Caribbean Global Movements

Abstract

The Caribbean has always been the site of global interactions and transactions. Movements from one place to the other across diverse geographic locations and spaces (from island to island, the circum-Caribbean and from the region to continental locations). These movements, local and global, have played an important role in the dissemination of ideas and sharing of cultural practices from the indigenous people’s preColumbian experience to the contemporary Caribbean migrations and internationalization of Caribbean culture throughout the world. Haitian scholarMichel Rolph Trouillot argues in Global Transformations that the Caribbean has long been global with its “massive flow of goods, peoples, information, and capital across huge areas of the earth’s surface in ways that make the parts dependent on the whole.” We can see this expressed as well by writers, like Derek Walcott who in his memorable “The Sea is History” describes the historical archive which is still located in the Caribbean Sea. For Benitez-Rojo as for Hilary Beckles, the Caribbean functioned as the launching point of global capitalism, from which we are yet to recover. In a fitting creative-theoretical assertion, Kamau Brathwaite’s conceptualization of “tidalectics” also defined the series of movements that give definable meaning to the Caribbean seascapes and landscapes. Indeed the Caribbean is produced by and produces a series of global transformative movements that both receive and propel distinct social, cultural, economic and political changes. This too is the sense of the dialectic of departure and return that runs through Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return and which, we assert, is the logic of Caribbean global movements. The theme of the memorable Caribbean Studies Association CSA-Haiti 2016 conference—“Caribbean Global Movements: People, Ideas, Culture, Arts and Economic Sustainability”—allowed a focus on the various movements that identify the Caribbean as located firmly in the global currents, while also repositioning questions of knowledge and sustainability. It also offered a space to think through the early centrality of Haiti in these movements and the ways of envisioning and planning future movements. Overall, the conference examined how Caribbean global movements operate, as people, ideas, and cultural arts from the Caribbean continue to have transnational impact and significance. What is presented here is only a taste of a larger intellectual fare that covered multiple fields, theories, within those larger thematic areas as they pertain to Caribbean Studies and for the benefit of a larger Black Studies community. This special issue presents the thinking on our part that went into framing Caribbean Global Movements, as a subject of intellectual inquiry, with only a few representative essays. We want by these means to offer a timely (and needed) engagement and which maintains the relevance of The Caribbean as a critical component of Black Studies in general. Caribbean theoretical and political