses the New World diasporas.
• Those in this language express: "I have no voice, I have no history, I have come from a place to which I cannot go back and which I have never seen. I used to speak a language which I can no longer speak. I had ancestors whom I cannot find, they worshipped gods whose names I do not know."
• When the speaker left Jamaica, the society was not largely black, and upon returning, it had undergone a cultural revolution and grounded itself where it existed.
• It was no longer trying to match up to some other image.
• It realized could speak the language they ordinarily spoke, and began to boldly speak patois.
• Creole languages have become the languages in which important aspirations and hopes are formulated and in which artists are writing.
• Those cultures were made by the cultural revolution of Rastafarianism.
• The literal Africa was not what people wanted to return to; it was the symbolic language for describing suffering.
• Reggae and Rastafarianism provided both black consciousness and identification for people in Jamaica.
• These saved the second generation of young black people in British society. The point was not literally going back to Africa.

Final Thoughts

• The greatest reggae artist, Bob Marley, was a product of Rastafarianism.
• Reggae was born in the 1960s as the answer to ska, being a fusion of retained African drumming traditions with other musics.
• The Invention of Tradition explains that many British traditions believed to date back to Edward I were developed the day before yesterday by Elgar or Disraeli.
• Identity allows a people to produce something new from cultural resources rather than rediscover the past.
• Caribbean identities for the twenty-first century lie in using the rich and complex cultural heritages to which history has made them heir.
• The pursuit of a strange and subtle goal, a melting pot, is the mainstream.
• The significance of this is akin to the European preoccupation with alchemy, with the growth of experimental science.
• Harris says it's the poetry of science, as well as the explosive nature which is informed by a solution of images, agnostic humility, and essential beauty rather than vested in a fixed assumption and classification of things.