Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History

Abstract

The contributors to Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History have set out to address Franklin Knight’s description of a “fragmented nationalism” that has typified the Caribbean from the fifteenth century until the present. Knight’s challenge of an integrated Caribbean has echoed throughout the field of Caribbean studies as well as the emerging Antillean nations themselves since he coined the term in the 1970s. As the editors suggest, although the West Indies, to use a colonial phrase, were separated linguistically and politically by the empires that administered them, they share common themes of slavery, plantation agriculture, emancipation, labor movements, independence, and nationalism. The book is arranged chronologically into three sections investigating major themes: “Slavery and Emancipation,” “Aftermath of Slavery,” and “Colonialism and Decolonization.” The challenge facing academics working in the field is to integrate the region into larger perspectives. Thus, the essays consistently contemplate nationalism, imperialism, and micro and macro history, as well as race.As the editors note in the introduction, the Caribbean is a region in transition simultaneously searching to construct national or island-state histories but often confined to imperial studies. Moreover, the scholarship of the region — as evidenced by the imperialistic focus of the essays in each section — remains linguistically divided. One of the best essays, by Francisco A. Scarano, provides some reflection on the difficult task facing historians of the region. As Scarano notes, postrevolutionary Cuban historians had their “sympathies for the revolutionary process” (p. 38); Dominican historians during the Trujillo regime were “loath to discuss the slave past” (p. 42); while historians of Puerto Rico have “accentuate(d) the relevance of race for national identity and nation-building” (p. 51). Such problems have made it difficult to construct even a Spanish Caribbean history. Thus the political fragmentation of the Caribbean has been deeply rooted. The failure to create national or island histories has limited the ability of scholars to integrate the region into regional and global histories.Since Eric Williams’s pioneering Capitalism and Slavery, scholars of the British Caribbean have given considerable attention to Europe’s West Indian possessions and their pivotal role in the construction of the Atlantic world. Academics have focused on constructing economic histories or, as Gad Heuman contends, have “focused on the planter class and on slaveholders rather than on the enslaved” (p. 93). The major themes, as Heuman notes, have been the plight of women in slave and post-emancipation societies, as well as the role of free coloreds in Caribbean society, and slave resistance and rebellions. Bridget Brereton remarks on the unevenness of literature on the British Caribbean, noting that “recent scholarship has tended to downplay the significance of [the] ‘great break’ ” or emancipation (p. 187). And although Brereton and Heuman identify the unevenness of the historiography within the British Caribbean, they are less direct than Scarano in tying this to the influence of nationalism in that region. Nonetheless an imbalance has resulted as scholars have gravitated toward those colonies that obtained independence first — Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. This has directed scholarly attention away from islands like Grenada, St. Vincent, and Dominica, which were also settled by Britain. These later-established colonies probably developed differently than others in the British Caribbean.Beyond Fragmentation challenges academics to integrate the Caribbean more fully into both their scholarship and their classrooms. While the editors and contributors have certainly worked to accomplish Knight’s challenge, the literature that they must draw upon has unfortunately not yet fully matured. While today historians have been able to revise the assertions of previous generations and fill out the skeletal arguments made by pioneers such as Williams, the field is still divided along linguistic and imperial lines. While the dream of achieving a unified history has not been achieved, this volume is certainly an important step in that direction.