Caribbean Thought Lecture 4.1 Summary: What is Caribbean Thought and Who Determines This?

Week 4: What is Caribbean Thought, and who determines this? (Brain-teaser/Activity: 1. I reside in the US as a Naturalized US Citizen from Jamaica. Would I be considered a “First Generation American”?) 2. Come up with one or two sentences that define/s Jamaica as the Caribbean. Learning Goals/Objective: 1. To critically formulate and present a concept of the Caribbean about its position in history, giving rise to its present reality. 2. To begin to trace Caribbean thinking through its process of coming to be, moving beyond independence and the tensions between competing political thoughts in Jamaica – capitalism and socialism. 3. To develop a critical and academic frame within which to provide commentary and contributions on current issues of society and identify media that facilitate these expressions. This lecture aims to facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Jamaica, the Caribbean, where the internal and personal interact with the external. Like Keith and Keith, they agreed that Jamaica has suffered under colonialism. Yet, they contended for a picture of Jamaica independent of its socio-economic position and experience. Maybe it is a way to forget the reality of its vulnerabilities and boast about something that gives pride and joy. Indeed, although at first, the students struggled to come up with an original concept of the Caribbean for themselves, they still sourced and provided a definition that gave them great pride about Jamaica – its size, its influence, and popularity as a leading island in terms of its worldwide appeal and fame from Bob Marley, Merlene Ottey, Usain Bolt, and Jerk Chicken. Nevertheless, the consensus was that Jamaica is still a society divided by class. This was important as one student pointed out that his movement from one class to the next and from the rural to the urban has adjusted his experience and his ideas about Jamaica, which changed his perspectives. This supports what Norman Girvan had written in his “Reinterpretation of the Caribbean” in “The Caribbean Reader,” indicating that to define the Caribbean is a matter of context and perspective.

However, The Caribbean Reader began their perspectives on the Caribbean in Grenada in 1983 when Maurice Bishop and his People’s Revolutionary Army met their demise. This was juxtaposed with the invasion or penetration of the US by their Navy Seals who provided the support that sought the local conflicts among the peoples that crushed the nationalist and democratic socialist intentions of the nationalists. Keith and Keith and Dale Johnson, all scholars of the postcolonial, write in their projects how the US penetrated the Caribbean through their various types of machinery so as to promote US-style ideologies. This was not free of local assistance, who were opportunists hoping to cash in as elites or representatives house slaves in the locality. Like Europe’s strategy of trickery, making the same deals with all the African tribes, which created further chaos in Africa and led to its plunder and domination, the penetration by supporting a few created a local tug-of-war. That was evident between the Manley and Seaga governments of the 1980s, which defined Jamaica.

Nevertheless, the students agreed that Jamaica has been given tremendous opportunities and investments. But it has squandered it through nepotism, connectionism, and corruption. The students alluded to their own experiences, associations, and studies showing Jamaica’s corruption index, the NIA, and Dr. Trevor Monroe's UK report on Jamaica being on the UK crooked politician Radar as evidence to support their conclusion that the country has mismanaged its investments and resources.

Ultimately, we concluded that we are not a human race in the sense that we are racing against each other. No race but a human race is separating us from animals. But if we think in terms of race, then the reality of the Caribbean and the black position within that racial thinking suggests that we lost the race of time - globalization and colonialism. This loss has created the dependent and mixed realities of the Caribbean. So, if we have lost a race, the race is not over since we still exist in the world. We are still part of that human race; must we not prepare for the next event in this race so that we can become competitive? It means we can’t make the same mistakes. Therefore, this project of conceptualizing the Caribbean becomes an important endeavor as an objective of this course, which we have spent most of our time doing. But, we will conclude with the foregoing Lecture summary presentation below:

What is the Caribbean? Novella and Nelson Keith start their book project, "The Social Origins of Democratic Socialism in Jamaica," with a working definition of Jamaica concerning the Caribbean and the history of black and brown peoples of the global south. www.theneoliberal.com

Rev. Renaldo McKenzie is an author of neoliberalism, an adjunct professor at Jamaica Theological Seminary, and a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University.

The NeoLiberal Corporation is at https://theneoliberal.com.