Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation Richard Lee Turits Harvey R. Neptune. 2007. Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 274 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8078-5788-5. Harvey Neptune’s Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation explores the social and cultural effects of the large United States military base established in Trinidad during World War II to forestall German expansion. Creatively researched, daringly interpreted, and beautifully written, Caliban and the Yankees analyzes the relationship between cultural transformation and political nationalism under the U.S. “occupation.” Through this analysis, it offers an original, unexpected, and nuanced story of the evolution of a successful decolonization movement in Trinidad after more than four hundred years of European suzerainty (including British control since 1797). The book’s focus is the intellectual and popular cultural history of this “occupation” period. Neptune explores topics such as labor, dress, music, and sexual relations, providing rich treatments that will be of great interest to scholars across disciplines and fields. In addition, Caliban and the Yankees makes profound methodological contributions to the study of U.S. foreign policy by foregrounding cultural history and by drawing on innovative sources so as to discern the perspectives of ordinary Trinidadians (as opposed to telling the story from the perspective of the United States and through more traditional political and diplomatic subjects). Neptune’s story begins in the 1930s with a rich discussion of the young intellectuals seeking then to mobilize a new Trinidadian cultural and national identity differentiated from the British. Prior to this period, white, black, and Indo-Trinidadian nationalists, while they had envisaged a movement toward self-government, had rarely imagined cultural autonomy from British colonial traditions. Yet for the new “creole [local] patriots” in the 1930s, nationalism turned above all on culture. These intellectuals engaged in Fanonian-like calls for freeing the mind, not just the body politic, from the trammels of colonization, that is, for seeking to “forget” Europe and to liberate the population from the hegemony of British culture. Together with the powerful labor resistance that erupted in Trinidad in the 1930s, this intellectual movement for the decolonization of culture gained force in a colony stirring with nationalist-populist ferment. Onto this stage arrived the U.S. military base with some 25,000 [End Page 310] white and 2,000 African American soldiers (in segregated troops). For an overall population of 500,000 and a white Trinidadian population of 15,000, this was a dramatic new presence. Equally salient, the base employed upwards of 25,000 Trinidadians. One might expect that the U.S. military base further piqued popular nationalist sentiments, and that anti-Americanism thus helped lead eventually to decolonization in 1962. To the contrary, however, Neptune finds little anti-Americanism. The factors leading instead to a general embrace of the U.S. presence included the fact that this was not literally an “occupation” (even though its massive influx of U.S. soldiers would be referred to as such by some Trinidadians). It was not like the United States occupations of other Caribbean and Central American nations in the earlier 1898 to 1934 period, when the U.S. took over the government (de jure or de facto) and sought to remake the military, the economy, and the state (“nation building”) in ways conducive to capitalist expansion and U.S. influence in the region—policies that did generate strong elite and popular (often armed) resistance. Instead, U.S. soldiers were on a mission to forestall expansion by the Axis powers during World War II that probably most Trinidadians supported. Furthermore, Neptune shows, the U.S. base offered extensive employment opportunities with more attractive wages and conditions than local businesses and homes were ready to provide to workers and “servants.” Finally, since the 1930s, Trinidadian critics had often valorized the U.S., save its particularly brutal and binary mode of racism, largely as a type of implicit denunciation of the negative role of British colonialism, culture, and economy in Trinidadian society. Yet, ironically, the popular ways in which the U.S. “occupation” was embraced did, Neptune...