The Caribbean: Race and Creole Ethnicity

Abstract

The legacy of the plantation is highly implicated in every aspect of the Caribbean. It has produced and sustains a syncretic, hybrid, transitory reality characterized by a corpus of values and institutions that maintains social integrity. Such integrity is universally recognizable throughout the region. But the region was created, from the start, as a space of transitory impermanence after the almost total extinction of its indigenous population. Caribbean reality has emerged almost in opposition to this notion of impermanence. Nevertheless, at its core, it is forced to accommodate a never-ending assault by a global and international environment and a multiplicity of ever-changing cultural, social, economic, and political forces. The result is an extremely pregnable Caribbean, constantly penetrated, while struggling to maintain its own sense of integrity and the notion of a definitive character. But there is nothing “authentic” about its socioculture and very little that has not originated from abroad. Everything is “adapted, reimagined, reinvented” (Stavans, 1995:60) to suit the needs of a domestic condition, constantly buffeted by external pressures, needs, and demands. The region's character is described by one its writers and theorists as “chaos–shock, mixture, combination, alchemy” (Taylor 1989:136).

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