Editorial Special Issue—Matters of the Caribbean

International Journal of Public Theology 7 (2013) 345–354 brill.com/ijpt Editorial Special Issue—Matters of the Caribbean Garnett Roper and Esther D. Reed Guest Editors The name Caribbean may be used in geographic, cultural and political senses. Byron Blake sums up the geographical definition in this paragraph: Central to any physical or geographical definition of the Caribbean is the sea. The Caribbean Sea has been defined by some cartographers as an area of about 1.02 million square miles (2.62 million square kilometres) between nine and 22 degrees north and 60 and 80 degrees west. With those coordinates, the Caribbean would be bounded to the south by the coasts of Venezuela, Colombia and Panama; and to the west by Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Mexico; to the north by the Greater Antilles chain of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico; and to the east by the Lesser Antilles chain of islands.1 Cultural definitions of the Caribbean refer to the fact that the Caribbean is a melting pot or better put, racial amalgamation made up of the residue of the indigenous peoples, Kalinago, Tainos and Ciboneys; Africans that form the majority and were brought to the regions as chattel slaves; indentured labour from Asia (Chinese and Indian workers were imported into the Caribbean) and the planters, owners and pirates from Europe.2 These groups continue to exist in the Caribbean as both distinct subsets and also as something of a creole society or better yet as a blending of ethnicities. 1) Byron Blake, ‘The Caribbean—Geography, Culture, History and Identity’, in Kenneth Hall and Dennis Benn, Contending with Destiny: The Caribbean in the 21st Century (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000), pp. 45–52 at p. 46. 2) In Trinidad and Tobago for example, between 1845 and 1917, after emancipation 143,000 Indi- ans from the Asian sub-continent were brought to the region to serve a minimum indentureship of ten years. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15697320-12341304 346 G. Roper, E.D. Reed / International Journal of Public Theology 7 (2013) 345–354 Political definitions tend in recent years to centre round CARICOM, the Caribbean Community Secretariat dedicated to the improvement of the qual- ity of life of the people of the community.3 CARICOM was promulgated by the Treaty of Chaguaramas in 1973. Former colonies of the British Empire are the members of CARICOM; so also are Haiti and Suriname that were French and Dutch colonies. The Dominican Republic and Cuba, former Spanish colonies, have been given observer status in CARICOM. Norman Girvan suggests that the use of the name Caribbean in this political way shows both arrogance and ignorance. He argues that CARICOM has only one fifth of the population that lives in region of the Caribbean Sea. The countries that are part of CARICOM, to the exclusions of other countries in the region, occupy only a fifth of the total land area and produce only a fifth of the GDP when compared to the total produced by the entire region.4 In this regard it is better to use to the term ‘Caribbean’ to refer to an ethno-historico zone and a transnational community.5 Therefore, the Caribbean refers to the chain of islands and countries on the Central American mainland that share the experiences of slavery colonization and the plantation economy that for the most part gained political independence in the second half of the twentieth century. It must be borne in mind, however, that those with Caribbean con- nections that live in North America and the United Kingdom consider them- selves no less Caribbean than those who live in the region. The word ‘Caribbean’ is a re-use of the nickname given to the group that provided the fiercest resistance against European invasion in the region at the end of the fifteenth century. When the Europeans came, they met the Cibo- neys, Tainos and Kalinagos. They nicknamed the Kalinagos, ‘Caribs’, which had pejorative connotations originally. The Kalingos neither succumbed to European diseases nor their military manoeuvre in the way of the Ciboneys or the Tainos. Resistance by the Garifuna (Black Caribs) in places like St Vincent and the Grenadines in the South Eastern Caribbean Sea, lasted one hundred and forty years after Taino-dominated Jamaica had surrendered to British rule in 1655. St Vincent was conquered in 1795. The chain of islands as well as countries on the mainland of South and Central America that are washed by the 3) For information, see Caribbean Community Secretariat at <http://www.caricom.org> [accessed 2 July 2013]. 4) Norman Girvan, “Creating and Recreating the ‘Caribbean’ ”, in Hall and Benn, Contending with Destiny, pp. 31–6 at p. 31. 5) Ibid..

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