by Alessandra Benedicty, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, The City College of New York

In keeping with the intention of this seminar in which we are considering, interrogating and creating new epistemologies about the Caribbean, I’d like to mention that some of the ideas that I am including have come out of conversations that I’ve had with several persons here—Professor Dash, Kaiama L. Glover, Robert Baron, Maja Horn, Rose Réjouis, Robert Baron and Jarrettia Adams. It’s also a great honor to be able to discourse so directly and in such a venue with J. Michael Dash.

Binaries offer scholars, if not a productive tool, at least a point of departure, with which to consider and reconsider one or more epistemological spaces. A binary that I think might inform our discussion in this seminar is that in which creolization appears as one of the terms, and which I think might serve as a point of contact with J. Michael Dash’s work here today. Before going further, I am not bringing this up to be polemical, although what I describe is provocative. I think that Dash’s notion of the “bateau-prison” is exciting precisely because it opens up a space within which the polemics of creolization become less significant. Continue reading Metaphors and Creolization: Reading J. Michael Dash’s “Bateaux-Prisons”

by Kaiama Glover, French, Barnard College

Michael Dash’s article explicitly states its concern with the “anxieties of place and belonging” that lead to a certain “spatial emphasis in postcolonial criticism” and the concomitant reliance on a series of increasingly unhelpful binaries: either a “homogenizing, ahistorical wholeness” or an “emphasis on displacement and diaspora;” either a call for attachment to place à la Peter Hallward or the devaluation of territoriality à la Chris Bongie; either a Césairean affirmation of the local and specific or a Glissantian emphasis on wandering and deterritorialization; etc.

Dash proposes an elegant approach to negotiating these binaries in his thoughtful mobilization of the chronotope of the ship. He offers a convincing articulation of the ship – or bateau-prison – as a metaphorical space that can hold in tension the unique combination of movement and immobility that is the Afro-Atlantic experience. From C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, and Edouard Glissant’s configuration of Toussaint as both imprisoned within and liberated from Fort Joux, to James’ reading of Melville’s “mariners, renegades, and castaways” as the proper heros of Moby Dick, to Césaire’s multiple accounts of “contained openness,” the Caribbean literary tradition is marked profoundly, Dash argues, by iterations of this central marine trope. Dash reads the portraits of various men on boats, as it were, in Caribbean literature as so many exemplars of the “true citizens of the hemisphere” who, via what he dubs their “renegade subjectivity,” issue a challenge to the concept of privileged, hegemonic national or cultural identity. Continue reading Comments on J. Michael Dash’s “Hemispheric Horizons”

by Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center

These comments preceded the discussion of Richard Turits’s paper, “New World of Color: Slavery, Freedom, and the Making of Race in Dominican History,” at the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar meeting on 23 November 2010.

As Mintz states throughout his work, Caribbean cultures should be viewed by their particular histories and include analyses of power (Mintz 1995). Without the specificities of history, one’s understanding of current processes operating in the Caribbean is highly incomplete. This paper places the Dominican Republic at the center of the history of the Caribbean and the Americas as a microcosm and a precursor of similar processes operating in those spaces. It is a much-needed addition to the existing scholarship that has tended to privilege the narratives of the Anglophone Caribbean, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Continue reading Comments on Richard Turits’s draft

by Marcela Echeverri, History, College of Staten Island

The following were discussion points for the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar meeting on 29 October 2010.

In Chapter 3 of Conscripts of Modernity David Scott tells us he wants to find a strategic point of criticism from which to write “a new history of the postcolonial present” (p. 119). For this he proposes to displace what he finds are prevalent romantic narrative tropes for tragedy. What does it mean to displace a romantic trope? “To move away from the humanist assumption of a pre-constituted will to resist or will to freedom that studies of slavery and slave revolt are obliged to affirm or illustrate” (p. 122). More specifically, Scott suggests that we should go beyond the prevailing emphasis on cultural autonomy, the predominant focus on Africa and resistance, or the very normative expectations of resistance or overcoming. Continue reading Comments on David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity (Chapter 3)