Caribe

Pan-Caribbean Perspective: Colonialism, Resistance and Reconfiguration

Norman Girvan

27/06/2012

Opinión

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Introduction: definition and scope

In its widest conception, the Caribbean has been said to stretch from the Northeast of Brazil through most of Middle America and the Antilles to the South of the United States. In this zone of the Americas, plantation economy was the dominant mode of colonial-capitalist exploitation, and this defined the contours of economic, demographic, social, political and cultural development of the societies that emerged; giving them a form more or less distinctive from those established in the other parts of the Americas. The Caribbean Plantation School thus inserted into the intellectual consciousness of the Anglophone Caribbean, a sense of organic linkage between our experience and that of the Brazilian people. During the 1960s the work of these Caribbean scholars drew many insights from the work of the famous Brazilian economist, Celso Furtado, on the underdevelopment of the Brazilian northeast and on economic dependency.

Even in a more restrictive sense, there are several conceptions/definitions of the Caribbean. UNESCO’s General History of the Caribbean sees it as region “encompassing not only the islands but also the coastal part of South America, from Colombia to the Guyanas and the riverine zones of Central America, in so far as these parts of the mainland were the homes of people engaged from time to time in activities which linked their lives with people of the islands…Despite the variety of languages and customs resulting from the convergence there—by choice or constraint—of peoples of diverse cultures, the Caribbean has many cultural commonalities deriving from the shared history and experience of its inhabitants”.

This definition, which is rooted in ethno-cultural characteristics, is widely shared by historians and cultural scholars. From a geo-political viewpoint, it posits the Caribbean as including parts of the surrounding mainland countries, but not necessarily these countries in their entirety. Hence, the entire bloc of countries in and around the Sea is often distinguished by reference to El Gran Caribe, or Greater Caribbean. (…)

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- Norman Girvan is Professor Emeritus of the University of the West Indies. Former Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States. http://www.normangirvan.info/biography/

(This is a revised version of a paper presented at a Seminar on “The Caribbean, Strategic Zone in the Americas”; in the series “Bolivarian Journeys” of the Institute of Latin American Studies (IELA) of the Federal.)

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