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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Caribbean in the World: Imaginative Geographies in the Independence Age Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5106q78q Author Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua Ian Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Caribbean in the World: Imaginative Geographies in the Independence Age By Joshua Ian Jelly-Schapiro A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Michael Watts, Chair Professor Jake Kosek Professor Nadia Ellis Professor Jocelyne Guilbault Professor Percy Hintzen Abstract The Caribbean in the World: Imaginative Geographies in the Independence Age by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro Doctor of Philosophy in Geography University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Watts, Chair “Wherever the sugar plantation and slavery existed,” wrote the famed Trinidadian scholar C.L.R. James, “they imposed a pattern. It is an original pattern, not European, not African, not a part of the American main,…but West Indian, sui generis, with no parallels anywhere else.” These lines appear in James’s 1963 essay “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro,” which he appended that year to a new edition of The Black Jacobins, his seminal history of the Haitian Revolution first released in 1938. Writing at a time when the British West Indies’ attainment of independence, coincident with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, had prompted many Caribbean politicos and intellectuals to propose that the region’s diverse territories confederate into one regional nation, James argued that those territories, no matter their divides of language and history, should be understood to share a common culture and destiny. He also argued that the peoples of the Caribbean “nation” – belonging, as they did, to societies created and shaped for centuries by their links to European powers – had a unique and special role to play, among the world’s formerly colonized peoples, in shaping the future of world civilization. This dissertation engages with James’s arguments to explore how, across the past half-century, the Caribbean has been imagined – both in the Caribbean and worldwide – to be a coherent cultural region. Engaging with broader debates among geographers and other scholars about the uses and abuses of the “region” as analytic and political tool, I use the concept of “imaginative geography” to explore why and how various representative figures – from popular musicians to novelists to theoreticians – have shaped understandings of “Caribbeanness,” both in the islands and worldwide. Today James’s dream of formalizing the West Indian “nation” into a unified state is long past, but the impetus to think in terms of region that he once exemplified has persisted – and indeed grown – among Caribbean thinkers. Moreover, I argue, his predictions about the import of Caribbean cultures in the cultural landscape of the wider world, aided by the massive outflow of Caribbean emigrants to Northern cities, have in many ways come true. From the emergence of Harry Belafonte as “the first black matinee idol” in North Atlantic pop cultures; to the rise of Fidel Castro as figurehead of the non-Aligned Third World during the Cold War; to the emergence and continued salience of Bob Marley as the “first Third World Superstar”; to the outsized number of brilliant writers, from Walcott and Marshall to Díaz and Danticat, who in addressing experiences particular to the Caribbean, have spoken with often unexcelled eloquence to universal themes – these exponents of the Caribbean as region and idea have succeeded, for better or worse, in supplying to the world some of our most widespread stories about bondage and freedom; racial purity and mixture; art and politics. This dissertation offers an account of how and why this has came to pass, in the decade’s since C.L.R. James published his revised history of the epochal slave revolt in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue by which, as he put it, “West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people.” Courtesy the University of California Library Maoires Minores que Insulae Hispaniola, Cuba Lucaia et Caribes. From Beschrijvinghe van West-Indiën (1630) Joannes de Laet, ed. "The indigenous Carib and Arawak Indians, living by their own lights long before the European adventure, gradually disappear in a blind, wild forest of blood. That mischievous gift, the sugar cane, is introduced, and a fantastic human migration moves to the New World of the Caribbean; deported crooks and criminals, defeated soldiers and Royalist gentlemen fleeing from Europe, slaves from the West Coast of Africa, East Indians, Chinese, Corsicans, and Portuguese. The list is always incomplete, but they all move and meet on an unfamiliar soil, in an unpredictable and infinite range of custom and endeavour, people in the most haphazard combinations, surrounded by memories of splendour and misery, the sad and dying kingdom of Sugar, a future full of promises. And always the sea!" -George Lamming “We’re all in the Caribbean, if you think about it.” -Junot Díaz Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………….ii I. The Caribbean in the World: An Introduction………………………………1 II. Jamaica Farewell: Belafonte’s Caribbean and the (Political) Erotics of Transnational Pop…………………………...34 III. Brown Girl, Brownstones: Africa, Islands, and the Migrant Fictions of Paule Marshall………………64 IV. Cuba in the Caribbean/Cuba in the World: Andrew Salkey’s Havana Journal and the Congreso Cultural of 1968………………………80 V. Geographies of Exodus: Bob Marley and the Muse of History…………………………………….101 VI. Ground Zero(s) of the New World: Geographies of Violence in Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat………….119 Afterword: By Way of Conclusion………………………………….…..143 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….147 Acknowledgements Thanks due, with feeling: To Professor Michael Watts, comrade and chair, whose steady support and questing critique centered my happenstantial career as a Berkeley geographer from first to last. To all the members of a splendid committee whose energy and expertise enlivened this project: Jake Kosek, bee-keeping race man and dear pal; Percy Hintzen, CSA stalwart and Guyanese eminence grise; Jocelyne Guilbault, soca maven and fellow Trini-at-heart); and Nadia Ellis, whose arrival to Berkeley, with the non pareil scholarly care she brings to “thinking the Caribbean,” has been an incalculable boon. To two other members of the UC faculty, Donald Moore and Allen Pred, from whose humane brilliance the current project profited at its start, and to dear colleagues and staff in the commodious department where it happened. To the Social Science Research Council, and the DPDF Fellowship group in “Black Atlantic Studies,” headed by Percy Hintzen and Andrew Apter, that got my research started. To the National Science Foundation (and a Graduate Research Fellowship) that kept me in food and books for the time it took. And to the American Council of Learned Societies (dissertation-completion fellowship), for finishing it. To Michael Denning, Vera Kutzinski, and Paul Gilroy, whose generosity of intellect and time, with a curious Yale undergrad and since, made the questions feel worth asking. To Bonnie Kennedy, Peter Doig, and their clan entire, and, also in Trinidad: to Jonathan Ali, Katinka Bukh, Charlotte Elias, Catherine Emmanuel, Ray Funk, Terry Perry, and Ruth Telfer; to the splendid staff in Special Collections at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine; and to the honorable Pat Bishop, Junior Telfer, and Bruce Procope, Q.C., for sharing so generously of their remarkable lives. In Jamaica: to Herbie Miller, Annie Paul, Brad Klein, her highness Lady Saw, and the fine people at the Library of the Spoken Word, University of the West Indies, Mona. In Cuba: to Carlos Goicechoa, Joseph Mutti, and Nehanda Abiodun. To Raul Fernandez and the UC-Cuba Group, for invaluable support, grant- and otherwise; and to Sarah Seidman, for collegial chat and gracious sharing of FOIA-got riches. To Nathan McClintock, in Martinique and McCone. To Robert Silvers, John Palatella, Nicholas Laughlin, and Garnette Cadogan, to whose editors’ eyes what’s most readable here owes much. (It hardly needs stating that whatever faults remain, in editorial and all respects here, are down to me alone.) To John Gillis, Tina Gillis, and David Lowenthal, for imparted wisdom on Islands of the Mind, West Indian Societies, and what a lifetime of scholarship and being gentle-people can yield. To Sandy Levinson, at the Center for Cuban Studies, in New York, and to the great Harry Belafonte, down the block, for his capacity for reflection, and his life. To Mark Danner, mentor and friend. To Hilton Als, for sending me a well-loved copy of Brown Girl, Brownstones, once, and for his Olympian gifts for brotherhood generally. To my first friend and finest reader, Eli Jelly-Schapiro. And last but most: to my parents, Katherine L. Jelly and Steven A. Schapiro, to whom I owe quite simply everything. Note: Portions of chapters III, IV, and V were published in The Caribbean Review of Books (“Travelin’ Woman,” May 2011); The New York Review of Books (“The Bob Marley Story,” April 9, 2009); and The Nation (“An Empire of Vice,” June 10, 2009). Thanks is made to those publications for their kind permission to re-publish said material here. I. The Caribbean in the World: An Introduction “There lay the islands in the night, suspended between the stars and the sea's bottom with the abstraction of thoughts: the stages of a thesis that was still to be unraveled.” -Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveler’s Tree1 In November 1963, Vintage Books in New York released a new edition of The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James’s celebrated history of the Haitian Revolution. In the quarter- century from its initial appearance in London in 1938, the book—though already a touchstone for many Pan-African and anti-colonial thinkers worldwide—had fallen out of print.