Postcolonial Primer

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Postcolonial Primer Nancy Cirillo Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization: Fictions of Independence Helen C. Scott Ashgate http://www.ashgate.com 202 pages; cloth $89.95 The US presence in the Caribbean is a venerable two hundred years old. More of a shadow presence during much of this time, although not entirely, it operated through, or around, and occasionally in spite of the traditional, that is, direct, European colonial powers that have given the region much of its cosmopolitan character and just about all of its economic, political, and social problems. In the second half of the twentieth century, in the period that saw independence in nearly all of the Anglophone areas, the US presence became more substance than shadow, as the Eastern Caribbean appeared increasingly a staging area for the Cold War. The question, still under debate, of how deeply the Soviet Union was invested, in all senses, in the Caribbean is in general ofa piece with the questions, also still under debate, about similar investment in other postcolonial areas, especially in Africa and Asia. The impact of the Cold War on the independence movements immediately following WWII and on the mostly fragile post-independence governments that emerged is a crucial lens through which to examine the history and culture of the Caribbean of the second half of the twentieth century. Helen Scott's Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization: Fictions of Independence is a profoundly thoughtful, impeccably researched, and—amazingly enough—elegantly written book that does just that. A scholar with the intellectual breadth and depth of a Sidney Mintz or a Peter Hulme, Helen Scott works the historical, critical, and theoretical mine fields that frame her task thoroughly unscathed and has produced a study that is a model of its kind. The very history and geography of the Caribbean pose methodological problems that at times seem insurmountable: writing about the Caribbean requires that we particularize (Jamaica is not Martinique ); on the other hand, the mere writing of the word "Caribbean" as a noun or an adjective, means we have generalized, have thought regionally, for the myriad geographic and historic reasons that we can. Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization is an agile response to this. Professor Scott sets up a tight introductory chapter that both theorizes and historicizes the region. It is this usually obligatory chapter that in so many cases most taxes the writer's skill, not to mention the reader's patience, but Professor Scott negotiates ably and skillfully several intellectual divides, most notably the one between theory and history. In a mere 22 pages, she sets out her theoretical framework around what will be a governing idea, class "as a process and a material relationship to the governing mode of production" within "the broader historical processes of the second half of the twentieth century" as a means of reading women's literature. Both these theoretical and historical frames provide the general understanding of that contentious term, globalization , here mostly understood in the context of the US presence in the region, as neo-colonial largely in terms of its political interventions and its implementation of neoliberal economic policies. Four different locales provide the readings: Haiti, Antigua, Guyana, and Grenada, as much for which writers as for the what of these locales. Her discussion of Haiti is a strong case in point. Her choice of the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, who writes in English about Haiti and Haitians and lives in the United States, strengthens rather than weakens her sense ofglobalization. Scott's well-wrought account of the longstanding colonial inspired racial, economic, political, and social divides in Haiti, greatly exacerbated by the US presence during long periods in the twentieth century, sets up the breeding grounds for the violence and turmoil of Haitian life. Danticat exemplifies in complex ways the diaspora that was the consequence of this, and her work is largely set in the Haiti of the Duvaliers, so consistently supported by the US. Scott uses Paul Farmer's comment that Haiti is a template of colony because "Relations and events that become central to the Caribbean (and often the entire colonized world) happen earlier and in starker form here." Using the template, Scott next...