History has produced a myriad of cultural overlays in the Caribbean and the adjacent region of South America, a legacy of centuries of intrusion by rival European empires and the consequent sporadic exchange between the European invaders of the various local territories and peoples they claimed to control. The result is a mixture of peoples, languages, religions, and all other aspects of human culture, reflected in enrichment of the respective European and African languages involved, as well as in creation of new hybrid languages. It is in this context that one can speak of "Caribbean" literature and art from Suriname and the Netherlands.
Explores the routes followed by ideas and practices related to the body emerging in seventeenth-century Caribbean locales like Cartagena de Indias and Havana. Mobile and interconnected Spanish Caribbean ritual practitioners of African descent, using oral tradition, performance, and material culture, functioned as the most important links for the diffusion of ideas about corporeality in the region.
Suggests that racism was a strategic military liability in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars between Britain and France in the Caribbean. The French Revolution provoked slave uprisings on many of the Caribbean islands. Both the British and French underestimated the black rebels' capabilities and routinely executed black prisoners of war rather than ransoming or imprisoning them. These tendencies made Caribbean campaigns longer and bloodier than they might otherwise have been.
"En Martinique, lors des décennies qui précèdent l'abolition de l'esclavage, tous les groupes sociaux redoutent les sorts et les maléfices qui peuvent leur être jetés. Les colons ont peur des nègres empoisonneurs, les esclaves et les affranchis sont terrorisés par les pratiques magiques qui les menacent. Certes la religion catholique prétend protéger, mais lui est souvent préférée l'intervention d'un sorcier désenvouteur." (author)
"In this essay I discuss the thwarted cultural translation of modernity across the Atlantic and how this process affected the cultural self-understanding of the Caribbean. I will frame my argument by referring to the Hegelian theme of the Subject insofar as this particular concept condenses and articulates the ideology of modernity as a Eurocentric drive for world domination." (author)
Environmental determinism was not universally accepted at the end of the 19th century, but it was a useful philosophy for the men of the British Colonial Office who controlled the Crown's Caribbean colonies
